GMAT in hours

[Azizakaria]

i would like to know how many hours would it take to prep for GMAT and get a 600+ plus score? i know it's not about quantity but quality. but while i'm studying now i find that each topic takes approximate 10 hours ( 4 days) to study and solve some questions from OG , i want to know does that mean i'm very slow or this is normal ? because if i continued this way i may not be able to finish, i have only 44 days till test day.
thanks

[DavidG@VeritasPrep]

i would like to know how many hours would it take to prep for GMAT and get a 600+ plus score? i know it's not about quantity but quality. but while i'm studying now i find that each topic takes approximate 10 hours ( 4 days) to study and solve some questions from OG , i want to know does that mean i'm very slow or this is normal ? because if i continued this way i may not be able to finish, i have only 44 days till test day.
thanks

There's no magic number - as you've noted, not all study time is equally benefical - but here is an interesting statistical breakdown that GMAC provides: https://www.mba.com/us/the-gmat-blog-hub ... -gmat.aspx

[MartyMurray]

i would like to know how many hours would it take to prep for GMAT and get a 600+ plus score? i know it's not about quantity but quality. but while i'm studying now i find that each topic takes approximate 10 hours ( 4 days) to study and solve some questions from OG , i want to know does that mean i'm very slow or this is normal ? because if i continued this way i may not be able to finish, i have only 44 days till test day.
thanks

Your rate sounds pretty normal. Having said that I wonder actually whether you are doing enough practice questions, but what is enough depends on the results you are getting.

Are you taking practice tests regularly? How are you gauging your progress?

On another note, maybe you should redefine "finish."

The reality is that when you reach you score goal you will be finished. You don't need to cover every topic in equal depth in order to do that. The GMAT not testing to see whether you have covered all of the topics. The GMAT is a game, and your task is not to cover topics but to see how high you can get your score in that game to be in the next 44 days.

So my take is that maybe you should shift your focus somewhat away from wondering whether you can cover every topic toward being more concerned with seeing how high you are scoring.

To make this clear, let's say you were scoring 570 on practice tests. Probably by covering five more topics in depth and by making fewer calculation errors in quant and fewer silly mistakes in verbal, you could move your expected score up to 630.

That example highlights two things, at least, one of them being the indicative value of practice tests and the other being the fact that you don't have to cover everything in equal depth in order to attain a certain score.

If you want some more ideas, tell us what your latest practice tests scores are, total scores and section scores, and maybe tell us a little more about how things are going in terms of your performance, and we could help you get a clearer sense of what you have to do in the next 44 days in order to hit that score goal.

Here's an example of the type of question that is relevant here.

"I have been scoring in the 500's on practice tests, and on my last practice test I scored 560, with section scores Q39 and V27. It takes me about 4 days to cover a topic in depth. Do you think that I will hit my score goal of 630 within 44 days, and what do I need to do maximize the likelihood that I will hit that goal within that timeframe?"

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Hi Azizakaria,

While many Test Takers will spend 3 months (or more) on their studies to hit their goals, YOUR particular needs will depend completely on your strengths and weaknesses, among other things. With 44 days until your Official Test Date, you should be taking a FULL-LENGTH CAT (with the Essay and IR sections) about once a week, so that you can track your progress and make sure that you're focusing your studies on the more 'valuable' concepts and Tactics.

1) How did you score on your last CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)?

A score goal of 600+ is completely reasonable; we just have to make sure that you're using these last 6 weeks of study time in an efficient fashion.

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

[GMATinsight]

i would like to know how many hours would it take to prep for GMAT and get a 600+ plus score? i know it's not about quantity but quality. but while i'm studying now i find that each topic takes approximate 10 hours ( 4 days) to study and solve some questions from OG , i want to know does that mean i'm very slow or this is normal ? because if i continued this way i may not be able to finish, i have only 44 days till test day.
thanks

Point 1: SOlving questions only from OG will not make you prepared to get the GMAT score that you are targeting. You need to refer to most material in order to get good exposure of variety of GMAT questions. One option ius that you can refer to the questions from Forums as per the topic (using tagging feature) that you are preparing at the moment or you can refer to the Manhattan GMAT books as well.

Point 2: "10 Hours to solve some questions from OG" is a little vague information. GMAT gives you approx. 2 mins per questions however even if you spend like 3-4 mins (on avg.) oer question then you should not much worry about your speed. The heirarchy of things to paid attention is
1) Conceptual Building
2) Accuracy in Attempt
3) Speed with accuracy
So first build concepts and then work on accuracy and speed

Point 3: 44 days is not considered sufficient time for proper GMAT studies considering that you are giving about 2.5 hours everyday (as you mentioned 10 hours in 4 days). You need to postpone test by about a month. Because once you finish your concept learning part then you need to practice atleast 10+ full length CATs to see where you stand and what kind of mistakes you make.

I think you needed crisp advise then just a motivational booster so have tried to convey my concerns as clearly as I could.

I hope this helps!!!

[Azizakaria]

If you want some more ideas, tell us what your latest practice tests scores are, total scores and section scores, and maybe tell us a little more about how things are going in terms of your performance, and we could help you get a clearer sense of what you have to do in the next 44 days in order to hit that score goal.

Here's an example of the type of question that is relevant here.

"I have been scoring in the 500's on practice tests, and on my last practice test I scored 560, with section scores Q39 and V27. It takes me about 4 days to cover a topic in depth. Do you think that I will hit my score goal of 630 within 44 days, and what do I need to do maximize the likelihood that I will hit that goal within that timeframe?"

thanks for your answer, my last test score was 400 Q27 V17, terrible I know, i covered all the topics once before but i didn't solve enough questions so i ended up with that score, i plan to do CAT once a week and last week i found that my most weakness is in Geometry and Reading Comprehension, so i devoted this week to these two topics, and i'll do another test tomorrow, but i feel like i'm burning tests,so what do I need to do to maximize the likelihood that I will hit that goal within that timeframe?

[MartyMurray]

my last test score was 400 Q27 V17, terrible I know, i covered all the topics once before but i didn't solve enough questions so i ended up with that score, i plan to do CAT once a week and last week i found that my most weakness is in Geometry and Reading Comprehension, so i devoted this week to these two topics, and i'll do another test tomorrow, but i feel like i'm burning tests,so what do I need to do to maximize the likelihood that I will hit that goal within that timeframe?

Focusing on geometry and RC that way sounds like a good start. After this next CAT you will have more information, and you clearly have more topics to work on.

Probably you are burning tests a little, but there are dozens available. Which ones are you using? At this point you may want to focus on using non official tests from companies such as Manhattan and Veritas and save the official ones for later. It may even make sense to use PowerPrep, which you can download from here. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/resources PowerPrep is an official software package that came out before GMAT Prep. Likely you have seen some of the questions in it already, but at this point in your preparation PowerPrep will give you some practice and a decent indication of how you are doing and what you need to work on. One caveat, some of the SC questions in PowerPrep have in them more idioms than the current SC questions do. So if you do use PowerPrep, don't let your experience get you thinking that you need to learn all kinds of idioms that you really don't need to learn.

For practice quant questions, do consider setting up a practice account at https://bellcurves.com.

44 days is a decent amount of time. As you said you need to do many more practice questions. I suspect that your achieving higher results will be in large part based on increasing your skill in applying what you have already learned concept wise. In order to build that skill you probably need to do many practice questions, slowly and carefully, on an untimed basis, so that you develop effective processes for getting to right answers.

Will you get from 400 to 600+ in that time frame? Doing that is totally possible. How it goes depends on what the score increase is going to take and how you go about making the score increase happen. Definitely you need to be organized about assessing what you need to change and to get better at in order to hit your score goal. As I said before, you don't necessarily need to learn every little thing in order to hit a certain score goal, and much of what you might have to do could involve things such as increasing accuracy when handling questions of types that you already understand.

So to sum this up, to maximize the probability that you will hit your score goal in 44 days, do what you have started doing, finding areas to work on, areas that you can get better at to get more points. Logic dictates that as you get better in each area you can expect to score higher. Also I am pretty sure that you will find that there are things that basically you know how to do, and you would be getting more points were you just to be more accurate and to notice more key things such as certain details and trap answers. So create an error log or otherwise work on becoming aware of how you can get more points by noticing key things and being more accurate.

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Hi Azizakaria,

After taking each CAT, it's important to review your performance. By identifying WHY you got certain questions wrong, you can better define the non-content areas that you need to work on.

On this last CAT, how many questions did you get wrong because...
1) of a silly/little mistake?
2) the question was too hard?
3) you narrowed the answers down to 2 choices and 'guessed wrong'?
4) you were low on time and had to blindly guess?

The above issues are likely what you have to 'fix' to pick up the missing points that you're after. Thankfully, the GMAT is a predictable, standardized Test, so you CAN train to score at a higher level.

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

[ceilidh.erickson]

Why are you pushing yourself to take the test in 44 days? That doesn't seem like sufficient time, given what you've described. 10 hrs per subject seems like a reasonable amount of time to me, and you also need to factor in taking practice tests roughly once every 2-3 weeks.

I would recommend pushing your test date back by at least a month. Very broadly speaking, I recommend that students give themselves about a week for every 10-20 points they want to gain. If you need to gain 200 points, I think you'll need a minimum of 10 weeks, and likely 20 weeks until you've mastered the content and test structure.

Give yourself time, because there's no way to force it!