12 weeks 'til G-Day! I need a study plan!

[smclean23]

As you may or may not have known, I took my GMAT yesterday and got a 390. YIKES! I honestly can say I studied for 2-3 weeks. I bought the OG 11 almost two or three months ago. Needless to say.....I need major help. I was discouraged by my score but decided that the #1 flaw that people have with this test is CONFIDENCE. I was shot walking out of that building and it took a toll on me. I felt like a jerk, but by reading other horror stories it seems to be the same thing...PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE....(Allen Iverson..lol)

My goal is to get at least a 600. Is this conceivable? Let me know so I can save my time. I have the OG 10 & OG 11 and just purchased the Manhattan SC. I know there is a Kaplan book out there but I have a MAC and it seems those CD ROM's aren't compatible.

I've looked at the "MASTER" study plan in one of the blogspots and I have to say that is remarkable but with the amount of time I have and the resources I need something that is more tailored to my situation. I made the following plan for myself:


Week 1 & 2 - 100% Problem Solving
Week 3 & 4 - 100% Data Sufficiency
Week 5 & 6 - 100% Sentence Correction
Week 7 & 8 - 75% Critical Reasoning & 25% Reading Comp
If there is a Week 9 - Refresher of everything

I scratched this plan 10 minutes ago because I want to take a CAT every week or two.

Please advise as to how I should navigate thru the sections. For example should I do PS & DS for how many hours and SC/CR for another couple.

I seem like I am rambling but I want to sink my teeth into this GMAT so bad...I'm totally determined...Please someone help me out!

[lunarpower]

a couple of things.

one:
one thing that's been conspicuously left off this list is the idea of time management. you didn't comment on your time management during your last gmat performance, but it's likely that you need some help in that area.

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make sure that you obey STRICT time management guidelines, as follows.
the following are ROUGH guidelines for verbal; feel free to adapt them to your strengths and weaknesses. for instance, if you are an unusually fast reader, you should lower the time estimate for reading comp, and so on.
SC: about 1:00 for short sentences; about 1:30 for long sentences
CR: about 2:00 for easier passages; about 2:30 for harder ones (perhaps 2:45 for passages that are unusually long)
RC: about 3:00 to read a short passage; about 4:00 to read a long passage; about 0:30 to answer main-idea problems; about 1:15-1:30 to answer detail-oriented questions

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for quant, there are 37 questions in 75 minutes, which translates more or less perfectly to ~2:00 per question. this doesn't mean that you should give up on questions after exactly two minutes have passed - you are, after all, going to be spending less than two minutes on some questions - but it means that you should be wrapping things up and getting ready to guess/answer after the 2:00 mark.

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for either of these timing guidelines, one crucial thing is for you to be able to INTERNALIZE THE STOPWATCH, meaning that you should develop a good sense of what 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, etc. FEELS like, WITHOUT having to look at the timer. you should NOT look at the stopwatch on every problem, as doing so will only distract you and/or rattle your nerves.

you should plan to check the timing guidelines every 10-15 minutes.

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as far as which subjects to study in which order, here's a decent idea:

* first, make sure that you familiarize yourself with the basics of data sufficiency. many students score much lower than they potentially could, just because they don't take the time to fully internalize the way that data sufficiency problems work, don't understand the answer choices, and/or don't learn and memorize the data suff answer choices. you must be able to do d.s. problems without looking at the answer choices; you should be able to proceed through the problem and eliminate choices without having to look through that big long list of 5 every time.

* also, get used to reading sentence correction problems vertically - i.e., looking down through the choices for differences, rather than reading through the answer choices the way you'd read a book or some other 'normal' reading material.

* once you've done that, you should start concentrating on different topic areas of problems. don't just "do problem solving" or "do data sufficiency"; instead, find the problems that concentrate in specific subject areas (such as number properties, or algebra, or geometry, or ...) and go through them ALL. this way, you'll be learning material that's focused enough that you can build the necessary connections.
some subject areas are obvious; anyone can tell geometry problems from other problems, for instance. however, you may need help picking out problems in other areas at first. our manhattan gmat strategy guides are a useful resource; not only do they provide the basic content that you'll need to understand the problims in the first place, but, more to the point in your case, they organize the o.g. problems by content and topic area. that way, you can glide through the o.g. problems, looking at ALL the ones pertaining to the subject du jour in a sitting or two.

* don't forget to review problems. this means not only problems that you've gotten wrong, but also problems that you've gotten right! if you got a problem wrong, review exactly what went wrong, what you should have noticed, and so on; if you got a problem right, review what DID work, what signals you DID notice, etc., and internalize those successful strategies so that you can put them to work on future problems.

good luck!