j, here's how I'd break down the skills required for each level:
550-600: familiarity with most basic concepts of math and reasoning, but trouble solving problems that are creative or nonstandard
600-650: a good sense of the basics - you can solve most straightforward questions, and are honing your instincts for the harder ones
650-680: a mastery of the basics and a nose for trickier problems, but not enough of a sense of how to set up complex problems or catch the fatal little details
680-720: you're much harder to trick, but almost all the problems you'll see are complex or deceptive, and some of them overwhelm or frustrate you, leading to time management or confidence issues - still, you're strong overall, and you can often guess the hardest problems even if you can't explain your answers
720-760: you have good enough test taking and problem solving skills that you can develop creative solutions for problems testing concepts you've never seen before, and your time management and confidence are excellent
770+: you've mastered the material and/or you're a natural reasoner
So to get to 600, I'd say you just need to practice a good amount of arithmetic, algebra, and common word problems, and have a good enough sense of critical reasoning and sentence correction that you can get 60-70% of the questions in the Official Guides. I've seen plenty of people score in the 600s who didn't know the difference between LCM and GCF or the formula for the area of a circle or that an inequality flips when you multiply it by a negative number, so it's absolutely doable in a short amount of time with a decent familiarity with the material.
j4528 wrote:Hello everyone! I've been out of school for a year now and am contemplating going back and getting a masters in a year or so. I bought the OG 13th edition and the Kaplan GMAT math workbook to prepare for the GMAT. Currently, I'm a supervisor at a manufacturing plant working day shift so I have time to study in the evening. After checking out this site, there seems to be a lot of people that would have great input on how I would need to correctly study to do well on the GMAT. I would like to score 600+. Any advice on how to attain this score would be greatly appreciated!. Thank you.
