Dallas - 1 month

[havok]

Hi,

I'm Don, I've been a member for quite some time but I haven't really put as much effort (60-day wise) as I should have. I am just out of school (I've been working for less than one year) so I'm still fairly familiar with a lot of the concepts.

My goal is to score a 750. My baseline based on the first downloadable practice test was 690, so I need an improvement of at least 60 points to hit my goal.

My study schedule involves math problems in between sets at the gym, studying verbal and critical reasoning on the train, and my after work study routine is hit-or-miss but with just over a month left (May 7th), I think I can get enough studying in to prepare me.

I just learned that the essay is graded by an E-reader, so that will be my next horizon. Also, throughout the book I only scored an 80% correct on the data sufficiency. I mainly need to (a) be more careful and read questions thoroughly, and (b) get my geometry down, I skipped it in high school so I never truly learned it.

[bradyllewis]

Hello Don. Welcome to the forum.

[havok]

Update, Test #2 taken.

Ran out of time on the Math Section (didn't know that could happen) so I completely guessed on the last 5 questions (4 of which I got wrong) in the last 2 minutes (thank GOD this is practice, I still freaked out nonetheless). I finished the verbal with 20 minutes to spare though, I should make more use of my time I suppose.

Scored 710 (how is this calculated? LOL) with 23Q 33V.

[beatthegmat]

Which practice test software did you use? A 23Q and 33V shouldn't calculate into a 710 (sorry!).

[havok]

That's not the actual score I now realize. That's how many out of 37 and 41 I got right, respectively.

[beatthegmat]

Sounds a little more realistic. Just a heads up--you can get a lot wrong on the GMAT and still achieve a high score. The GMAT algorithm is a bit of a black box, but that does happen.

[havok]

Uh oh, looks like I'm not making any progress?

I retook GMATPrep Test #1 (It's been a long time, so for the most part I didn't remember any questions).

The first time I took it, I scored: 690
37Q 41V (this was before any studying)

This second time (after a month's worth of studying), I scored: 690
49Q 35V
Finished Quant with 13 minutes left, finished Verbal with 17 minutes left.


So I've definitely put a lot more effort into studying the Quantitative sections - but I've also put some time into sentence correction - which I thought was my initial weakness.

2 weeks until my exam....