GMAT Strategy

Hey all,

I'm just starting out on my GMAT preparation. Not even sure if I'm going to apply to business school. If I do, it won't be until Fall 2017 at the earliest. I figure it can't hurt to refresh on some of the mathematical concepts that I haven't used in 10+ years. So far, I've taken two full exams and the quant section of a third on Veritas Prep.

It was quite a challenge working through the quant sections - at least the first two. The third exam went much better, because I listened to a lecture on how to approach the data sufficiency questions. I was bombing them badly, when I went in cold.

Anyways, my scores on these diagnostic exams are as follows:

Exam 1 - Total Score: 650 (78th percentile); Quant 41 (54th percentile); Verbal 38 (84th percentile)
Exam 2 - Total Score: 650 (78th percentile); Quant 39 (48th percentile); Verbal 40 (90th percentile)*
Exam 3 - NOT COMPLETED YET; Quant 46 (71st percentile)

*I ran out of time on Quant in Exam 2 - missed the last 4 questions, or else my performance would have probably been more comparable to Exam 1.

**On Exam 3, you can see I did MUCH better on Quant than the first two attempts. Mostly because I actually had a basic understanding on how to approach Data Sufficiency problems. With that said, if I do comparable on Verbal to how I did in the first two diagnostic exams, I should have a composite score in the range of 690-710. I also focused more on time management for this exam.

My question: What is a reasonable goal for me on this exam? Can I score a 750+ if I study hard over the next three to four months? There's obviously a lot of room for me to grow on the Quant side of the equation. I'm already doing excellent on verbal, even with zero preparation. I think I should probably aim for a split of 49Q/44V, which should be around a 750 (per Magoosh.com). Thoughts?

Hi Rich,

I'd say they were reasonably representative of test conditions. I took both sections continuously with no break for the first two (not even the optional 8 minute break between the sections). Actually, with the verbal, I think my scores would have been higher given actual test conditions. I kind of motored through those sections as fast as I could - had close to 10 minutes left both times I took it. I think had I taken my time and focused a little harder, I could have probably gotten at least one or two additional questions correct.

But I agree with your suggestion. I'm done taking the practice exams for awhile. I do have a pretty good idea where my deficiencies are. Like I said, it's been over ten years since I did mathematics similar to what is tested on the GMAT. I tend to be a very good test taker - scored a 169 on the LSAT. I'd like to at least replicate that success and, ideally, do even better. I feel like I should be better at the GMAT than the LSAT, given past successes in mathematics. Right now, though, I'm definitely starting at a disadvantage. The probability questions, in particular, are going right over my head at this point.

Anyways, I'm using Nova's GMAT Math Bible as my starting tool. I've already gotten through the first couple sections, but I feel like that's been more basic algebra and geometry. Maybe I'll aim for taking another full-length practice exam by Sunday, May 1st (including the Essay and IR sections). That's three weeks from yesterday. It will have to be on a weekend, because I've got a full-time job that takes up most of my weekdays. Nothing more than a couple hours in the evenings to study.

Sorry for posting this to the wrong forum at first. I wasn't sure where to post, because I had assumed this forum was more for discussing strategy at approaching specific problems or types of problems. Thanks for moving it. I will post all replies in this forum moving forward, and save the "I beat the GMAT" forum for the day I beat the GMAT!

[email protected] wrote:Hi 800_or_bust,

To start, you should NOT take any more practice CATs until you've put in some actual study time. From what you describe, it's not clear whether you took these CATs in a realistic and test-like fashion. If you did not, then these scores are likely 'inflated.' At face value, you clearly have strong critical thinking skills and could very well score in the 700+ range on Test Day.

I suggest that you commit to study routine for the next couple of weeks and use whatever materials you'd like. Then take a new FULL-LENGTH CAT (with the Essay and IR sections, and take the CAT in one sitting) and report back here with your scores. That data will help to define what you'll need to focus on going forward.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Rich,

Quick question for you. Kind of a hypothetical situation here. I see you scored an 800, and have a test prep website. Let's say after 2-3 months of self study, I'm able to reliably get into the 710-730 range. Are there test prep sites that deal with advanced test takers, i.e. those that desire scoring in an elite range, say 750/760 or higher? I'm just thinking probably most of the courses are geared more towards those with an intermediate (or lower) starting point. Not trying to sound arrogant or anything... It's just for somebody like me, it's only going to make sense to take the GMAT if I can score in the elite range.

Any thoughts?

David

[email protected] wrote:Hi David,

To start, you probably don't "need" to score 750+ to get into your first-choice Business School, so you have to remember what the *real* goals are. Yes, you're looking to score at as high a level as possible on the GMAT, but you're ultimately looking to earn a score that makes Business Schools think that you can handle the curriculum/work that they're going to throw at you. You'd be surprised by the number of applicants who get into Top Schools with scores under 700. Unfortunately a high GMAT score will NOT guarantee you anything - highly competitive Programs want strong OVERALL applicants, so if your whole application plan hinges on a high GMAT score, then you might need to change your plans.

That all having been said, it might help for you to define your goals in a bit more detail.

1) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
2) What Schools are you planning to apply to?
3) Are you planning to apply for Scholarship(s)?

The GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. "High level" thinkers actually tend to run into 'issues' with certain parts of the GMAT though - since they believe that "their way" of handling GMAT questions is the "best way", they often refuse to practice the necessary Tactics to score at a higher level. For those Test Takers, an inflexible way of thinking means that there's no resource that can help them. While I can't speak for any other Test Prep Company, I can tell you that you will learn everything that you need to know to score an 800 from the EMPOWERgmat Course. Whether you choose to practice our Tactics or not is up to you. Beyond the content and Tactics though, there are all of the other 'variables' of Test Day itself - the amount of sleep you got the night before, the breakfast you eat, the commute, whether you get a headache or not, the distractions at the Test Center, etc. All of those can impact your performance, so factoring all of that into your training is imperative to scoring at a peak level.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Rich,

Thanks for the response. I've tentatively scheduled my test date for September 10, 2016. Being this far in advance, I have not made any sort of official registration. Part of the timetable will depend on how my progression is coming along. Like I said, I'm not even entirely sure I'm going to apply for business school admission, but if I do it would be for Fall 2017 matriculation. Maybe I'll schedule some visits during this summer or fall to meet with the admissions folks at some of the b-schools on my radar.

It might be a little unorthodox to have no clear plan moving forward, but right now the goal is just to beat the GMAT. It certainly can't hurt anything to refresh on some of these mathematical concepts that I haven't used to any great extent in 10+ years. Yes, there's a time component and a cost. But it would seem to be a more fruitful use of my time than watching TV/Netflix.

David

Getting there. Finished up Exam 3 just to get a final score. Verbal is clustered pretty good. And I'm at a solid starting point there, despite not having studied anything on the verbal portion. Still have a lot of work to do to get up to the level where I would like to be overall. Need to achieve a quant score around 50, and a verbal score in the mid 40s. Won't be taking any more exams for at least a month or so. Going to focus on studying for the next 30 days.

800_or_bust wrote:Getting there. Finished up Exam 3 just to get a final score. Verbal is clustered pretty good. And I'm at a solid starting point there, despite not having studied anything on the verbal portion. Still have a lot of work to do to get up to the level where I would like to be overall. Need to achieve a quant score around 50, and a verbal score in the mid 40s. Won't be taking any more exams for at least a month or so. Going to focus on studying for the next 30 days.

Well, I guess I lied. Decided to take another practice CAT this morning. Scored a 47 quant (73rd percentile). Man, this was a grueling test. Seemed like the hardest one yet. I'm just glad I still managed to make a little progress. Still not anywhere close to where I need to be - which is 50+. Can't believe that was only good for 73rd percentile. I was sweating the entire time, and my room wasn't really warm at all.

Good news, per Magoosh's score chart, if I hit the average of my last 3 verbals (39), I'll break 700. If I can hit 40 (like on the 2nd practice exam), I'll be around 710. If I hit a new PR of 41, that would bump me to 720. Long way to go until 760-800. Not sure I can do it. I'm going to take the Verbal portion after lunch to get one more complete score. Then get back to studying.

The struggle is real! Well, the afternoon session didn't go quite as well as planned. I seem like I'm Mr. Reliable on the Verbal as my scores have been tightly clustered on all four exams. I guess that makes sense considering I haven't really studied any Verbal material yet. The good news is the Quant studies are definitely paying off. Still extremely deficient in certain topics, especially statistics and probability. Haven't gotten that far in the course of my studies yet - and it just doesn't seem to be something that was a focus in my high school studies (yes, that was a long time ago!). In any event, it's nice to see slow and steady progress. The goal is in sight.

Given my solid Verbal foundation, I believe the goal there is going to be identifying the few mistakes I'm making & fixing them. With this most recent test, I finished the Verbal section with more than 20 minutes left - which suggests maybe I should be spending a little more time on each question, and really focusing on some of the more difficult ones.

All said, I still believe the goal should be 50+ on Quant and working my way into the elite range on Verbal (mid 40s or so). Per Magoosh, a 50Q/44V split gets you a 760. I'd say that's doable. Of course, this is just a general idea. YMMV. Going to take a lot of continued hard work to achieve though. No doubt.

800_or_bust wrote:Given my solid Verbal foundation, I believe the goal there is going to be identifying the few mistakes I'm making & fixing them. With this most recent test, I finished the Verbal section with more than 20 minutes left - which suggests maybe I should be spending a little more time on each question, and really focusing on some of the more difficult ones.

Here are some things that you can do to increase your verbal score.

- Learn to feel the pain. Working on tough verbal questions can be painful. You may just want to finish them and get away from them. Learn to be super determined to do whatever you have to and to work on them for as long as you have to in order to clearly see what is going on in them. Refuse to not see exactly what is going on.

- When you are practicing verbal questions, don't just do your best to eliminate answers. Learn to see why every wrong answer is wrong AND every right answer is right. Especially in the cases of CR and RC questions, you can prove why the right answer is right. Spend 10, 15, 20, 80 minutes, whatever it takes, on each question figuring out EXACTLY what is going on in the question. In doing that you will develop the skills necessary for getting them right consistently. You need to develop an eye for the details and logic of the questions.

- For SC, there are two aspects to getting them right, how you handle them, and maybe less importantly, knowing a few dozen key rules and concepts. Usually you can get a sentence correction question right even if you don't know every concept involved in its construction, if you are good at hacking them. In any case, for any that you miss, consider two things, how you could have gotten it right and and what if any concept or rule you could have used that you were not clear about. I am guessing that of the few dozen key concepts and rules, there are maybe ten or twenty some review of which you would benefit from.

- Unless you always get 100% of the verbal section questions right, there is NO good reason to finish the section early. I used to finish verbal early. "Look at that." I would think, all excited about how I had finished the section early, but wait a minute, I hadn't gotten all of them right. Doing that doesn't make sense. If you had spent that remaining twenty minutes you had by spending two minutes more on each of ten particularly challenging questions, and you had therefore gotten, let's say, 8 more right answers, maybe you would have scored V47 and gotten a total score of 750 or 760 on that practice test.

Recently someone working with me, someone who didn't consider herself particularly good at verbal, was taking the GMAT and she realized that she hadn't done very well on quant. She wasn't very happy about that and decided to destroy the verbal section. Sure enough she scored on verbal significantly higher than she ever had on any previous CAT, just because she had decided to. Care, attitude and determination are key aspects of handling GMAT verbal. You may as well shoot for V51. Even if you don't hit it, the type of care and determination that you put into shooting for V51 will get you to the mid 40's or higher, and if you do hit V51 you may actually get that 800 in your name.

Marty Murray wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Given my solid Verbal foundation, I believe the goal there is going to be identifying the few mistakes I'm making & fixing them. With this most recent test, I finished the Verbal section with more than 20 minutes left - which suggests maybe I should be spending a little more time on each question, and really focusing on some of the more difficult ones.

Here are some things that you can do to increase your verbal score.

- Learn to feel the pain. Working on tough verbal questions can be painful. You may just want to finish them and get away from them. Learn to be super determined to do whatever you have to and to work on them for as long as you have to in order to clearly see what is going on in them. Refuse to not see exactly what is going on.

- When you are practicing verbal questions, don't just do your best to eliminate answers. Learn to see why every wrong answer is wrong AND every right answer is right. Especially in the cases of CR and RC questions, you can prove why the right answer is right. Spend 10, 15, 20, 80 minutes, whatever it takes, on each question figuring out EXACTLY what is going on in the question. In doing that you will develop the skills necessary for getting them right consistently. You need to develop an eye for the details and logic of the questions.

- For SC, there are two aspects to getting them right, how you handle them, and maybe less importantly, knowing a few dozen key rules and concepts. Usually you can get a sentence correction question right even if you don't know every concept involved in its construction, if you are good at hacking them. In any case, for any that you miss, consider two things, how you could have gotten it right and and what if any concept or rule you could have used that you were not clear about. I am guessing that of the few dozen key concepts and rules, you could benefit from some review of maybe ten or twenty.

- Unless you always get 100% of the verbal section questions right, there is NO good reason to finish the section early. I used to finish verbal early. "Look at that." I would think, all excited about how I had finished the section early, but wait a minute, I hadn't gotten all of them right. Doing that doesn't make sense. If you had spent that remaining twenty minutes you had by spending two minutes more on each of ten particularly challenging questions, and you had therefore gotten, let's say, 8 more right answers, maybe you would have scored V47 and gotten a total score of 750 or 760 on that practice test.

Recently someone working with me, someone who didn't consider herself particularly good at verbal, was taking the GMAT and she realized that she hadn't done very well on quant. She wasn't very happy about that and decided to destroy the verbal section. Sure enough she scored on verbal significantly higher than she ever had on any previous CAT, just because she had decided to. Care, attitude and determination are key aspects of handling GMAT verbal. You may as well shoot for V51. Even if you don't hit it, the type of care and determination that you put into shooting for V51 will get you to the mid 40's or higher, and if you do hit V51 you may actually get that 800 in your name.

Hi, Marty. Thanks for the reply. After you posted, I decided to take a closer look at the Magoosh GMAT score chart. I see what you're saying about maximizing the verbal scores; it truly is a much more significant magnifier to your overall score than quant because so few people reach a verbal scaled score of 48+ (or even 44-45, for that matter). To date, my main focus has been to get my deficient quant score up to par. And I think I've made significant progress towards that goal already. However, now I see the importance of verbal in the context of the overall test. Even a split of 48Q/42V comes out to around 740. A split of 49Q/43V bumps that up another notch to 750. These are very attainable levels for me. But, like you said, my approach has to be one that accepts nothing less than perfection.

David

P.S. I was reading some of your older posts - very inspiring! Congrats on the 800! Suffice it to say, you definitely beat the GMAT!

I took a quick look at my verbal performance on each of the four practice exams. Not only are the overall scores quite similar, but the breakdown has been about the same each time. I'm regularly getting around 80% of the reading comprehension and critical reasoning questions correct, but only around 60% of sentence correction questions. Even some rather easy sentence correction questions are tripping me up. I don't have time to do a full review today, but I spotted one that I should have gotten correct. Missed it, but only spent 26 seconds on it. I must have simply picked the first answer that sounded correct, instead of carefully reading and analyzing all four of the answer choices.

800_or_bust wrote:Even some rather easy sentence correction questions are tripping me up. I don't have time to do a full review today, but I spotted one that I should have gotten correct. Missed it, but only spent 26 seconds on it. I must have simply picked the first answer that sounded correct, instead of carefully reading and analyzing all four of the answer choices.

There you have it, and it's a good bet that you did similar things in missing some of those CR and RC questions.

Next Tip: Even if you are pretty sure that you have found the right answer, make sure that the one you that you think is right is actually better than all of the others. In other words, unless you are out of time for some reason, always look carefully at all five choices, and don't use the "splits" method on more advanced questions as they can contain false splits. Look at each choice on its own.

Basically shoot for 100% of all three types. When you go over those CR and RC questions, for the most part you will find that had you just seen certain things you would have gotten them all right. I say "for the most part", because there may be little issues in some of the practice test questions. Official questions will be tighter though.