GMAT Strategy

All-

This is going to be a long post as there are a lot of things I need to get across, but I'll bold the major points

I had my first attempt at the GMAT in November and scored a 590 (V35 Q36 AW6.0). Needless to say I was quite shocked considering how much time I had spent studying (~3 months, mostly following the 60 day plan from here). I felt like I was doing well with practice questions (Error tracking tool shows overall 76% correct with 82% of the questions answered). The odd thing is that this was the exact same score I got on the first practice test I took before I knew anything about the GMAT. Basically my 3 months of studying were useless.

One of my suspicions as to what went wrong is that I got put on a intense project (work in M&A consulting) about 5 weeks before the test and I had 0 time to study for ~3 of those 6 weeks). I tried to salvage studying for the short time before the test but it clearly didn't help.

I need to improve my score significantly, to at least 650, preferably closer to 700. My question is what is the best strategy for studying for a retake and how long to study before retaking? The 60 day plan is a bit too intense as I simply cannot keep up daily with the pace given the nature of my job -- and that's the reason I allotted myself over 3 months of studying, knowing that I'd have to skip days here and there or wouldn't be able to complete every question assigned that day. Should I assume I need more than 60 days or would I be ok with less given that much of the material will be review and not first-time learning?

I'm clearly weak on Quant, which really pisses me off because this is stupidly easy math that I don't understand. I work with numbers every day but the sh!t asked on this test is ridiculous. Verbal I'm OK with, but there's definitely room for improvement. AWA is clearly a non-issue.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I very much doubt your studying was useless unless you intentionally avoided subjects you knew that you needed to practice. It's common for people's scores to fluctuate as they assimilate new information and strategies (for example, once you know more about triangles, you consider more options and rules when you do a given triangle problem, and sometimes choose the wrong rule or spend more time than you should).

Did you keep track of topics and question types in your error log?

Personally, I advocate studying every day, even if it's only a couple questions before bed or on your lunch hour or whatever on some days; it short-circuits our tendency to tell ourselves that we are "too busy" or "too tired" a given day but that we will "make up for it" on the next less-busy day.

Jim@Grockit wrote:I very much doubt your studying was useless unless you intentionally avoided subjects you knew that you needed to practice. It's common for people's scores to fluctuate as they assimilate new information and strategies (for example, once you know more about triangles, you consider more options and rules when you do a given triangle problem, and sometimes choose the wrong rule or spend more time than you should).

Did you keep track of topics and question types in your error log?

Personally, I advocate studying every day, even if it's only a couple questions before bed or on your lunch hour or whatever on some days; it short-circuits our tendency to tell ourselves that we are "too busy" or "too tired" a given day but that we will "make up for it" on the next less-busy day.

I didn't formally keep track of topics in the error log from this forum, though I generally know the categories/areas I'm weak in.

On a somewhat related note, what I really find to be weird is that the test questions (or practice questions for that matter) seem to go in more detail than any of the study programs cover. Like all the rules and details surrounding roots, exponents, etc...none of the study guides really seem to drill down into every detail/rule, but then the GMAT ends up testing you on the details. With the study guides, it's almost as if you're expected to know more than what's taught/explained. Am I missing something here?

brosnan6 wrote:With the study guides, it's almost as if you're expected to know more than what's taught/explained. Am I missing something here?

Probably an editorial decision not to try to charge people for information they can find easily on the internet for free. If I were buying two study guides, I would want the % of overlapping, identical content to be very, very low.

Thanks Jim. Moving back to my original issue though, what would you and the readers of this forum recommend as study strategy for a retake? I'm truly lost at trying to think of what the best approach might be.

Study (mostly or all untimed) every day, even if it's only briefly. Weekly or bi-weekly full-length exams with complete review. Detailed error log so you can target your problem areas.