GMAT Strategy

This is my first post, but I have been actively logging on to the site and reading all the great information.

My test is scheduled for FEBRUARY 8TH!!!! My goal is to score 740+

Here is the breakdown of where I have come to after months of studying. Sorry for the long post! I put all the questions in bold font.


QUANT

I feel pretty confident with the Quant, I score 47/48/49 pretty consistently. Questions I miss are almost always the more difficult DS questions inequality/number property/abs value questions. I seem to get stuck on higher level data sufficiency problems that seem to require iterations of plugging in and testing certain scenarios of divisibility, < or > and other things alike. These kinds of problems seem too tough and obscure to solve with algebra and I'm left plugging and chugging which is tough to organize and takes much too long. Thoughts?

My second issue with quant is timing. I tend to take more time on the earlier problems thinking that these problems are more sensitive to determining my score than those later on. This is leaving me in situations with 10minutes to the last 7 questions. Alot of people on the forums have said to guess and move on after a minute if the problem seems unsolvable in decent time. However, I find it very hard to determine that moment when its right to guess and move on: almost every problems seems doable atleast from the start. Any advice here?

side-note: Through poor time management I have noticed that guessing on data sufficiency is much easier than PS



VERBAL

I am most weak on RC. In fact I am thinking about doing Aristotle' s RC 99 this last week. Other than that I have CR and SC pretty well covered.


TEST SCORES SO FAR:
12/13- MGMAT Q47 V35- 680
12/16- MGMAT Q47 V35- 680 (interesting how i got the exact score)
12/22- MGMAT Q44 V36- 640 (i spent way too much time on a few of the quant problems)
12/30- MGMAT Q46 V38- 690
1/4- GMATPREP2 Q49 V37 - 700
1/5- MGMAT Q51 V45-780 -i took this one with unlimited time
1/7- MGMAT Q50 V45-770
1/10 MGMAT Q48 V45-750
1/13 MGMAT Q48 V45-750
1/15 GMATPREP Q49 V42-740
1/25 GMATPREP Q51 V45-770

At this point a considerable amount of problems are starting to reappear in practice tests. I am afraid my scores are inflated because of it.



STUDY PLAN:
My study plan has been to exhaust all the OG problems from beginning to end. I did this all of last week and essentially did a 100 problems a day. I just started to do the same with the OG 11 as well. Every day I review the ones that I missed(After a set I take time to review ones I got wrong and any others that I didn't feel 100% confident with).

I also will be reviewing my notes that I have been taking since the beginning of my studies.

I will try and do as many problems from RC 99 as possible this week.

Lastly, I figure I will take 3 more GMAT prep practice tests again.


More Questions:
1. Any pointers on the study plan for these last 10 days?
2. Is it worth retaking these tests at this point?
3. Am i in the range of my goal of 750?
4. Any other advice?

Try retaking a test you've done before and see what happens if you give up on impossible problems much earlier. Ideally, you should get right every question you have a chance to get right, and not waste much time on the rest.

I would say your target score is absolutely possible, but you know what they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same . . . but in practice, they aren't.

Jim@Grockit wrote:Try retaking a test you've done before and see what happens if you give up on impossible problems much earlier. Ideally, you should get right every question you have a chance to get right, and not waste much time on the rest.

I would say your target score is absolutely possible, but you know what they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same . . . but in practice, they aren't.

Thanks for the advice. Took another MGMAT test, this time with a majority of forgotten or new questions. Still got a 740, but I was disappointed because I got four errors in a row on verbal, and I knew this was my reaction to a lack of time.

I spent a considerable amount of time on the first half of the section, which is ok I guess. But I started to rush through a good number of problems instead of employing an educated guessing technique like i have developed in Quant.

Unfortunately I feel like this timing technique is much harder to employ in verbal because its hard to know what kind(rc,sc,cr) of verbal question to employ it on.

Any thoughts on this?

vgharibj wrote:

Jim@Grockit wrote:Try retaking a test you've done before and see what happens if you give up on impossible problems much earlier. Ideally, you should get right every question you have a chance to get right, and not waste much time on the rest.

I would say your target score is absolutely possible, but you know what they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same . . . but in practice, they aren't.

Thanks for the advice. Took another MGMAT test, this time with a majority of forgotten or new questions. Still got a 740, but I was disappointed because I got four errors in a row on verbal, and I knew this was my reaction to a lack of time.

I spent a considerable amount of time on the first half of the section, which is ok I guess. But I started to rush through a good number of problems instead of employing an educated guessing technique like i have developed in Quant.

Unfortunately I feel like this timing technique is much harder to employ in verbal because its hard to know what kind(rc,sc,cr) of verbal question to employ it on.

Any thoughts on this?

I just took the exam and scored WELL BELOW expectations.

I got a 670 Q49 V31

I MESSED UP BIG on my verbal timing. The exact question I had in this quote is the same idea that really screwed me over.

I did not guess when I needed to. Consequently I spent all my time on hard passages(my weakness if anything) in the beginning and started rushing through SC and CR which are my strengths. Again, I really did not no where to start guessing to save time.

I guess I should have been guessing on the passages, but I could not justify doing this. I kept thinking, how could I guess on this question when I just spent 4/5 minutes reading the passage???

When the passage was over, Id get a CR or SC that I would hate to guess on cause I am much stronger with these kinds of questions. After rushing through the middle portion of the test, I was left with 10 minutes for 10 questions. Totally screwed myself.

Again I don't think my reading is sub par for a 740. Pure lack of time management got the best of me today. I know I am on the slower side, but like QUANT I guess strategically. I just for some reason couldn't justify guessing on CR and SC today.

SUGGESTIONS??

An error log is essential in determining "guess" question types or topics, and yes, it is definitely more challenging on the verbal. If you simply do not consistently get the same type of question wrong, guessing will only happen on questions that are taking too long and on questions at the end that you didn't have time for.

Guessing is ALWAYS a gamble and always less good than knowing the answer, but sometimes it's the only way forward. I definitely advise against rushing through any part of the test that isn't guessing in the last 90 seconds; if you guess, you want to be saving yourself as much time as possible for questions you have a better chance on. Time-consuming and (relatively) difficult options include fully-underlined SC, application CR, boldface CR, and very long RC passages.

I don't want you to have to guess at all, I need to be clear. If RC is really, truly a weak spot for you -- 5 minutes on the passage and then a minute or more on a given question, for example -- you could consider guessing without reading. You take a RISK in doing so -- if there are 5 questions, for example, that is a lot of guessing mid-test -- but if there are 3, you may have saved yourself 8 minutes, which could be enough added time to get twice that many right where you rushed through them before.