How can I conquer Gmat?

[beatgmat_2015]

I have read many testimonies on here about how test takers have conquered gmat with some great scores. I can tell you everytime I read them I feel more than motivated to keep pressing as I have been attempting to do the same since summer 2013. And I confess that with a job that consumes more than 50% of my day- my motivation to pursue a score of 700 + is practically dying.I have utilized manhattan gmat Kaplan 800 og as my sources. With Manhattan gmat question bank I have found more than sufficient questions to dabble and practice. I have hand written on flash cards questions, formulas to help me through. In my first attempt I scored 470, my second attempt a whooping 420. I was sufficiently upset that I asked the system to cancel my scores.
I am not whether pursuing an Mba is what I need to be doing. However by failing to perform on my gmat is so massively discouraging that even the hope of a positive change is being snuffed out at the very start of the race.
My major in college was Fine Art and Media. If there is anyone who can guide me through - It would be appreciated.

[MartyMurray]

The way you write seems to indicate that you are fairly good with language. That makes me curious about your verbal section score. While you are at it, how about listing both section scores so that anyone answering has more to go on.

Also when you describe dabbling and practicing you sound like someone who gets what it takes to rock this test, with only the word dabbling possibly indicating that more intensity might be needed.

It may be that by seeing the test in a different way, even somehow relating it art, in your case, you could raise your score. I am sure that along with that there are other things you could do that would raise it more.

So you could give us some more information such as you section scores and target score, and let's see what we can get going.

[beatgmat_2015]

Hi Marty, Firstly thank you!
Secondly, for my 470 I got a scaled score of 34 on Quantitative and a 21 on Verbal.
For my 420, I was quite upset and cancelled my score - I did not persevere enough to get it printed. But I suppose you can make a fair judgment on my test taking ability.
I would like to take it again - maybe in June and that's all the time I can stretch to do this thing. FAlthough these tests are great objectives to work towards - I am not liking the fact that these standardized tests play heavy on my competence.

I am willing to put in the man hours (outside 62-63 hours of work / week) - but I am not sure what to do to conquer it! I dont know...
Thank you though I appreciate your thoughts.

[MartyMurray]

Hi Marty, Firstly thank you!
Secondly, for my 470 I got a scaled score of 34 on Quantitative and a 21 on Verbal.
For my 420, I was quite upset and cancelled my score - I did not persevere enough to get it printed. But I suppose you can make a fair judgment on my test taking ability.
I would like to take it again - maybe in June and that's all the time I can stretch to do this thing. FAlthough these tests are great objectives to work towards - I am not liking the fact that these standardized tests play heavy on my competence.

I am willing to put in the man hours (outside 62-63 hours of work / week) - but I am not sure what to do to conquer it! I dont know...
Thank you though I appreciate your thoughts.

Do you mean play heavy on your confidence? If so, I say the first step is to not allow anything to beat up your confidence in you. You are a spirit with infinite potential. If there were a 1000 score to get on the GMAT, you could learn to achieve that, and muuuuuch more.

Along similar lines, while I can understand your cancelling the score, don't let anything upset you. Be Zen about everything. Observe without getting upset. This is just a game you are playing, a game you can get amazingly good at and getting upset just slows down the process.

That quant score, while not high in percentile terms, is not so low in absolute terms. Meanwhile your verbal skills are generally pretty good, as I already mentioned. So I am already optimistic about seeing you score higher on this test.

It's a little challenging to know exactly what to recommend but one thing is to maybe start by being a little more confident somehow. I mean I am wondering why someone who speaks as well as you do is not doing better on verbal. Could it be partly that she just doesn't have the confidence that she can get the answers? Also, determination is key. It really helps to be super determined to find that answer.

Strategies can only take a person so far. My personal my strategy could possibly be summed up as be determined to find the answer and use any trick, and idea I can come up with to succeed. I wonder if just being a little more that way would give you more points right there.

You know what 420 and 470 are? A good start. You can score 800 on this test, and we both know it.

Here's a cool thing I found recently.

How would the world be different if everyone were a genius?
In this hypothetical people still have their natural inclinations towards preferred areas of career focus and individual talents that span the spectrum from creative to scientific to athletic depending on the person.

How would good and evil change and what role would that play in the human condition? What changes in human behavior can be expected? Would technology have developed differently, or is that development driven by human needs and not ingenuity?
Want Answers115Comments6+
54 ANSWERS
Quora User
Quora User, contrarian, teacher, writer, o... (more)
1k upvotes by Taylor Boots, Abdulaziz Al-Ghannam, Vaibhav Sinha, (more)
I originally answered this question anonymously, because I assumed people might interpret what I said as bragging if I attached my name to this. However, several people in the comments and a couple people privately asked me to go public, so here I am. Nobody special, like I said, and I hope that this does not affect how people read my answer.



A lot of people have written answers to this question that I agree with the broad strokes of, but the problem with most of them is accepting that there is a meaningful category called "genius." I have a ridiculously high IQ. Taking different tests at different times in my life, there's been about a 15 point spread, but the highest was in the low 180s. I took the LSAT on a whim a few months ago, and with no preparation scored in the 96th percentile. People were calling me a genius all through school, until I switched from studying Physics to another discipline where people aren't always looking for geniuses.

There is no such thing as "a genius." I'm not one, and I'm not special. Virtually everyone I've ever met, aside from people with brain damage or intellectual disabilities, is as smart as I am. The only thing that makes me different is that I am extremely good at logic puzzles, and I'm better than average at math, and I am firmly convinced that those are not inborn aptitudes, but things that I learned.

So, what am I doing in my life? Am I a venture capitalist, or an entrepreneur, or an award-winning novelist? Nope. I'm just now getting somewhere in my career that I'm pretty pleased with, but I spent most of my 20s blundering around. I made a lot of emotional decisions, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and I made several aborted attempts at different professions. I moved a bunch of times, and I delayed my own plans for romantic relationships. Nearly all of my peers who were also called geniuses did similar things. The one thing that unites most people we call geniuses is intellectual restlessness and the speed with which they get bored (not positive qualities, on their own). My peers and I were lucky kids, with supportive families and lots of opportunity, and almost none of us could get our careers together before we were pushing 30. Clearly "genius" is not what gets things done.

Nearly everyone is as smart as I am. I've never met a cognitively normal person who didn't have as much capacity for learning and understanding as I have. There might be Good Will Hunting people out there somewhere, but I've never met one of them either. So you want to know what a world where everyone was a genius would look like? You're living it.

Our culture is extremely invested in the concept of geniuses, special people who rise above the rest of us to accomplish great things. I think this concept is a symptom of something sick in our society. Some of us like the concept because we like to think of ourselves as geniuses, and we think this somehow makes us better than the ignorant masses. Many of us also feel the need to elevate those who achieve greatness to a special intellectual category, to justify why the rest of us aren't doing as well. We say, "Oh, she's a genius, of course she's a success." We do this to trivialize the extreme hard work and absurd good fortune that is necessary to succeed in any field in this system we've created. Steve Jobs wasn't a genius; he was a megalomaniacal businessman with some good product ideas who was in the right place at the right time. Change his life's circumstances a bit, and he could have ended up as a manager at McDonald's instead of getting rich selling us shiny pieces of metal and plastic.

Some of the other answers have said how society wouldn't function if we were all geniuses because there would be nobody to do unskilled work. If you don't think that there are millions of Einsteins toiling in thankless, unskilled jobs, you are fooling yourself. Some flip burgers or dig ditches or drive delivery trucks or work on fishing boats for a while, and then find a way out to something better, or work their way up to management. Some never do, and keep flipping those burgers for their entire lives. They have the aptitude and the interest that would have let them study physics, or compose a symphony, or start a successful company, but they were never encouraged to think they had the capacity, or they had no opportunity to study, or any number of other things that prevent people from doing all they're capable of.

So what would the world look like if everyone were a genius? A few really successful people, lots of people bumbling around trying to find their way, and an enormous mass of frustrated, bored people, flipping burgers every day so you and I can afford to pontificate about geniuses on Quora.

[MartyMurray]

Let's get that verbal score a little higher by getting you better with modifiers.

You can start by using this. If you read it and do all the exercises, you should get pretty good with modifier placement.

https://owlet.letu.edu/grammarlinks/modi ... ier2d.html

Then find some GMAT modifier questions and do them. Get good with modifiers and you will be well on your way to a higher verbal score. Also, as you do this, notice in general the logic of sentence construction. Logic is probably what matters most on verbal.

[[email protected]]

Hi george.elsa,

From what you've described, it sounds like your studies have been "book heavy", which is likely a big part of the problem that you've faced. Most Test Takers get stuck at a particular scoring level when they try to self-study with books. If these scores are as high as you can go using THIS approach, then you have to look into using a different approach.

Improving from a 470 to a 700+ is quite the challenge, but we've worked with people who have done it before. You're going to have to learn some new tactics and practice them thoroughly, which will take some time. You've defined your score goal, but I'd like to know a bit more about your plans:

1) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
2) What Schools are you interested in?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

[Brent@GMATPrepNow]

I suggest a systematic (even methodical) approach, in which you take the time to master each topic/concept (e.g., percents, ratios, assumption questions in critical reasoning, comparison questions in sentence correction, etc).

So, for each topic/concept, you should:
1) Learn the underlying concepts (rules, attributes, notation, etc.)
2) Learn GMAT-specific strategies related to that topic
3) Practice dozens of questions all related to that one topic.
4) Don't stop working on that topic until you have mastered it
Then, and only then, move on to the next topic.

To help you focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature. 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.

While completing questions from the Official Guide (OG), you should you use an Error Log (aka Improvement Chart). You can find a free downloadable Improvement Chart here: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-error-log. This will help you identify and strengthen your weak areas.

You should also spend a lot of time reviewing the responses from the Experts on this site. They model the steps one should take when tackling math problems.

In addition to learning the core concepts and GMAT-specific strategies, be sure to work on your endurance and test-taking skills (e.g., time management) by taking several practice tests. If you're interested, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244

Finally, you might consider signing up for Beat The GMAT's free 60-Day Study Guide (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide).
Each day, you'll receive an email with a series of learning activities that guide you, step-by-step, from Day 1 to test day. This will ensure that you will cover everything that the GMAT tests.

Here's an outline of all 60 emails: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide-outline

Cheers,
Brent

[beatgmat_2015]

Hi george.elsa,

From what you've described, it sounds like your studies have been "book heavy", which is likely a big part of the problem that you've faced. Most Test Takers get stuck at a particular scoring level when they try to self-study with books. If these scores are as high as you can go using THIS approach, then you have to look into using a different approach.

Improving from a 470 to a 700+ is quite the challenge, but we've worked with people who have done it before. You're going to have to learn some new tactics and practice them thoroughly, which will take some time. You've defined your score goal, but I'd like to know a bit more about your plans:

1) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
2) What Schools are you interested in?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi Rich,
My intent was to apply to B schools for Fall 2016. But with the way I am going I can't say if I will. If I get good scores it makes the likelihood of getting into a decent b school higher as y know and a job subsequently. However, I think u probably right on the book heavy bit. I don't know if I can deem my understanding of concepts as weak except maybe not great but weak certainly isn't it.
Under the pressure of time I seem to buckle to answer a tougher question at random just to finish the exam. I had taken the Mgmat more than a couple dozen times. My last range was between 580- 620.
Earning 700+ seems like a formidable task to me now - no clue whatsoever!

[MartyMurray]

You said you took MGMAT CAT's a dozen times. Did you take any official practice CATs during your preparation? Official CATs are at least slightly different from any test prep company CAT, and one thing that happens is people believe they have prepared for the GMAT when actually they have prepared for a certain test prep company's CATs. Then when they go to take the actual GMAT they can be a little thrown off.

So one thing you could do if you haven't been is incorporate official CATs into your preparation, using them as a forum for practice and as tools for assessing what the test is like and what you have to work on to get a higher score.

Also, you mentioned that you were using the Manhattan GMAT question bank. From what I understand that question bank comprises only a few hundred questions, meaning that for any particular type of question it may only include one or two of those. In getting comfortable with and skilled in answering questions it often makes sense to do literally dozens of questions of a type. So you would probably benefit from finding and using resources that have more questions.