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710girl
- Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Sun Oct 24, 2010 4:51 pm
- Location: New York
- GMAT Score:760
Hi Everyone,
After taking the GMAT twice and getting a 710 both times (first time 40V/48Q, second time 41V/47Q), I decided that self studying just wasn't gonna cut it. For background info, I'm a liberal arts grad living in NY. Before my second test I had used the following resources:
1) MGMAT books
2) All three OGs
3) MGMAT CATs
4) 800 Score CATs
5) GMATPrep CATs
After the second time, I hired a private tutor from Veritas for 10 hours (I liked that I could decide the number of hours as opposed to Kaplan which required a package of 14hrs or something. There was a waitlist for Manhattan GMAT tutors in the NYC area). The cost included the Veritas books. Right off the bat, it helped a ton. He told me that my Quant scores were probably never going to improve significantly since I'm not an engineer or anything so that I should focus on my Verbal. In addition, I'm a native English speaker and it would give me more "bang for the buck" for my score. It was completely counterintuitive to me since I had scored in the 92%ile in Verbal the second time but 77% on quant.
But I did what he suggested. I kept up the math practice but completely re-engineered my focus on Verbal. I got the following books:
1) Grammar Smart by Princeton Review (waaayyyy more manageable for English speakers than MGMAT sentence correction)
2) PowerScore LSAT Logical Reasoning Question Type Training (great CR practice)
Then I used the Veritas books as additional question resources for Advanced Math and Sentence Correction.
The day before the test I got a 1 hour massage and tried not to think about the test at all. I did little spurts of work... only 45 minutes at a time for about 3 different times.
The long story short is: if you're a native english speaker and you're scoring in the low 40s in Verbal and high 40s in Math, keep up the timing in Math and do advanced math problems, but focus as much as possible on your verbal (again, this is counter intuitive if you look at the percentiles). I thought about it this way: I want to get 100% in the Verbal section. There shouldn't be a single question that is too tricky or hard for me. For math, it was all about staying consistent and staying good at what I already knew but I didn't care about additional number properties or weird memorization. This really helped boost my overall score!
Good luck everyone!
After taking the GMAT twice and getting a 710 both times (first time 40V/48Q, second time 41V/47Q), I decided that self studying just wasn't gonna cut it. For background info, I'm a liberal arts grad living in NY. Before my second test I had used the following resources:
1) MGMAT books
2) All three OGs
3) MGMAT CATs
4) 800 Score CATs
5) GMATPrep CATs
After the second time, I hired a private tutor from Veritas for 10 hours (I liked that I could decide the number of hours as opposed to Kaplan which required a package of 14hrs or something. There was a waitlist for Manhattan GMAT tutors in the NYC area). The cost included the Veritas books. Right off the bat, it helped a ton. He told me that my Quant scores were probably never going to improve significantly since I'm not an engineer or anything so that I should focus on my Verbal. In addition, I'm a native English speaker and it would give me more "bang for the buck" for my score. It was completely counterintuitive to me since I had scored in the 92%ile in Verbal the second time but 77% on quant.
But I did what he suggested. I kept up the math practice but completely re-engineered my focus on Verbal. I got the following books:
1) Grammar Smart by Princeton Review (waaayyyy more manageable for English speakers than MGMAT sentence correction)
2) PowerScore LSAT Logical Reasoning Question Type Training (great CR practice)
Then I used the Veritas books as additional question resources for Advanced Math and Sentence Correction.
The day before the test I got a 1 hour massage and tried not to think about the test at all. I did little spurts of work... only 45 minutes at a time for about 3 different times.
The long story short is: if you're a native english speaker and you're scoring in the low 40s in Verbal and high 40s in Math, keep up the timing in Math and do advanced math problems, but focus as much as possible on your verbal (again, this is counter intuitive if you look at the percentiles). I thought about it this way: I want to get 100% in the Verbal section. There shouldn't be a single question that is too tricky or hard for me. For math, it was all about staying consistent and staying good at what I already knew but I didn't care about additional number properties or weird memorization. This really helped boost my overall score!
Good luck everyone!
Last edited by 710girl on Tue Nov 23, 2010 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
