Graduating Senior Looking for Advice

[2010Chick]

Hi guys I need some help. I'm a senior in college and have received a great offer to join a leading technology company. I would like to work for 3 years or so and then leave to obtain an MBA at a top 10 program in General Management. My biggest problem is the GMAT, however. So, I don't know if I'm going to apply any more. Here's my profile:

Demographics:
Gender: Female
Race/ethnicity: African-American
Region of orgin: Southeast

Education:
Top 20 university
3.7 GPA -Double major in liberal arts/ foreign language; minor in business
ACT: 30
SAT: 1350 (on 1600 scale)

Work Experience:
Strong internships w/ Fortune 500 companies
Planning on working 3 years before applying

Other:
Placed in undergraduate marketing case competition at a tier2/3 business school
Studied abroad twice
Lots of community service

GMAT:
1/10-600
4/10-610

I took a Kaplan Classroom course twice (I used my higher score guarantee) , completed the Official Guide GMAC publishes from cover to cover, and nearly exhausted my Q-bank resources. I started out at a 570 on the diagnostic and logged more than 200 hours between January and April (while finishing my last semester in college) doing practice problems and CATs. I kept an error log and reviewed all questions answered correctly and incorrectly.

I typically have no issues with standardized tests as you guys can see from my ACT/SAT performance in high school( W/O expensive prep courses I'd like to add!), so my initial goal was a 700. Honestly, if I could get to a 650, I would still consider applying as a reach candidate. At this point, however, I don't want to give up my dream of obtaining a high-end MBA,but I don't know what else to do. I truly am a hardworker and really want to use an MBA to help non-profits run more efficiently one day, but it seems the GMAT is making this impossible!

[Jmitchell]

Well what was the break down of your score? Are you weak in Verbal or Quant or Both?

It seems like you have studied a lot but you need to ask yourself what are you learning each time you do a practice problem. Doing the problem then reviewing and looking at the answer but not focusing your studying on why you missed it will only get you to a certain level. If you want to take that next step to a higher score you need to focus on the weak areas in your Verbal and Quant very specifically.

The following is geared more towards Quant.

Keeping an error log is good, but I would suggest after going through all the OG ( which are the questions to do), review all the questions you missed, but don't just look at it and go "oh that is the answer". Review why you missed it. Try to figure out what areas you are weak on. I would also recommend keeping track of what type each missed question is then using that to figure out a weak area you need to focus on more. If you don't understand the explanation of the problem in the book, come look it up on beatthegmat, someone has probably asked a question about it in the past. After you have reviewed all the problems you have missed ( which should take a while), wait a week or two then go back and do all the missed problems again. You might remember some but probably not all. If you miss it again, you need to analysis why you missed the problem again and focus on fixing that weakness. Keeping what types of problems you are missing in your error log should eventually show a pattern of your weaknesses.
I would recommend some of the Manhattan books, I found those to be pretty good if you have a relatively solid base. Some of the EZ Gmat math books can be pretty good too as they have a lot of problems that are grouped by type, but they are cover things in super detail and do not necessarily teach you the time tricks.

For verbal, if you are having problems with sentence correction the manhattan sentence correction book is a must. It is the bible of sentence correction as far as I am concerned. But once again like quant, if you miss problems you need to try to figure out what grammar rules you are missing.

Hope that helps,
-J