Hitting a roadblock in prep! Ideas please!!

[indranildatta]

I have my GMAT scheduled on 7th Jan.

I have been preparing for a month now. I scored a 620 on Kaplan diagnostic before starting to prepare. The preparations were going on well and I had identified the areas of weaknesses and was working on them.

SC, CR and a few quant concepts like inequality were my weak points and I worked on them and improved. I was practising from the OG 10th edition. Initally I improved drastically and was getting almost all of the problems right.

But after about a 100 questions in each of SC and CR, whatever I do, however much I study, I just can't get some of them right.

I have bought the Manhattan SC book and Kaplan 800 to practice the tougher examples, and I am ardently reading through the explanation of ALL examples, but still I get at least 25% of the questions wrong. The frustrating part is I am quite confident about the questions I am getting wrong. Not that I am doubtful that I may be wrong.

I wrote the first test on Powerprep and panicked in the Verbal because of this reason and got into a tremendous time pressure. Finally I scored 720 (Q 49, V 38).

Now I am totally out of ideas how to boost the score further. Please help me out with some ideas/advices/thoughts. Please!!!

[mayonnai5e]

You went from 620 on Kaplan (which has consistently low scores) to 720 on powerprep. It seems like what you are doing is working.

You mentioned that you spend a lot of time reviewing the answers, but how are you reviewing the answers? One thing that Stacy also stresses is what you review. The most important question is: what can you do next time if you saw this same question again or a question similar to it and get the answer correct? What critical thought path would you need to utilize to avoid the wrong answers and get to the correct answer?

You may want to do a search for Stacy's posts to see what she has to say on how to review solutions.

[indranildatta]

thanks a lot for your advice ... i think i have started to see a new way to go forward ... let me work on it ... will be updating shortly

[mayonnai5e]

Excellent! Don't be afraid to mention your plan and strategy. Why? Members here can critique your plan with their collective knowledge and others on this forum can learn from how you are adjusting your plan. The latter is of particular interest because I bet many people hit a plateau at some point in their studies.

Good luck!