The GMAT Avengers Study Group

Hi
I have started my GMAT preparation now and scored a 540 in my diagostic. Can somebody please suggest if GMATprepnow free video course is sufficient to score 650 in a 36 days time. I already have prepared for CAT and XAT, so is it a plausible target ?
Thanks

Vaibhavrvbt wrote:Hi
I have started my GMAT preparation now and scored a 540 in my diagostic. Can somebody please suggest if GMATprepnow free video course is sufficient to score 650 in a 36 days time. I already have prepared for CAT and XAT, so is it a plausible target ?
Thanks

That's a very plausible goal. (And why not shoot for 700+?) The most important thing is to be diligent in evaluating your progress, making notes and adjustments after each practice test, and then incorporating those adjustments into the next exam. Whenever you get a stuck, or feel your approach isn't quite working, come back here, post the question that's giving you difficulty, and you'll get plenty of good advice.

Your goal and timeframe are pretty reasonable. At the same time, be clear that the video lessons are not exactly the core of what you need to do in order increase your score.

The GMAT is basically a game, and so you need to learn how to play the game. Clearly you can get many ideas from the video part of GMAT Prep Now. At the same time, in order to get better at the game, you need to play it yourself, by doing plenty of practice questions, maybe even going beyond those suggested by GMAT Prep Now, if necessary, and by taking practice tests.

Probably, taking 2 to 4 more practice tests during the course of your preparation over the next 36 days makes sense. After taking a test, you can review how things went to get a sense of what to work on to drive your score up. So, for instance, by looking over the results of the practice test that you just took you can start to get a sense of how to invest your time in order to achieve in the next 36 days the greatest possible score increase. Also, part of your score increase can come from getting better at handling the challenges of the test itself, challenges such as maintaining focus through all of the sections, knowing when to guess and move on, and handling the timing aspect.

Be sure to include some official GMAT Prep practice tests among the ones you use so that you get an accurate sense of what the actual GMAT is like.

1)Yes I am on a deadline and have to submit my scores by 31st March to an institute.

2)Diagnostic test review
Section Score Estimated Percentile
Argument essay - -
Integrated Reasoning 1.7 1 - 2
Quant 39 43 %
Verbal 26 43 %
Total 540 42%
Can you please guide me on how to go about it ?

3)
- I have my arithmetic and Geometry done. Rest need to cover
- I am familiar with C R and SC but need to work on them. RC also needs quite some work but I am familiar with CR, RC and SC from my Indian CAT exam which I gave couple of months back.
- Integrated Reasoning needs to be worked on a lot, mainly calculations and comprehension too. Is it part of
GMAT score ??

Can I have some guidance on how to achieve my target score 650 in 5 weeks. Also I have joined GMATTestPrep free online program. If you know how's that, will that be sufficient ?
Thanks

Vaibhavrvbt wrote:Can I have some guidance on how to achieve my target score 650 in 5 weeks.

To go from 540 to 650 you need to get right approximately 12 more questions than you did on the 540 score test.

So the way to get to your target score is to figure out how you are going to get those 12 more right answers.

Let's look at verbal first. You have just started preparing, and while you have done some verbal work for those other two tests that you have mentioned, you don't have that much experience with GMAT verbal. So theoretically just by getting a little more practice with GMAT verbal you should be able to get two or three more right answers in the verbal section.

That may not be enough though. So here are some specific ideas that you can use to drive up your verbal score.

Getting verbal questions right is mostly about process. So to score higher on verbal you need to notice what about your processes did not get you to right answers, and what will. For instance, in RC, are you going back to the passages to CAREFULLY determine which answer choice actually matches what the passage says? Often people doing RC questions choose wrong answers because they jump to conclusions and choose answers that somehow subtly don't match what the passages say.

To get CR questions right, you really need good processes. People talk about strategies and noticing premises and conclusions, but really what you need to do to get them right is to make the right moves. The right moves include understanding EXACTLY what is going on in the prompt. If you don't get what's going on in the prompts you are doomed to CR mediocrity. So get used to reading those prompts and completely understanding what is going on. Then look at each answer choice and via practice get to the point where you know exactly why each wrong one is wrong and each right one is right, and I don't mean by looking at explanations. You have to get good at seeing these things for yourself.

Doing these types of things will take longer than two minutes per question in the beginning, but using a lot of time in the beginning is fine. Spending ten minutes or more per question in the beginning is a great way to develop the analytical skills that you need for getting right answers consistently.

If you practice verbal and develop tight processes and an eye for what you need to see in order to get right answers, you should be able to get at least six more right answers in the verbal section within five weeks.

Getting to quant, you could shoot for six to ten more right answers in quant.

Some of them could come from better accuracy. Without your learning one more thing about GMAT quant, you could probably get a few more right answers just by being more accurate in your calculations.

Another way to get more right answers is to get better at handling data sufficiency questions. If you don't have experience with those, clearly they will be particularly challenging for you. So one of you areas of focus for quant could be data sufficiency. I bet that you could get four more right answers in quant just by carefully doing data sufficiency questions for a week, learning how to not get tricked and seeing some of the patterns that consistently show up in data sufficiency questions.

Just as is the case when practicing verbal, when practicing quant you should start off taking your time and learning how to get RIGHT answers consistently. Once you develop the skills necessary for getting right answers you can seek to speed up.

To get more right answers in quant, you could do topic by topic work. For instance, you could go over that test that you took, and see what types of questions you really didn't know how to handle. Then work on the topics associated with those questions. In five weeks you could learn so much about how to handle let's say two to three quant question types per week. That's ten to fifteen question types that you go from so so at handling to expert at handling.

Let's say that when you take the test you see ten questions of types that match the topics you focused on. You nail those ten questions, rather than flailing around and maybe getting them wrong, AND, because you do those questions relatively quickly, you give yourself time to work on other questions.

So by being more accurate, getting better at data sufficiency and by getting better at handling ten to fifteen, or more, hey go for it, question types, you get a bunch more quant questions right and drive your score from 39 to the mid to upper 40's or higher.

Drive your verbal section score from 29 to 35 or 36, and your quant section score from 39 to 45 or 46, and you score about 660 - 670 total, and all of that is the result of getting something around 6 - 7 more right answers per section.

The number of right answers is not the only factor. The order of the right answers matters too, and obviously the more you get right, the more challenging the questions become. Still that rough approximation gives you a fairly accurate sense of what you have to do in order to hit you score goal.