GMAT Strategy

mike_gm wrote:I think this will be very challenging. I'm trying to boost my score by 50 and think I'll have a hard time.

I may be wrong, but I remember reading a statistic that said 93% of people who retake the GMAT a second time score within 30 points of their original score.

lunarpower wrote::

* you should spend no more than 4-4.5 hours studying on any one day -- and, if you do 4 hours of studying, you should do 2 hours, then a LONG break, then 2 more hours. (adult humans are incapable of sufficient retention when studying for more than this long.)

--> but if I can find a way to make fun with my studies or find a way to put my mind at rest completely for 30 mins, these will no longer be true. is that right?

lunarpower wrote:

ngalinh wrote:

lunarpower wrote::

* you should spend no more than 4-4.5 hours studying on any one day -- and, if you do 4 hours of studying, you should do 2 hours, then a LONG break, then 2 more hours. (adult humans are incapable of sufficient retention when studying for more than this long.)

--> but if I can find a way to make fun with my studies or find a way to put my mind at rest completely for 30 mins, these will no longer be true. is that right?

not really.
regardless of whether you can make fun and games out of it,** that's pretty much the maximum amount of learning or retention of which the normal adult human brain is capable, at least until you get some real rest/sleep. (30 minutes is a nice catnap/refresher, but it's not enough to kickstart neuron production in your brain.)

note, of course, that learning/retention is not to be confused with execution/recitation tasks, which people can pretty much do endlessly, although their performance suffers after a long enough time.
for instance, taking a test (as opposed to studying) doesn't involve any learning or retention. that's why people can grind through tests like the MCAT (which is 7-8 hours long) without too many issues. but, if you try to study for that long in a single day, it just isn't going to work -- half the stuff you "learn" is just going to fly out the other side of your head.

yeah,

actually that question related to an issue that I have experienced: limitations can be broken gradually through endurance. It's true for both physical and mental aspects.

but on the day I read your post, I experienced this thing:
after study for 6 hours, I relaxed at a fashion store. I picked a nice shirt, tried it. Beautiful! --> still conscious. Ok, now it's time to return it to the place (where the similar ones hang up). Where it it? It likes disappear forever. Then I didn't study more because I might not find where details located in the RC passage.

thank you! it (your advice) works

lunar power wrote:

yep -- if you're looking for the same ideas elsewhere, you'll find them. the more random observations (like this one) you make, the more you'll learn about yourself in the process.

lunarpower wrote: the point is to find your own intuitive ways of thinking about these tasks. yours aren't going to be the same as mine, but that's not the point; the point is to develop an intuitive understanding, by whatever means.

lunarpower wrote:
well, it's not really "artificial" -- an intuitive understanding will emerge more or less organically, as long as you're thinking in a way that's open to it.

--> yes, my question came out at the time I felt so greedy after reading (read or reading?) your post. I wanted to have more and quickly ...intuitive understanding, which needs time to develop. This is an example of how emotion affects reason.


in other words, as long as you are approaching the task in a way that's open to developing intuitive understanding, then it will gradually happen over time, without any "artificial" effort -- in the same way that you'd develop an intuition about other things, like, say, your relationship partner's habits.

this is only a problem, really, for people who approach this test by trying to memorize tons and tons of individual "rules", without paying mind to how the test actually works or to the mentality that's required to succeed at it.
that's the kind of thing that's not open to intuitive understanding in the first place -- after all, the whole point of memorization is, in general, to avoid thinking/intuition -- and so will prevent the requisite intuition(s) from forming. but, as long as that's not the way you are approaching the task, you should be all good.