GMAT Strategy

I decided to take the GMAT last year. I prepared through only self-study, and took CATS while simulating official test conditions. I got the Kaplan Book, Manhattan GMAT Pack, and the 3 Official Guides.

I studied for the GMAT for over a year but it was regularly inconsistent. Work demands or other emergencies often required that to postpone practice for long periods -sometimes months.

Still, I went through the entire Kaplan GMAT book and all the Manhattan Guides but I didn't have enough time to go through most of the practice questions in the OGs before taking the test. In the end my GMAT score was lower than my last practice test.

Here are my scores below. As you will see, verbal was always a strong point, and my quant was weak
CAT 1 (Manhattan GMAT) - 620(V37, Q37 Date -Sep 27
CAT 2 (Manhattan GMAT) - 620 (V36 Q38) - Date -Oct 11
CAT 3 (Manhattan GMAT) - 710 (V45 Q41) - Jan 12
CAT 4 (Manhattan GMAT) -660 (V45 Q36) - April 23
CAT 5 (Manhattan GMAT)- 680 (V45 Q37) - June 18
CAT 6 (Manhattan GMAT)- 670 (V42 Q39) - June 25
CAT 7 (Official GMAT PACK 2) - 720 (V47 Q43) - Jul 16
CAT 8 (Official GMAT PACK 2) - 670 (V41 Q41) - Jul 16
Actual GMAT - 660((V41 Q39) IR 40% Jul 25

In the actual exam, I imagine that exam pressure and some disruptions at the test centre lowered my verbal score from V45-V47(99th percentile) in test exams to V41 (94thpercentile). All the same, what's clear to see is that my quant was always weak and would not have been persuasive for a top 5 MBA program. I think doing all the practice official guide questions is a good place to start with improving my quant but...

How would you recommend that I raise my quant score from the 39th pecentile(Q39), and fine-tune my verbal score to steady 99th percentile?

I have gone through all the examples in Manhattan GMAT Math more than once, so I do feel tired of re-reading the same material and repeating the questions in each chapter.
I am applying to top 5 MBAs in September next year. I had wanted to work on other parts of my application profile till December - more social/community involvement- study from Jan-April and retake the GMAT in April.

Do you think this is a solid strategy? To abandon GMAT material for 4 months before taking it up again? The thing is that I work long hours at a demanding job; even finding time for community/social involvement will be hard and attempting to combine that with intensive GMAT practice is likely impractical.

How should I proceed? Thanks a lot.
Please note that joining tutor programs isn't an option for me - too costly, so I do need the most cost-effective options.
Please let me know if you require more information.

Hi eraytu.

First, I think that you should stick with some, at least a little, GMAT preparation over those four months when you are doing other things. You could even do one question a day, or maybe a set of ten questions a week. I find that playing any game, such as the GMAT, continuously for a long period of time is a great way to build such a degree of familiarity with the game that you are super comfortable with the game, and so are less likely to run into issues on test day.

For example, one person who worked with me didn't sleep well the night before her last test, and when she showed up at the test center, it was so cold that she had to take the test wearing a coat. Guess what though. She was so comfortable with the test itself that she settled right in and scored 750.

You don't have to study intensely during those four months. As a matter of fact, you could just make some slow steady progress, and stay in GMAT mode. How? By doing topic by topic quant work.

Working on quant topic by topic is the way to make your quant score go up anyway. I mean pick any quant topic that you are not a total expert in, as defined in this post,

How To Increase Your GMAT Quant Score

and work on that topic until you could almost answer questions of that type in your sleep. Then pick another topic.

You could work on a topic every two weeks, or even one every three or four weeks. In any case, by the time the four months are up, you would have worked on 4 - 8 of the quant topics that you are least strong in, and not killed yourself doing it. Then whenever you got back into full GMAT training mode you would be totally familiar with that which had been keeping you from scoring V47+.

So there's an idea, and if you don't want to implement it over those four months, when you do start preparing again, topic by topic work will be the best path to quant success. Logic dictates that if you get totally adept at handling types of quant questions that have been tough for you, your quant score will increase.

When you are practicing quant, you now have to go beyond knowing basically how the questions work to becoming good at consistently getting right answers. Part of the reason you didn't score high on quant is that you were doing the same questions over and over. Doing that might work great for scoring high on an ordinary math test, on which the questions might look like homework questions, but GMAT quant is more a test of hacking skill than it is a math test. So you have to do all kinds of questions and become good at hacking your way to right answers.

So in preparing for GMAT quant you are better off taking a half hour to get a right answer than you are rushing through a question in two or three minutes and reading an explanation. You are to a large degree beyond using explanations at this point. While you might still get insights from some explanations, you have to become good at creating your own explanations, whether doing so for a particular question takes two minutes, ten minutes or two hours.

For tuning up verbal, usually what works is slowing way down and doing practice questions with the goal of getting close to 100% of them right. By doing questions slowly and carefully, you can get better at seeing what you have to see and doing what you have to do in order to choose right answers pretty much all of the time.

Consistently scoring high in verbal requires solid processes that consistently deliver correct answers and don't lead you to get sucked in by trap answers. So make sure that you attend to your processes as much as or even more than you concern yourself with concepts or explanations.

For some more verbal questions, you could try GMAC's question pack. Of course, first you could do all of the verbal questions in the OG.