Strategy for 3 weeks. Need help

[raghavkb]

I am fairly new to BTG, so please forgive me if I am posting this in the wrong forum. I have exactly 3 weeks left for the exam and have not been doing too well on the practice mock exams. My current scores have all been below 600 and my aim is to atleast achieve a 680 to be competitive for the smaller school programs. I took the GMAT last year without any prep and scored a paltry 530 (Q45, V19)

Story so far,
1) Completed all 5 books of the Manhattan GMAT strategy guides in Quant. Currently solving questions from the OG and Manhattan books as well.
2) Practicing SC (aristotle for concepts), CR and RC from OG 12,13. I have a 70% accuracy on SC, 65% accuracy on CR and 80% on RC
3) Practice tests taken so far
a) GMAT prep 1 - 550 (Q49, V20)
b) Kaplan GMAT test - 580 (Q41, V24)
In both the tests, I had pacing issues where i had to guess the last 7 questions. So I started to take the 800score.com quant tests to practice pacing better and understand which question I ought to be at during the test.
c) 800 Score.com - 2 Quant tests (34 and 37)
- 1 Verbal Test - 29
I would really appreciate any advise on the strategy that I should follow in the next 3 weeks to achieve my target. I am not not working during this time and can easily dedicate 6 to 8 hours a day.
Furthermore, I have also spent a lot of time on reviewing results than practicing more and more problems. Due to the time I take to review, I work on Quant and Verbal on alternate days. I find that a lot of my mistakes are careless (especially in Geometry) and I find Probability to be extremely difficult. In verbal it is mainly CR and "flaw and Inference questions" in RC.

My questions are:

1) Normally, how much time do folks on the forum spend between solving problems and reviewing. Do you guys solve a lot of questions to cover the length and breadth of the material. I am sure that I am doing something wrong here because it takes me a while to understand the solution.

2) What can I do to improve my CR score? Each question seems to have a very unique logic to it and it is hard for me to pinpoint a pattern or a strategy. Also, where can I find complex SC and RC questions as the questions that I encountered on the tests mentioned above were more difficult than the ones found in OG.

I know that its a long post. My apologies on this. But I am a little desperate for help at the moment.Thanks!

[Mike@Magoosh]

Dear raghavkb
I'm happy to help. Don't worry: you posted in the perfect subforum for a request such as this.

First of all, here are some practice CR questions, with explanations:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/more-gmat- ... questions/
Each linked article has further practice.
Here are some practice SC questions:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-sente ... questions/

Here are a couple collections of questions about probability, with explanations:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-proba ... questions/
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-data- ... obability/

As far as you question about the balance, studying solution vs. more practice, here are a couple blogs to consider:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-strat ... -problems/
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/understand ... rformance/

Here's a one-month study plan.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/1-month-gm ... -schedule/
I realize you have less than a month, but that plan was designed for someone starting their studying with only a month to go, so you could certainly streamline it to fit your time constraints.

Finally, on the issue of stupid mistake and focus, see this article:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/zen-boot-c ... -the-gmat/
If you want to see major improvement in three-weeks, consider as many of those steps as you can implement.

I hope all this helps. Let me know if you have further specific questions.

Mike

[raghavkb]

Thanks Mike! I am definitely gonna go through the links that you have provided.