GMAT Strategy

I took my first mgmat test last week and the score was 700(50Q, 36V) with 7 of 12 worng in RC & 1 of 14 wrong in CR so I worked continiously on RC while touching SC/CR intermittently. After a week that is last sunday(27th) I took my 1st GmatPrep test and score is 710(50Q & 36V)with 5 of 14 wrong in CR and 1 of 12 wrong in RC.

Now, I'm a little confused; which section should I focus on?

Point to note here is I've been studying RC continiously for last 2weeks and have been studying SC in parallel sometimes; I was preping CR too but quite less as compared to RC or SC. What I'm trying to say is I see there is a corelation between amount of time I have spent in RC, SC and CR in last 2weeks to the number of questions I have gotten correct in respective sections last sunday.

Should I practice more on all three sections & then take test? Also, my understanding is that CR is a very conceptual section, so scores shouldn't have gone down because of less practice?
It may be that my CR score has gone down mostly because of long paragraph; I'm generally good at CR but not good on CRs with lots on info in long passage.

Another thought is, I shouldn't waste a lot of time in the difficult questions that I have been solving lately, just solving those silly/moderate questions correctly will do my job - I mean if I could get those 2 CR-silly & 2SC-simple correct then my score can reach 740-750(40/41V, 51Q)

Any help/thoughts on my condition guys would be extremely appreciated.

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Thanks & Regards,
Syed

Sounds like your studying is paying off - the key is to keep working on those question types. Test prep is often a bit of a see saw - focus improves one area while another area suffers. this may be what happened to your CR. also focus on RC can cause a decrease in CR becuase the way you read to get correct answers is very different between the two sections. I would suggest continuing to work on both SC and RC and add in CR work. You can also look at the CR questions you got incorrect to see if there is a reasoning pattern that is more difficult for you than others and work to fix those.

Your scores are really great overall so after a few days of work I would recommend your practice contain more mixed sets so your brain has to shuffle between the question types like it does in the real exam.

Dude have seen enough drops in actual GMAT when compared to MGMAT. So i would advise against fully relying on MGMAT as a score predictor. You have 2 versions each of GMAT Prep1` and 2 and 1 version of Powerprep, use these for bench-marking.

tpr-becky wrote:Sounds like your studying is paying off - the key is to keep working on those question types. Test prep is often a bit of a see saw - focus improves one area while another area suffers. this may be what happened to your CR. also focus on RC can cause a decrease in CR becuase the way you read to get correct answers is very different between the two sections. I would suggest continuing to work on both SC and RC and add in CR work. You can also look at the CR questions you got incorrect to see if there is a reasoning pattern that is more difficult for you than others and work to fix those.

Hi Becky,
That makes a lot of sense. I think I know what you're refering to; In CR we are supposed to be very focused(if the passage mentions A, B and that C causes D, focus should be on c->D and not on A or B)
while RC requires us to understand the bigger picture and flow(paragraph connection). I missed 2/3 silly questions on CR because of missing the focus(eye to detail). I'm going to mixed things up as per your suggestion.

tpr-becky wrote:Your scores are really great overall so after a few days of work I would recommend your practice contain more mixed sets so your brain has to shuffle between the question types like it does in the real exam.

Thanks a lot. I'll definitely mix things up and would remind myself each time I switch to CR that I need to focus(details) and will remind myself to look for bigger picture and flow(paragrpah direction) each time I swtich to RC. I think SC is relatively independent of other two?

Thank you so much for giving so much thought to my problem; you probably have given me exactly what I needed. I'll update you on my next test score after studying a lot of mixed CR n RC.

AbhiJ wrote:Dude have seen enough drops in actual GMAT when compared to MGMAT. So i would advise against fully relying on MGMAT as a score predictor. You have 2 versions each of GMAT Prep1` and 2 and 1 version of Powerprep, use these for bench-marking.

Hi Abhi,

Thanks a lot for replying and for reminding me of PowerPrep; I'll check it the next weekend. I agree with you; mgmat tries to keep a lil higher standards and in this process it slightly deviates from actual gmat test.

Thanks,
Syed

tpr-becky wrote: also focus on RC can cause a decrease in CR becuase the way you read to get correct answers is very different between the two sections.

Could you please explain this ? As per my knowledge some test prep companies advocate that the CR and RC questions are to be approached similarly. Both have inference questions and parallel reasoning questions, which should be answered similarly.

Ajhij -

What I mean is that when you are reading a reading comp passage you are reading for the main idea, the big concepts - but when you are reading for most CR types you are specifically looking for Conclusion, Premise Assumption and filling in info according to the question. The actual reading is of the same level but the reasoning is the same - yes both have inference questions that are more similar but I was talking about the shift between the entire subject. When a person studies the approach for one then the approach for the other can become cloudy and you need to go back and review the method to help improve.