can some one advice

[swapna.rajanish7]

Hi

I am completely shattered and clueless. Do not know what i need 2 be doing..I started off preparing a few months back..when i started...it was a score of 510 as per kaplan...pulled it up to 620 in kaplan...i have worked on OG materials 2..i also took a test with manhattan. I gt a 590. Since I booked my dates, i gt the cd from the GMAT prep. Today I had a rude shock when i took the test from the cd and scored a 480...I cant believe my score can go so low..I jus have a month left for my exam. Would anybody be able 2 suggest something or say what could have gone wrong??

Swapna

[venkata.jataprolu]

Hello,

To start with, you might want to postpone your test date, at least for a couple of more months, I'd suggest a 2 to 5 months. Your scores definitely don't seem to give the necessary confidence. And let's jot down the study plan.

1) Figure out what your strengths are - Quant or verbal. Whatever is your strength, you can focus on it later. Keep away from the OG guides. They are for practise at the last. OG guides are meant to understand the language, style, sentence framing structures and models of the questions that you can expect on the real deal.
2) For quant practise, refer the Manhattan books, they are just amazing. Learn the fundamentals and basics. Get perfect with the mode of solving the problems. When you read a question, you should understand and comprehend exactly what the numbers are, the relationships between them, and the answer that is expected. When you can get that flow perfect, you can solve any problem within the stipulated 2 minutes.
3) For verbal practise, refer the Manhattan SC guide, it's THE BOOK for learning the essential grammar fundamentals. Powerscore CR Bible, is THE BOOK for CR strategies and once you are good with SC and CR, start solving RC questions, they'll tend to become easier. 5 RCs a day will keep the RC jitters away.
4) The entire challenge of GMAT is actually very very simple. The questions are all based on templates and traps. If you know them well, you can recognize them quickly, figure out the way to solve the question and come up with the answer faster. Furthermore, as you notice your performance improving, you must remember that getting questions right for 80 - 90% of the time is different from getting them right 80 - 90% of the time for 4 prolonged hours. So, the last part of your preparation is to focus on patience for the entire duration of the exam.
5) Take as many full-length tests as you can throughout the preparation time. Maintain an error log to mark questions and their related logic. Every new question type that you didn't know how to solve should go there. The strategy of solving these questions is to know why an option is right and why the others are wrong. It is also good if you take notes or summary from your preparation after reading all the books mentioned above. An error log is the most essential thing to fall back on during the last few days of preparation before your real deal.
6) Participate in this forum regularly. Answer questions for other members, never feel bad that your logic might go wrong and others might point out errors. The essential aspect of the preparation is to know where you can potentially go wrong and learn to cover your mistakes.

All the very best and keep us posted with your preparation.

[RonPurewal]

to the original poster -- i'm sorry to hear about your score drop.
could you please provide us with more specific information about your scores? you've given us your numerical scores, but basically nothing else; we have no information about where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

we can't really offer any specific advice unless you give us, at a minimum, the breakdown of your scores into quant and verbal components, along with a brief summary of which areas you found least and most challenging.
the more detail you can get us, the better the advice we'll be able to get back.

--

venkata's response above is right on the mark, except for the following item:

Take as many full-length tests as you can throughout the preparation time.

this is not necessarily good advice. indeed, for a study period the duration of which you have suggested (2 to 5 months), it could actually be quite counterproductive.

--

first, you must realize that practice tests are not as universally helpful as a lot of people make them out to be. in fact, there are only two main purposes of taking full-length tests (as opposed to doing timed sets of problems from other sources):
1) FIGHTING FATIGUE
2) PRACTICING TIME MANAGEMENT

#1 means just getting used to the idea of taking a test for four hours straight -- many students can't last that long at first, and only taking full-length tests will develop the ability to take a test for this long in one sitting.

#2 refers to developing the discipline of time management over the full length of a 37-question quantitative section or a 41-question verbal section.

if FATIGUE and TIME MANAGEMENT are not major issues for you, then there is no reason to take frequent full-length practice tests.

if these are not major problems, then you should focus your attention on topic-specific homework sets instead. your choice of topics should of course be driven by practice tests, but INFREQUENT practice tests are enough to dictate the topics that you should choose for homework.

--

second, you just finished recommending to this student that he/she should follow a two- to five-month study plan!

in order to practically follow the advice to "take as many full-length tests as you can" over a period of several months, this student would basically have to
* scrounge around every corner of the internet
* buy any and all practice tests he/she could find, and
* take them all!

the problem, of course, is that there are lots of really bad practice tests out there.
i also post over on the BeatTheGmat forums, where the requirements for citing sources are more lax and students post sample problems from all sorts of random exams from the internet.
the one thing that most of these "random internet source" exams have in common is that many, if not most, of their problems are, to put it bluntly, inexcusably bad.
this is especially true in sentence correction, on which i see 3-5 unacceptably poor (if not downright erroneous) problems for every one problem whose quality is worthy of the gmat.

in short, the pool of QUALITY practice tests is quite limited, even if the total pool of tests is not.

you should conserve these tests, taking them sparingly so that they last for the entire duration of your study plan.

[venkata.jataprolu]

Ron, thanks for the detailed insight.

Could you recommend any worthy and qualified practise tests, I am yet to try the Manhattan GMAT tests, but I sincerely believe I do not have the patience to sit through a long and tiresome 4 hours answering all the questions with the same concentration. I need to improve on that and would appreciate any pointers in this regard, so I'll have ample of tests to try and learn.

[swapna.rajanish7]

thanks for the advice...:-)..i wanted to mention somethin which i noticed..even though i finished attempting all the questions on time...and after i said end exam..it jus let me see the correct and wrong answers...no explanation though..However...i noticed that..when i tried to come out of the test...it kept prompting that the test is unfinished.I have no idea why it said that..cos i still strongly believe am very much around the 600 level(hopin to be positive)as my last score wid manhattan was 590 and kaplan was 620 and earlier was 600.
Any idea why it kept prompting me that???

And ron to answer ur question..sorry i was so terribly disappointed..i din see the break up properly..i jus burst out cryin..lol..and as i mentioned that it kept tellin me"test unfinished", i am not able 2 go back to the test again and see answers.

swapna

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry you're having a tough time with the test.

There are lots of things that can cause a score to drop; as Ron said, without any data, we can't really help you figure out why your score dropped. You can try reading this article to see if it will help jog your memory about anything; if so, come back here and post:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/a/2009/10/26/my-score-dropped-figuring-out-what-went-wrong

You don't mention what your goal score is. Are you looking for something in the low 600 range, about what you had been scoring before this last test? Or are you looking for something higher?

I'm guessing you might be able to use some help in devising a study plan; try this article:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/02/09/developing-a-study-plan

If you want some advice about how to study / what to do, read the Evaluating Your Practice Tests article (you can find the link in the Study Plan article above), evaluate an MGMAT test using the steps described in the article, and then come back here and post.

[RonPurewal]

Ron, thanks for the detailed insight.

Could you recommend any worthy and qualified practise tests, I am yet to try the Manhattan GMAT tests, but I sincerely believe I do not have the patience to sit through a long and tiresome 4 hours answering all the questions with the same concentration. I need to improve on that and would appreciate any pointers in this regard, so I'll have ample of tests to try and learn.

@ venkata, you may want to start your own thread with questions such as these -- this is technically swapna's thread. we don't generally like to have two or more conversations going back and forth in the same thread.

when you start that new thread, could you clarify this question a little bit more, please?
it sounds as though you're asking for practice tests that will last less than four hours. i'm not sure if that's what you mean, but, if it is, such tests should not exist -- after all, the gmat is that long, so any authentic practice tests should also be that long.

if you are looking to make your practice test experience shorter, you can always omit the essays -- although, ironically, in your case, it is more important than ever that you actually take tests in their entirety. after all, if you feel that fatigue is an issue, the only way to effectively combat that fatigue is to accustom yourself to taking full-length tests!

if you meant something else, please start a new thread and ask that question. thanks.