Blues wrote:Hello Everyone,

I'm getting very frustrated with the results of my GMAT preparation. I've been out of school for 10 years now, and started studying 3 weeks ago. Math has never been a strong suit for me, so all of my studying has been focused on quantitative only. The 3 practice tests I've taken have shown no growth:

07/25/2009: 38Q; 46V; 660 combined
08/01/2009: 39Q; 41V; 620 combined
08/08/2009: 37Q, 44V; 650 combined

Since I haven't even looked at the verbal stuff, I'm not too worried about the fluctuating verbal score. I'm starting to get the horrifying feeling that I'll never break 40 on quant, much less the 48 I set as my pretest goal.

I spend 2 hours a day (a 1 hour bus ride to and from work), 5 days a week going through practice problems. Saturday is for practice test. Unfortunately my scores have remained stagnant. I'm making fewer concept errors and more careless errors, but the end results are the same. Is this normal, or am I just sub-par mathematically? If I'm a math dunce, any suggestions regarding what I should do to help get the dunce cap off? I'm really worried about what's going to happen to my Q score once I start looking over the verbal section.

If, my scores end up staying more or less static, is this split too extreme for most good business schools? Do schools tend to value the quantitative section over the verbal section?

Brother I feel your pain. I too have been out of school for awhile. And I have to say this sprint to b-school is a young man's game. The closer you are to b-school after finishing college the faster your recall with basic concepts tested in GMAT. In addition, if you did not focus on a rigorous undergrad education like in engineering or computer science, etc, welcome to the pain.

Good news is your probably at a point in your life where you are willing to do what it takes to overcome your said weaknesses. You've got just got to work a little harder than these young guns. I would recommend taking courses in statistics, accounting to reboot and clear the cobwebs. Calculus and microeconomics are good too, to build confidence and acquire discipline and fundamentals that you can't shortcut with gimmicks and gmat tricks, they teach you in GMAT prep courses.

You may want to get a tutor to pinpoint some of your problem areas, and customize your studying to accent your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Review review review the mistakes you make. OG11th Edition is good. Study their solutions. You should be able to verbalize logically and clearly why you erred. If you can't then you don't know what you're doing.

Finally keep visiting this site. No question is stupid...everyone here is helpful. Study everyone's approaches against yours. You will learn very fast that way.

stay hungry, stay foolish

you got this man!