Day-44 (550 , Q 42, V 24, IR 4)

[NaimaB]

I just took the Practice test (without AWA part) and scored 550. (Previous test score was 480)

While giving the exam, I was feeling confident about my IR part but the result is highly disappointing.

I was in short of stamina in my verbal part. Time management was poor in all the section.

I will review thoroughly the exam but for the time being, I am concerned about whether it is possible to get 620-650 for me if i sit for the exam on mid December? I have some personal issues for which i need to sit for the exam by Mid December if i want to apply for Fall 2015.

Would highly appreciate if anyone can give me a realistic idea.

[Brent@GMATPrepNow]

A 70-100 point increase in 5-6 weeks is possible, but it will take some work.
It sounds like your test-taking skills (namely time management and endurance) are holding you back. So, you'll need to keep working on these.
In the future, complete the AWA section as well. This will help build your stamina.

If you're interested, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244

Cheers,
Brent

[NaimaB]

A 70-100 point increase in 5-6 weeks is possible, but it will take some work.

Can you please elaborate about 'some work' so that i can have an idea about how much work and effort i need to put in to practice other than test taking skill buildup?

The school I am planning to apply has an average GMAT score of 610. So I am setting my target for 620-650 just to be safe.

[Brent@GMATPrepNow]

From this point on in the Guide (Day 44), you will take frequent 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

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.

I've already touched on building your test-taking skills.

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

As far as how long it takes to reach your target score, that varies from student to student. However, once you take a few more practice tests, you'll have a better idea of your score trajectory.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Brent