GMAT Strategy

i received a private message about this thread.

before addressing the points contained in the thread itself, i feel the need to mention that, as posters above me have mentioned, it may not be the world's greatest idea to re-take the test at this point.

did you get any feedback from the schools about why you didn't get in? (they won't write this information in rejection letters, but some admissions people are willing to dish a little if approached politely.)
you already have a 710, which is a good score. if you were rejected by every school with a 710 gmat score, then the gmat is almost certainly not the issue with your application.

remember, the gmat is not the most important thing on your application! obviously it's important, but it's secondary to the factors that are more directly related to your post-MBA potential. e.g.,
what distinguishes you from other applicants with similar profiles?
what history of leadership/entrepreneurship do you have?
how strong are your recommendations?
basically, does your application make the case that you are one of tomorrow's leaders? a disruptive innovator? a visionary? a doer, a go-getter, a mover and a shaker? because that is what business schools are primarily interested in.

if the above items on your profile are not particularly strong, then it may reflect badly on you to re-take the exam -- even if you score substantially higher!
remember, the things mentioned above are things that matter more than the gmat. if those things need improvement, but you are still hacking away at the gmat when you already have a 710, the admissions committees will (rightfully) question exactly where your priorities lie.

the above questions are meant to be rhetorical -- i am not an admissions counselor, and i don't intend to start a dialogue in response to the items above. they are just some things for you to think about when you make this decision.

CaptainM wrote:1) RC: High accuracy level, but sometimes I take more time to comprehend certain convoluted lines in RC.

if you are spending time trying to "understand convoluted lines", then you may be concentrating on the wrong parts of the passages.
when you read through the passages, you should mostly ignore details. once you figure out what kind of details are present, and why (= what idea they're there to support), you can just skip them.
this is actually one of the purposes of the gmat RC section -- to favor test takers who can skip through masses of unnecessary details and still get the main point.

2) CR: If I take 4 minutes to solve, I get high accuracy in CR, but to solve within 2-2:30 mins my accuracy goes down. I think understanding CR stimulus and selecting between last two contenders take most of my time.

this isn't a very specific observation, so i don't really know what to say in response to it.

it's possible that you aren't focused enough when you first read the questions that accompany the passages. remember, you should always be reading the passages for something, based on the question, and you should always have a specific goal in mind when you examine the answer choices.
if you are just wandering through the answer choices looking for any and all various and sundry connections between the choices and the passage, then, yeah, you are going to have trouble with timing. on the other hand, if you are going through the choices and looking for something specific, then this should be much less of an issue.

3) SC: I know all the rules, but fail to apply all in restricted time condition.

this whole "all the rules" thing is probably the issue.

if you can just find the following things ...
parallelism
pronouns
s-v agreement
modifier placement (= where do you put modifiers that are moved around between choices?)
modifier usage (= which modifier should you choose from among different choices?)
overall sentence structure (= is this a complete sentence? vs. a run-on or a fragment)
... then you should be well equipped to solve the vast majority of the SC problems. these are the only truly major topics tested in SC, although there are a lot of little silly things in there to distract you. less is more.