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9 MONTHS w/ STAGNANT SCORING

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9 MONTHS w/ STAGNANT SCORING

by NYARCH22 » Sat May 11, 2013 8:45 am
I am a 31 y/o licensed architect interested in pursuing an education and career in real estate finance. After studying and passing 7 license exams for state registration, I thought that the GMAT would not pose a challenge. I have learned that "passing" and "beating" are two different things.

First practice exam- GMAT Prep (Sept 2012): 590
(3) more exams roughly 1 mos. apart: 570, 590,590
Last exam-MGMAT Prep (May 2013): 600

My goal is a 700 (690-710 would make me very happy)

During the past 9 mos. I have spent 1-2 hours a night and atleast 8 hours per weekend preparing (I work on avg. 9-10hrs a day and most Saturdays). I started with the OG, worked my way through MGMAT quant books 1-5 and reviewed advanced quant (briefly). I spent the past two weeks focusing on the GMAT Prep now SC / CR sections. After each exam I go through all questions, categorize my weaknesses and spend the next few weeks tackling them..
My verbal score started with a (35) and has remained constant since Sept. I am frustrated (as you can imagine) because I have learned many new skills but can't find a way to put the information I have taught myself towards the exam. I will state the obvious, MY METHOD IS NOT WORKING!

I am asking for suggestions (besides "give up"). Were you in a similar situation? What was your technique? Could you recommend an online program that worked for you and may help me reach my goal?

I understand that many of these posts are redundant. I would appreciate any information you could provide.
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by Matt@VeritasPrep » Sat May 11, 2013 11:55 am
Hi Arch!

I don't know if you've been struggling with math, but if you have I'd consider that it might be because you need to work a bit more on your foundations. Learning GMAT quant is almost like learning a language, and too many students (and prep books, for that matter, though not ours!) approach this in "phrasebook" fashion: memorizing a few formulas, honing a few tricks, and trying to bluff or bruteforce their way through unfamiliar topics.

The problem with this strategy, of course, is that the quant section can't be aced (700+) that way: it isn't asking you to make your way around a foreign country on vacation - it's forcing you to have a conversation with an observant native speaker who's trying to deceive you. The grab bag of formulas and tricks will empty out fast; the only way to really confront this exam is to familiarize yourself with the language of math. You don't have to master it, but you do have to speak it: you have to know why these formulas are the way they are, why a certain formula would be useful in a situation in which you've never seen it before, and how to construct an approach out of disparate techniques you've never before put together.

To that end, I'd recommend taking a break from GMAT questions for a while and really focusing on theory. After a recommendation from a former student, I've become a fan of the Art of Problem Solving series (the Prealgebra, Intro to Algebra, and Number Theory books are great for the GMAT): they're stimulating, comprehensive, and nonroutine, just like the GMAT itself, and they force you to learn how to speak math - I loan copies out to students all the time. There are other great resources too (Tutor in a Book's Geometry, Word Problems in Algebra, Forgotten Algebra, the Purple Math website, and Shailesh Shirali's books, to name a few), but these are the first that come to mind and the most comprehensive. I'd spend a month or two doing all the chapters that cover GMAT stuff, THEN come back to GMAT books and GMAT problems. You'll have a great foundation, all the explanations and approaches will make sense - "Now I see WHY they did that!" - and the pattern and logic to the GMAT questions themselves will be revealed, no longer seeming like a collection of arbitrary, unrelated puzzles. Math makes perfect sense if you take it step by step; it's only befuddling if you skip steps and jump from topic to topic. Working with one thorough, clever book will prevent you from doing that.

As for verbal, I found the best approach was to develop a systematic way of approaching any type of problem, and making lists of the errors that categorized bad answers to any given type of problem. I ended up devising my own approach to CR questions -- on inference questions, for example, I said "the bad answers will always either introduce new info, make a bad generalization, or contradict the evidence" -- then followed it. Even if I initially missed a few tricks, that distillation gave me a coherent method: I didn't cobble together a bunch of tricks from other sources, I built a system out of demonstrable errors in official questions and defined that system in terms I found intuitive and memorable. The key is not accepting the GMAT's terms, but defining your own: their explanations (IMHO) are designed to make the questions seem as distant and unrelated as possible, but their questions test far fewer concepts, fallacies, and common errors than you'd think.
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by lunarpower » Mon May 13, 2013 3:56 am
Hi there,
From what you've written, it seems you've been doing this almost non-stop for the last 9 months. If so, then the first thing you need to do -- right now -- is to step away from the test for at least a few weeks.
I wrote about this here: https://www.beatthegmat.com/confused-how ... tml#366523

This is not a test of knowledge or memorization; it's a test of thinking.
I don't know about architecture exams, but I would assume that you have to know a lot of stuff to take those. The GMAT is a totally different animal: the only stuff you have to know is (a) the fundamentals of English sentence structure (for SC), and (b) mathematics up to first-year high-school algebra and geometry (for quant). For CR and RC there is no stuff to know at all; those parts of the test depend entirely on (largely unschooled) human reasoning, with perhaps just a little bit of extra precision.

So, basically --
1/ If you've been studying 6-7 days per week, your brain needs a rest. Literally -- it won't be able to manufacture the requisite neural connections if you don't take some time off.
2/ If you've been approaching this exam as a test of knowing stuff, then that approach won't -- and can't -- work. It's an exam that tests thought processes, not stuff (other than the basics for quant and SC).

Good luck.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.

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