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GMAT 620 Need Help

by nexusgmat » Sun Feb 28, 2010 8:25 am
Hi

I got the GMAT score last week of 620(Q47V28 AWA5.0). I would have been satisfied by score of 670. I used OG11, verbal review,quant review, kaplan verbal review , MGMAT Sentence correction and Princeton review book. I found kaplan verbal review and MGMAT sentence correction review helpful. I took total of 7 GMAT tests before giving the actual one and the scores were below 580 on the exams. I am thinking to apply for retake of the exam to improve my score above 680. Can anyone suggest some good verbal learning techniques course or book?
When i used the above verbal books i used to do 30 questions at a time sometimes my strike was 50% and sometimes it was 80%.
Also any books for GMAT maths for difficult questions. I noticed that the quant books i used were not upto the mark of actual GMAT. These books represents 50% of actual maths on GMAT. Almost 70% of the problems on actual GMAT were in long sentences which take a 30-40 seconds to read and understand thou may take less than 1 min to solve.
I have 7 years of experience in IT(5+ in US MNC), publication in international journal , couple of presentaions and publications at reputed international conferences, GPA in bachelors 3.3 and in Masters 3.67

I was thinking of MGMAT or Kaplan course or just buy some good grammar book and go on from there. i read about reviews on this site for both courses and was kind of in mix which one is better.
My Target schools are SAID Business school, IESE, DARDEN(University of Virginia),KENAN(UNC) and Anderson(UCLA)
I am thinking to retake GMAT in next 60-75 days.

Any suggestions
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by David@VeritasPrep » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:12 am
Very thorough posting! It sounds like you did well on the quantitative. If you held that quant score at 47 (79 %ile) and wanted get a 680 overall, which is the 86%ile, you would need to move you verbal up to the same level as the quant, so a 36 or 37 on the verbal. It is unlikely that you could achieve your goal just by increasing your quantitative score because the quant does not have as much "top end" as verbal does and you are already scoring well in quant. I would recommend devoting two hours verbal to one hour quant moving forward, so that you do not lose you edge on quant as you improve verbal.

As to finding quantitative books that are up to the difficulty of the actual test-day GMAT questions -- that can be tough. You see, the difficulty in official GMAT quant questions is much more subtle. They ask something very simple, such as, "Is x an even number?" and then they guide you to the wrong choice. Remember, difficulty on the GMAT is judged by the percentage of people that get a particular question wrong, not necessarily by the difficulty of the concept being tested. Yes and NO data sufficiency questions (like the one mentioned above) often test basic arithmetic concepts but are considered to be among the most difficult questions on the test.

Unofficial Quant questions are often written by people whose specialty is mathematics and so they often are not the kind of "critical reasoning with numbers" that characterizes GMAT quant questions. I am most familiar with the Official GMAT guides and the books we use at Veritas. Each has strengths and weakness. A blend of these two works very well. The Official GMAT questions have the strength of the subtlety that I mentioned above, yet the Official Guides (11th and 12th editions) as well as the Quantitative Reviews (1st and 2nd editions) all have the weakness of not having enough difficulty in the concepts being tested. That is where the Veritas (or other unofficial) questions come in, they supply the difficulty in concepts (coordinate geometry, advanced word problems, etc.) that the official questions lack. I suspect you are looking for both kinds of difficulty. Do not dismiss the subtle difficulty of the Official Guide questions. Students often write off mistakes made on these simpler questions as "stupid" mistakes, but they are just the sort of mistakes that are intended by the test writers.

I would recommend that you acquire the 12th Edition Official Guide (you have the 11th already - there is overlap between the two but it is still worth it) as well as the 2nd edition Quant Review. There is no substitute for official questions and so you should do every official question that you can. You should also consider something (and it may indeed be a course, as you mentioned above) that will bring you both the difficult conceptual questions on the quantitative as well as the necessary techniques for the verbal that will allow you to move to 680 and beyond.

With your time frame, a two full weekend intensive course might work well, although you would also have time for a full course if it started soon. If you do choose a course, do not forget to use the discount codes at beat the GMAT! They will save you hundreds of dollars. (And just as a note, tomorrow night March 2nd there is a FREE sample Veritas 3-hour course that includes some of the those difficult Quant concepts I was talking about. It is 8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific. To find out more click on the link under "FREE UPCOMING GMAT EVENTS").
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