GMAT Strategy

Hi,

My preparation is about to take off as I am going to take the test on October 10th. I took the GMAT prep1 today and got a 710(Q48, V39).

I am not a native speaker but verbal was a breeze for me. Most of the questions I got wrong in the verbal section are from Sentence correction(around 95%)

I ran out of time in quant section so I had to hurry through the last 10 questions. Needless to say that I got most of the last 10 questions got wrong.

I have the following questions:

1. How close is GMAT prep to the real thing? The difficulty level is similar? If it's same then mostly I need to concentrate on SC and I should be able to do OK in verbal.
2. How do I improve my SC skills? I stated reading the SC book from Manhattan prep, but didn't find it THAT good. I will finish it though.
3. How to improve quant skills? I am having major problem with timing. I dream of scoring a 51 in quant section. How tough is this? I have around 50 days before the test. And I can practice three hours daily. I am guessing that's ample time. So How to go about quant?
4. Finally, how indicative is GMAT prep to the actual GMAT score?

Thanks,
prodizy

Wow -- lots of questions there.

The GMATPrep score is pretty close. It should be within 30 points either way.

To get a 51 on Quant you need to get very few questions wrong... whereas if you score a 48 you can miss lots of questions, 10 or 12 or so. It is actually a big difference.

You can go faster by practicing. There are types of questions that you will recognize as you study. You will see that these questions are repeated in disguised form...but you can understand what the question is doing and you will be faster.

For sentence correction you need to understand a few things, first is that much of what is written in each sentence is intentional clutter. Learn to recognize what can make a sentence wrong and what is harmless. Modifiers that are not underlined and not touching are generally harmless sense they are isolated from the part of the sentence that is underlined.

Also understand how much of sentence correction is a test of logic. Does the modifier logically modify what it is touching? Is this a logical comparison? Does this meaning make sense logically?

You should have plenty of time per day and plenty of days to improve so that you are closer to your goals.