4th attempt study strategy. Need advice pleeease (Stacey??)

[renejo]

Hi everybody, I'm posting because I just decided to give the GMAT one last try (hopefully!!!). I think it is obvious that I need to change my strategy because I just can´t cross the 600 barrier. Let me tell you a little about what I've been doing.

For my 3rd attempt I started my preparation in January studying between 3 to 4 hours during the week and between 6 to 8 hours during weekends. I did every math, sentence correction and most of the critical reasoning problems in OG12. I went through these problems trying to solve them in less than 2 minutes and checking the explanation for every problem, right or wrong.

After I was done with the OG, I started doing sets of problems I got from a friend who took a local prep course. I consider that the difficulty level of these problems was comparable to those in the actual GMAT and I had enough of them to keep myself busy for several weeks. The downside to these sets is that they didn´t come with an explanation like the one given in the OG, I just had the answers and the steps my friend took to get to those answers. I found these sets really useful because there were a lot of really hard problems but given I didn´t have a clear explanation I wasn´t sure I fully understood them.

One month before the exam I started doing MGMAT CATs, my scores where 650 (Q43 V36) 660 (Q43 V37) 700 (Q47 V38). During my 1st and 2nd attempt on the GMAT I did the first 6 available exams but given that a lot of time had passed since I took them I thought these 3 scores where a good of approximation of where I stood. After revising the exams I ran the assessment provided by Manhattan Gmat to get a view of my performance on each area. I did every problem again, under timed conditions, in the areas in which I scored the lowest and went through every explanation again. I felt that this was really useful because I finally understood some problems I wasn't able to get right when doing the CATs.

Then, after I finished reviewing the Manhattan GMAT exams, I took the GMAT Prep exams. Like with the MGMAT exams, a lot of time had passed since I did a GMAT Prep, so I considered that I wasn´t going to remember the answers and that it was going to be good study material. I took the first exam 1 week before from the real one and I got 710 (Q46 V42). I didn't want to do the second one because I didn't want to affect the confidence that score gave me. During the last few days I just reviewed some math concepts, went through my notes and did some sentence correction and critical reasoning problems.

On test day I felt calmed and confident that I was going to achieve my desired score (650+). I went through AWA pretty smoothly and went out for my first break still really calmed but before starting math I began to feel really nervous. I started with the math section still feeling nervous; I got a really easy problem to start and that helped me to calm down again. I continued doing the math section feeling that I was getting most of the problems correct, I even got some problems I thought were really difficult (maybe 700-800 level) and I felt that I was doing really good. I finished the math section with 1 or 2 minutes to spare. I went out for the second break feeling really optimistic.

I started the verbal section with a lot of confidence and really sure I was going to achieve my objective. I got some hard sentence correction exercises and some really confusing critical reason problems, but overall I felt I was doing Ok. I never had any problems with RC and the passages I got were really clear to me and the answers weer easy to find. I finished verbal section with 15 minutes to spare! After reviewing the last 10 questions without any rush because of the time I had left, I finished the exam. The result was AWFUL, DISAPOINTING and really CONFUSING! I got a 550 ! (V38 Q28).

I think that I need to take a break from everything related to the GMAT so I'm planning to start studying again on mid-June and I´d like take the test on mid-August. That gives me 8 weeks to study.

I'm posting this 1 week after that horrible score to ask the experts on this forum the following: What else can I do this time to get a better score?!?!?! Which materials should I check? Should I go back to fundamentals or should I keep practicing?

I think I'll have 4 hours available to study during the week and 8-10 hours on weekends

I don't plan to let the GMAT beat me again... but I need a new strategy if I want to turn things around.

Thanks a lot for your advice

René

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry you're having such a rough time with the test. My first concern is trying to figure out why your practice tests were higher but your score dropped on the real test. Until we understand why, we won't know what to do to prevent that from happening again.

It's possible that your practice test scores were artificially inflated for some reason. It's possible that there were certain weaknesses that left you vulnerable to a score drop, and those weaknesses came into play on the real test. And it's possible that both of those factors came into play.

Read this; what do you think?
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... ent-wrong/

One thing that's jumping out at me from your notes: you gave me a lot of info on how many problems you did, but not much info on how deeply you analyzed the problems themselves and your work on them.

When reviewing problems, did you answer these kinds of questions:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/articles/a ... roblem.cfm

If not, then you weren't learning what you needed to learn from all of these problems that you were doing.

Read the first section of this article:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/09/ ... e-mistakes

Does it seem like we're on the right track here, in terms of figuring out at least part of what might have gone wrong?

Next, you do have timing problems on the verbal at least, because you finished so early. That means you likely made careless mistakes due to rushing. It's also possible that you have timing problems on quant (you can have serious timing problems even if you finish the section on time).

Use the below article to analyze a couple of your most recent MGMAT CATs:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... ice-tests/

What did you discover? Come back and let us know. (Note: please tell us your analysis, not just the raw data. You need to learn how to analyze this yourself!)

After all of the above, you should also start looking at the resources contained in this article:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... -the-gmat/

[renejo]

Hi Stacey! Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my post. I will carefully read and analize the links you posted and I will come come back here to let you know what I found.

Thanks again!

René

[StaceyKoprince]

you're welcome!