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final 10 days

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final 10 days

by JGaynor » Fri Apr 02, 2010 7:20 am
Hey everyone,

I am taking the GMAT in 10 days, on April 10. I'm not one of those 700+ scorers...I took the GMAT in January and did terrible 490 (Q31 V27). The program I am applying for needs me to get 550 at least, and over a 600 I'll be in for sure. I wasn't told to retake the GMAT until the middle of March, so that left me with only a months study preparation. I basically started studying from scratch, I have done most of OG#12 and finished the OG quantitative review along with studying the fundamentals.

I took the GMAT early last year along with the LSAT, so I am comfortable with being in the testing room and I know what the test is like- I don't have a problem with timing.

How should I go about these final 10 days? I just bought the Manhattan sentence correction, geometry and number properties books last night and have gone through half the number properties book already.

Is it advised that I go through the books as thoroughly as possible and make sure I understand the fundamentals and ways to solve problems while doing all the problem sets and reviewing the problems in OG or is it recommended to take as many CATs as possible?

I feel like if I take a CAT and don't do so well then I will be depressed and not optimistic for test day.

I know there are a lot of posts about this- but the majority say to do as many CATs as possible to see how you are with time, etc. I have taken the GMAT twice already and countless practice tests when I was initially studying...and the LSAT, so I know what they are like and how to time myself...

Any advice on how to make my last 10 days the most efficient?
And given how I scored a 490 (Q31 V27) in January, what kind of Q and V score is the 560 range? I don't really understand the numbers behind the Q31 and V27....

Thanks for the help!

Jason
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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Fri Apr 02, 2010 1:46 pm
Hi Jason,

Crunch time - hopefully you're enjoying the adrenaline! With a little over a week to go, I think you can improve pretty significantly, and hopefully build the kind of confidence in your ability to do so that you can relax and maximize your score on test day. A few thoughts:

1) Taking a practice test this weekend isn't a terrible idea, as you'd have a full week to dissect your mistakes and work on a few weak areas to shore them up. Definitely don't do one within 3 days or so of the test, as you'll be susceptible to that "bad score --> no confidence" problem you spoke of, but a test this weekend might be helpful to give you directions on how to best spend your time the next 7-8 days.

2) I'd emphasize two things this next week:

a) Find 2-3 areas of the test (maybe Number Properties is one, as it sounds like you've already identified it) that you know you need to work on, and do your best to understand as many of those fundamentals as possible so that you're ready to go for the majority of questions in that genre on test day.

b) Pay attention to the types of "systematic" mistakes that you're making (i.e. "forgetting to check how a negative number would affect the answer" or "picking answer choices that are true, but that don't answer the question", and be prepared to seek those out and correct them on test day. I've always felt that your score improvement within the last 4-5 days before the test will come much more from "minimizing mistakes" than from "getting smarter".

3) Don't worry about the Q31/V27 scores at all - that's mental energy that you can put to much, much better use. They're pretty arbitrary tags assigned by the GMAT scoring algorithm to measure your score - much like Americans have chosen "inches" to measure distance. If you were a European long jumper competing at the Olympics, understanding "inches" as opposed to "centimeters" wouldn't help your cause...just jump farther! Those scoring values don't really matter...what matters is your ability to answer more questions correctly within the timeframe, and if you do that, the numbers will look favorable in the end.

Good luck!
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep

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by suryapal » Fri Apr 02, 2010 5:01 pm
In my opinion you should focus on quant. esp. problem solving . its easy to enhance your score in that particular area if you are not native speaker of English .
just go through Princeton review or manhattan's strategy guides for basics and than through og12 . after completing og once , note down the wrong question and solve them again and learn the concept and yeah try to avoid silly mistake... its very easy to score 45-47 in quant.
it can be done in 10 days .

all the best
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