Last three weeks

[prad]

i am appraoching my test day and have been trying to settle down with the hours I pUt into my study time. I am doing more practice problems, and alternating mornings and nights with verbal and math. I just took a gmat prep and got a 530. In am in dire need of 50-70 pints. Any suggestions of where to pick up some points will help. My verbal was 27 Q was 35. Verbal can use some help but I dont know how to go about it. Just need 50-70 pints is it possible?

[pepeprepa]

My point is that you could improve your maths in 3 weeks. Come to the maths forum and solve/post questions, you will little by little improve your weak points.
V takes more time to improve.
That's my point.

[Stacey Koprince]

Can you give us some more detail on your strengths and weaknesses? Take a look at the reports from whatever practice tests you've been taking and let us know how you're doing on the different question types and content areas.

Also, how's your timing? Are you moving at a steady pace throughout the test or are you always rushing at the end and maybe even having to guess? If you're struggling at all with timing, there's at least one thing you can do when you don't have much time left to prep: get questions wrong faster. Seriously.

If you can determine, for example, that you almost always get combinatorics questions wrong, and that you normally spend 2.5 minutes getting those questions wrong... next time you see a combinatorics question, get it wrong in 20 seconds instead of 2.5 minutes. That saves you 2 min that you can spread over other questions you might actually get right. You're not hurting yourself, because you were getting those questions wrong anyway, and now you have an opportunity to help yourself on some borderline questions that maybe you knew how to do but you were getting them wrong because you were rushing and/or making careless mistakes.

That little strategy can work well for something that's not very common on the test, such as combinatorics, but let's say you're struggling with something that is more common - number properties or algebra. You'll have to do a bit more homework to figure out when you can answer those ones right and when you can't. Learn how to identify the ones that just don't work for you - and get them wrong faster.

Let us know any additional detail about your strengths and weaknesses so we can help advise you better.

[prad]

my weakness is defintely in verbal
ive been concetrating a lot on sc since i feel it is the easiest one to improve
my cs stinks
i m starting to go over my mistakes in the og and reading all the anwser choice and why they are wrong
i also find myself second guessing myself
it seems that the non obviouis anwser is right most of the time
i have two weeks left and plan on doing nothing but doing problems from the og guides, looking at my mistakes, and two or three more practice exams.

[Stacey Koprince]

You said your "cs" stinks - did you mean sc or cr?

For CR (and RC), it's really important to study why the wrong answers are wrong. For any question (when studying), pick the wrong answer you think is most tempting and be able to articulate why it is so tempting, and why it is wrong anyway. Understand HOW they get you to pick the wrong answer and you'll be less likely to fall into that trap in the future.

For SC, it's all about the grammar. If you are falling into traps, you either don't know the rules well enough or you're relying on your ear too much, or some of both. Again, figure out why you're getting stuff wrong and then do what you need to do to fix that problem. If you're lacking on the rules, study the rules (both from the book you're using AND in the context of actual OG questions that test those rules). If you're relying on your ear too much, make yourself point to a word and articulate the specific rule being broken. If you can't do that, don't cross off that choice.

Generally, second-guessing yourself is a bad idea. Go with your original answer UNLESS you absolutely know you made a mistake with your first answer (and you could actually explain what that mistake was).

Think of it this way: when you pick an answer from among 5, you have a 20% chance that you're right and an 80% chance that you're wrong. If you're right and you change your answer, now you're going to get it wrong. If you're wrong and you change your answer, you have a 25% chance of switching to the right answer and a 75% chance of switching to another wrong answer. Unless you KNOW you made a mistake the first time around, the chances are pretty good that you don't really know what you're doing, so you're probably not going to get this one right. And, if you're probably going to get it wrong anyway, do you want to spend more time picking a new answer? Of course not - you want to get it wrong right now so you can have time for other problems that you might actually get right.

[prad]

thank you
this is solid advice and is appreciated
will listen and be conscious of teh wrong anwser
this is something i started doing subconsciously