Advice (Q 45's, V 32's) 630 range only

[aimhigh715]

Hi everyone:

I've been studying off the OG11 / has Verbal / Quant as well as a myriad of other resources for the last 2 months or so.

There's 3 more weeks until my GMAT date and I'm hoping for a 650+. Verbal seems to be my weakness, what can I do to improve?

It seems that if I can hit a high 30's , combined with a mid 40's in Quant I should be able to get 650+, is that a realistic goal for 2.5 weeks to go?

Kaplan Diagnostic 600
GMATPrep 610 Q41 V31
Powerprep 640 Q45 V32

Am I even in line to getting close to my goal given those? I'm quite afraid now because everyone indicates GMATPrep seems to be the most ACCURATE... and I'm only getting low 600's.

Any help is HUGELY appreciated. Thanks! : )

[Prasanna]

If you want to improve verbal, the only area which you can improve in a short span of time would be SC. I would suggest that you procure Manhattan SC guide in case you dont have it. You can focus on CR section too by identifying the various question types and working on the ones you are not good at. RC is one area where you cannot do much in 2 weeks except practice. I am not sure what your weak areas are. You can spend your energy accordingly for improvement of the score.

Wish you good luck. If you have specific questions this forum would be glad to help you.

[aimhigh715]

Morning Prasanna:

Thanks for your fast reply! My weakness is SC so that's a relief to hear.

Being a native speaker of English I'm somewhat surprised to find out that RC is difficult for me at times... I'm guessing the <2 minute per question may have something to do with it too. Sometimes I suppose I panic and guess on detail questions (especially if the topics are mundane or dry)... easy points to make up on there.

I have the MGMAT SC Guide as well as their free online test which I'll do this weekend. I'm reading flashcards and grammar rules daily which I'm hoping strict familiarization would help with me spotting incorrect idiom structures.

I'll be doing a CAT every day at least up to the exam date so I'm decent at pacing. Verbal is surprisingly fast for me, I tend to have 8-10 minutes to spare at the end, which I think I should have allocated better to the RC detail questions.

Thanks again!

[Prasanna]

You are correct in your observation that RC gets difficult for native English speakers too. It is more to do with the passage content rather than the language. You need to keep your concentration till the end. Thats the only way to beat it.

The other thing which I wanted to point out was that taking a test daily will be counter productive. After taking a time you would need lot of time to analyse the weak areas and prepare on them. If you have too many tests, you could take them untimed for practice. I have not seen any body reporting score increase by taking a test daily. Hope this helps.

[aimhigh715]

Just an update report... : ) If no one is reading, it will serve as my progress update to myself anyhow!

Took another practice exam! Unfortunately still around 640 : ( Can't understand why... while that's discouraging... I think I AM getting better at the SC / RC portion.

Looking back at the answers (I posted a whole bunch of questions in the forum just now) I narrowed down the answers down to 2 usually... and miss smth small last second and picked the wrong answer. I think that's an improvement.

Quant wise I seem to have hit a wall. I'm consistently getting 45's and no idea how to get better. Once again silly mistakes cost me the points.. looking back on the errors, 5 could have easily been avoided. I'm REALLY bad at DS. Need to improve on that HUGE.

Especially questions where x & y is featured in some equation
1) x > 1
2) y = 1y + 20

I tend to give up fast and pick either C or E.
Noticing that C tends to be less common on harder questions... it seems to be the easy way out (GMAC probably thinks that people will see that both answers offer suff info to solve...but the TRAP is actually equation 1 somehow is SUFF by itself...tricky!!)

Pacing wise I'm pretty good it seems, always finish on time. But it seems ppl who score higher have pacing issues... maybe I'm not spending enough time on questions??? Silly mistakes = means I'm too careless and not doing a final read through?

To be updated. Today's schedule:

Manhatten GMAT SC guide
20 questions each from OG11 as usual (100 questions)
Idiom list / Sahil's notes
ARCO exam (verbal section)

Exam is on Dec/13... T minus 4 days!!! *gulp
Hope I can cross the 650 barrier!

[aimhigh715]

Adding another note... last GMATPrep I had no errors on Critical reasonings!

RC is (surprisingly) my biggest weakness. I'm looking back and realize SO many careless mistakes, especially the global type questions

- What is the main point of the passage?
- Purpose of the second paragraph (to refute / correct first paragraph), etc

Going to sort through the OG RC's again. I'm a fast reader, but it seems to be a double edged sword as I miss the details and have to read back again. Going to try to read slower today and not worry about time frame... write down notes / change in direction or meanings as I'm going along...

[mayonnai5e]

I'm not sure if it will help, but you can try reading through my blog in my signature. I had some lessons learned in RC when I was going through my studies.