Day44, How to improve further?

[mickjagger]

Hi Folks, Hi Brent,
I would like to get your feedback about my study journey towards the GMAT test day.
I just finished the GMAT test prep 2 (Day44) and I don't know what to think about the outcome.
I got a 650 (Q49, V29). In the previous test on Day22 I got a 610 (Q46, V28) and a 640 (Q47, V32) on the first days of the 60-Day GMAT study guide.

I was expected some improvements in my verbal score after the verbal study (Day 23 to Day38) but there is no improvement at all. So maybe I don't use the right strategy or tactics to attack the verbal section. I need your help.
To give you more information from my improvement chart, the % of correct answers (from the OG 13) is:
- RC 79.1%
- CR 86.1%
- SC 75%
On the last gmat test, I got 14 incorrect answers, 7 of them were SC, 5 were CR and 2 were RC.

So I know that my main weakness is SC. So far, I'm following the MGMAT guide. How can I improve my SC %, Do you think the OG Verbal review can help (I just bought it but it's still in the package)?
When I read success stories in this forum, some people talk about the strategies they built in order to tackle the verbal section and to score 40+. I'm trying to use the MGMAT strategies for the moment (with a lot of difficulties as you can guess). Should I start to look for my own strategies too?
Thanks a lot for your help,
PS: I'm aiming a 750 score with 40+ in verbal , which is my main weakness.

[Brent@GMATPrepNow]

First of all, your Quant score has increased 2-3 points, which is great, since you were already starting with a strong quant score.
Unfortunately, increasing one's Verbal score can sometimes take a while.

Now that you've completed the "content days" of the Study Guide, the remaining days are devoted to identifying and strengthening areas of weakness. Keep in mind that the GMAT is a test of your math and verbal skills AND it's a test of your test-taking skills (endurance, time management, anxiety managemement), so, it may be the case that you need the most work on your test-taking skills.

From this point on in the Guide, you will take FULL-LENGTH practice tests and carefully analyze them afterwards. During this analysis, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:
1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

It sounds like much of our work will be spent identifying SPECIFIC verbal weaknesses. You mention in your post that SC is your biggest weakness. We need to go deeper than that. What kind of SC questions give you the most trouble? Comparisons? Verb tenses? etc. Once you can identify specific weaknesses, you can work on them.

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. The OG Verbal review is a good resource but it's hard to work on specific question types/topics. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options like verb tense, comparisons, etc.

At the same time, you shouldn't rule out the possibility that your test-taking skills are holding you back. If so, you may need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244.

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article for BTG: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/09/ ... n-the-gmat

Keep at it, mickjagger. You're on the right track.

Cheers,
Brent

[mickjagger]

First of all, your Quant score has increased 2-3 points, which is great, since you were already starting with a strong quant score.
Unfortunately, increasing one's Verbal score can sometimes take a while.

Now that you've completed the "content days" of the Study Guide, the remaining days are devoted to identifying and strengthening areas of weakness. Keep in mind that the GMAT is a test of your math and verbal skills AND it's a test of your test-taking skills (endurance, time management, anxiety managemement), so, it may be the case that you need the most work on your test-taking skills.

From this point on in the Guide, you will take FULL-LENGTH practice tests and carefully analyze them afterwards. During this analysis, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:
1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

It sounds like much of our work will be spent identifying SPECIFIC verbal weaknesses. You mention in your post that SC is your biggest weakness. We need to go deeper than that. What kind of SC questions give you the most trouble? Comparisons? Verb tenses? etc. Once you can identify specific weaknesses, you can work on them.

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. The OG Verbal review is a good resource but it's hard to work on specific question types/topics. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options like verb tense, comparisons, etc.

At the same time, you shouldn't rule out the possibility that your test-taking skills are holding you back. If so, you may need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244.

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article for BTG: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/09/ ... n-the-gmat

Keep at it, mickjagger. You're on the right track.

Cheers,
Brent

Thanks a lot Brent,
Concerning the test taking skills, I always have to rush at the end of both the quant and the verbal to finish all the questions. The trend is more enhanced in verbal. So, I watched the video about time management and will apply the concepts in my next test.

Cheers

Michel