Need Advice: How To Improve My GMAT Score For A Rewrite

[acrowson]

Hi Guys,
I feel pretty dejected. I wrote the GMAT today and I got killed. I scored a 500 (Quant: 29 and Verbal: 31). I was hoping to score in the mid-600's.

Study Background:
-Took an in-person Kaplan course Oct-Dec
-Dabbled in the OG 12th edition
-Skimmed M.G. Number Properties and Sentence Correction Guides??

I have rescheduled another retake for April 12th.

How would you recommend I improve my score by 100+ points...

I feel so in the dumps....

[Osirus@VeritasPrep]

I've been there. This is what I am did. I took a course with Veritas which was very good. I really needed help with verbal and I belive they gave me the pop I needed to conquer the GMAT verbal section. Since you have already taken a course, I doubt you would want to pay for another one. This is what I would do though. Go through all of your materials again. This time do not default to reading the solutions when you don't understand something. ATtempt to figure out what about that concept you don't understand and try to understand that concept more thoroughly. After you do this with all of the material take a new CAT and see how you do.

[DanaJ]

I'm guessing that the biggest issue here is that you went over the other materials superficially. The OG 12 and maybe even its two supplements deserve more than that, since they're the only resource out there (apart from the tests on MBA.com) that contain real, retired questions.

You should also probably look into some other resources to build up your skills. From your scaled scores, I can tell that quant is more of a weakness than verbal. Did you use anything else except the course materials? There are other recommendations I can make depending on your specific weak points. Also, you can check out our book review section - it's in the Resources tab at the top of the page.

If you do decide to take another prep course, there are plenty of options out there. You'll find that the most prestigious courses have discount coupons on our forum, on the right side of the page.

[acrowson]

I'm guessing that the biggest issue here is that you went over the other materials superficially. The OG 12 and maybe even its two supplements deserve more than that, since they're the only resource out there (apart from the tests on MBA.com) that contain real, retired questions.

You should also probably look into some other resources to build up your skills. From your scaled scores, I can tell that quant is more of a weakness than verbal. Did you use anything else except the course materials? There are other recommendations I can make depending on your specific weak points. Also, you can check out our book review section - it's in the Resources tab at the top of the page.

If you do decide to take another prep course, there are plenty of options out there. You'll find that the most prestigious courses have discount coupons on our forum, on the right side of the page.

Hey Dana,
Thanks for the reply...I have been following your posts for sometime...I am glad you decided to write back to mine.

You are right, I ran out of time and did a superficial skim of the OG materials. I recently purchased the entire Manhattan GMAT set of books, and I plan on attacking the OG's this way, on top of building up my content knowledge. Does this sound like a reasonable way to prepare for an April 12th rewrite?

How else would you suggest I improve my my Quant. skills?? Will Manhattan GMAT's resources help me enough to get up to the 600 level? Should I only focus on building up my math score?

Basically, I am looking for guidance on how I can prepare to score a mid 600 score??

Thanks Dana..

[DanaJ]

I think the entire set of MGMAT plus the three official books (OG big one, verbal and quant supplements) can do the trick here. I suggest you go over them patiently, you have roughly 6 weeks till your test date.

However, don't neglect your verbal. There's still room for improvement here as well! While you should definitely focus on quant, remember that increases in verbal score impact your overall "200 to 800" score more than increases in quant. This is because in general, people do worse in verbal than in quant: a verbal 50 is almost unheard of (I've only seen like a couple), while a quant 50 is only 93% (i.e. 7% of test takers do better than this). So my advice would be to go mainly for the quant, but also try to boost your verbal.

All the best and if you feel the need to discuss other details, just post here or send me a PM!