gmat7m wrote:C'mon, you want to attend Columbia Business school, but you can't get yourself to open the Official Guide? You sure you really want to do this? Maybe you don't.
Wow, this really helped. Nothing like a nice challenge where you compete with yourself.
So this gave me a good push, I went through most of the OG (I have a track of stuff that's pending) and gave the Manhattan CAT (2.5 hour though). My score was 710 (Q48, V38).
I am glad that that worked out for you. Sweet.
The areas where I struggled were:
1) Stamina: I struggled through these 2.5 hours, so 4 hours are going to be even more taxing
2) Found myself guessing in some places (more often in quant that in verbal), so I'll have to revisit the basics
What I need help with is forming a definitive 2-3 study plan (which should run parallel to my hectic job). I have all the time on the weekends and I can push myself for ~3 hours on the weekdays.
Regarding "Stamina", possibly you need more sleep.
That aside, I have found that one can think clearly even when totally worn out. So keep that in mind, especially during the verbal section. You might start feeling exhausted, but you can just keep seeking to think clearly and get right answers. At a certain point, there is only a half hour left to go. You might feel exhausted, but you can run the rest of the distance if you just focus on thinking clearly, seeing what you have to see and getting the right answer to whatever question is in front of you.
Of course, you can also build stamina via long practice sessions. Also, I for one used to do some practice questions late at night, just to get practice at thinking clearly when I was kind of worn out. When you are tired your self destructive tendencies are more apparent. What a great time to address them.
Regarding a study plan, in a way a specific plan may not be as necessary as you seem to think. What may work better is a general plan to find ways to put more points on the board and build your skills area by area. In other words, you can go over your practice test to see how you could have scored higher, and address what you find topic by topic. Was accuracy an issue? Then work on accuracy. Did you spend six minutes to get the answer to a prime factors question? Then work on prime factors and divisibility.
If you get better in even six or seven of your less strong quant areas, you can expect to match or exceed that 48 on test day, as you will not only get more right answers to questions of the types that you worked but also do those questions faster so that you have more time to work on the other types.
When you are working on quant and verbal, work on getting right answers, no matter how long each question takes you. You have to get into a right answer mentality, using elegant approaches or hacking, whatever works to get you to the right answers to each question.
For verbal, focus on getting better at seeing what you need to see in order to get the questions right. In a sense, there is no good reason for not getting a CR or RC question right, other than lack of time maybe. When you are practicing though, you can spend all the time you want. So do that, learning to see what you have to see and expecting to speed up as you develop an eye for the key things that make each wrong answer wrong and each right answer right. For SC, get good at seeing what meaning is conveyed by the sentences created using each answer choice, and go over any sentence construction concepts that you find you are not familiar with. If you run out of verbal practice questions, look for another resource such as the OG for Verbal Review, the e-book version of which is the only one I recommend. Making paper books is too destructive.
Some marathon weekend training sessions should serve to build your stamina. Seek to stay sharp enough to get right answers even after hours of doing questions and learning concepts. Also, you should plan to take a couple more practice tests over the next few weeks, and yeah, you better bite the bullet and take the entire things, including the AWA and IR sections.
The AWA is no big deal really. Just set yourself up with a template and learn to apply that template to any essay prompt.
I think that by building quant skill overall and in some specific areas and by getting better at seeing key things in verbal, you can get your score to at least the mid 700's within a few weeks. Just keep in mind that you are not studying for a grammar test or a conventional math test, maybe wanting to learn every little fact. Your goal is to get your score to increase. So anything you do that increases your expected score is the right thing to be doing.
Here are a couple of posts that go into more detail regarding some things that I mentioned.
How To Increase Your GMAT Quant Score
How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT - A Mini Guide for Success
