What to do in the last one month?

[erjamit]

Hi,

My G-Day is 08/20. I want to know what shall I do in the last one month. My PowerPrep score was 690 two weeks ago. I am really traumatised and under tremendous pressure as I feel I am not well prepared for the G-Day. The pressure is causing me sleep-less nights [:(].

Can someone pls help me and guide me.

Thanks
Amit

[VP_Jim]

My biggest piece of advice is probably to convince yourself that you are well prepared and that you're going to do well on the test! Scoring a 690 on your last practice test is excellent - if you're scoring in this range, you have no reason at all to be having sleepless nights. I've seen it time and again with my GMAT students - students who are calm and confident in the test invariably do better than those who are raging balls of stress. So, take a deep breath, remind yourself that you're well prepared, and stay calm.

One month is still quite a long time to study. Since you didn't mention what your weakest areas are, it's hard to give you specific advice. Spend extra time drilling your weak sections, but make sure to keep up studying the other sections as well. Also, take a few more practice exams to build up your confidence and get comfortable with pacing.

Good luck!

[bilko]

A 690 is a great score. Why on earth would that score traumatize you?!

[erjamit]

Hi VP_Jim,

My areas of weakness are as follows:-
DS - 65 - 70% (Accuracy rate)
CR - 60 - 65% (Accuracy rate)
RC - 60 - 65% (Accuracy rate)

Verbal weakness

1 RC will top my problem area in Verbal. I got 4 RC passages and to my horror, I got each passage after every 1 or 2 questions. I really got pissed off by frequent RC passages and they were really very bad. Very verbose and difficult to understand. Frequent RC passages created a bit of frustration in me and I lost my patience during the test. I got SC/CR questions consecutively from Q 28 onwards I think.
My accuracy on RC was 60%, which is on the lower side and I eliminated the correct answer during PoE.

2 CR was ok but I committed careless mistakes by not understanding the argument properly. Accuracy 60-70%.

General Observations/Weakness

1 In Verbal I re-read the question and choices many times before I could find the correct choice. This really hurt my confidence on the test.
While doing OG/Kaplan I rarely re-read and my accuracy is > 75% normally in Verbal.

2 My behavior was vastly different when I was under test conditions and when I do practice OG or practice Qs. During PowerPrep, I was quite nervous, pressurized under ticking time, wasn't able to manage effectively.

3 Had lost my stamina and patience half-way through the verbal section. Which lead to increased careless errors and mis-readings.

Pls advice me on how should I go about GMAT now.

Thanks
Amit

[VP_Jim]

Here's a few tips in response to your more detailed breakdown:

1. Don't get angry if you get your reading comp passages close together. Getting angry and frustrated will not help your score! Just take a deep breath and go at it.

2. As far as careless mistakes in critical reasoning, that just comes with practice. Do as many problems as you can, and take the time to really break them down; don't worry about spending 2.5 minutes per question. It's perfectly fine to spend 10 or 20 minutes on a question, so that next time you see an argument with that structure, you'll be ready.

3. One way to avoid re-reading answer choices on sentence correction is to read veritcally, not horizontally. Scan the answer choices for differences, and focus in only on those parts of the sentence. Connect those differences with major grammatical errors that you've learned from your prep books.

Good luck!