Breaking the 700 barrier

[myohmy]

I'm taking the GMAT next week and I've consistently scored in the 670-690 range on practice tests. In terms of what I need to improve on, I'm all over the map - verbal will go way down one week, math the next, I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong. If anyone has any ideas on what I could be doing differently (more practice tests) to bump up my score just another 10 or 20 points, please let me know.

[mayonnai5e]

During the last week of my studies, I simply went over my weak areas and redid the easy and medium difficulty questions - then I studied them again and again while looking for different permutations of the easy/medium questions in different cats I've taken etc. This allowed me to get those weak areas that were previously dragging my score down right 100% of the time, which made it much easier to break the 700+ barrier.

See my entry about "quant complexity" near the end of the blog found in my signature. I detail the process I used to go from a high of 45 Q in the week preceding the GMAT to 49Q on the real deal.

[myohmy]

Thanks - very helpful. I've definitely been reviewing basics (and I'm not superstressed because I know I have plenty of time to take it again) but it's difficult because something I'll do really well on one test (geometry for example) I'll do really poorly on the next. I took the GMATPrep test for the first time today (I'm in a PR class) and scored a 700. I'm a little confused because I appear to be doing percentage-wise better on V (8 wrong out of 41) to Q (12 wrong out of 37) but my V score is a 41 while my Q score is a 44. I'm planning on looking at basics again, and we'll see how test day goes... one more week.

[fleurdelisse]

just a follow up question to both, which practice tests have you been doing? I need to find a good source that has some practice test that will prepare me for the GMAT, and the prob is that there are only two on the gmat prep software.
Would appreciate your input.
Good luck myohmy with your test!!

[mayonnai5e]

PR, MGMAT, and GMATPrep are the best cats in my opinion. You can get the first two if buy their books.

[myohmy]

I've been doing the PR and GMATPrep practice tests. Was going to do MGMAT but time constraints did not work in my favor. Scores as follows:

Princeton Review
490 (30V, 29Q) - ouch, but it was just a diagnostic
650 (40V, 40Q)
660 (43V, 39Q)
670 (41V, 42Q)
680 (39V, 45Q)

GMATPrep
700 (44Q, 41V)
710 (49Q, 41V)

I'm not sure quite how to evaluate the results since if I plug the individual components into score calculators, it comes up with different scaled scores.

I would love some info on things to think about in V that might help push up my score (I'm an English major so I know that I *can* do this -- I have no idea why my verbal scores stay so consistently low)