CAT Review - Help!

[EddieC184]

Hello -

I took my second CAT last weekend and scored 120 points lower than my previous. Obviously, this was extremely concerning. I am going through the CAT analysis tool and have bucketed the areas below. Im not sure where to go from here. Do I go back through the syllabus and try and redo the relevant homework? Do I try and review the actual problems on the CAT itself? Go back to the OG? Do I try and create a custom set that covers the weaker topics? Should I start with the FOM sections again? Im not sure what the next logical step is given the amount of resources that are available. I am in week 7 of my MGMAT course, so I also have the homework to keep up with. At this point, what priority should the homework be? How much time should I be spending on homework vs improving weaknesses (my current schedule allows approx 3 hours of studying per day with longer sessions on the weekend)? Should I wrap in the analysis from Navigator into the buckets below as well? I fear everything in bucket 2 is mostly a fundamentals issue. I simply cant recognize the patterns in the questions that will let me even start to draw out a solution on quant. I was literally dumbfounded as I switched from question to question. This resulted in finishing the quant section roughly 10 minutes early. To give you the full picture, I finished verbal 15 minutes early.

Any advice is appreciated


Bucket 1: Let it Ride
Linear Equations
Formulas
Inequalities

Bucket 2: Prioritize
Problem Solving
Data Sufficiency
Critical Reasoning
-Find the assumption
-Strengthen the argument
-Draw a conclusion
-Explain the discrepancy
Number Properties
FDPs
Exponents and roots
Quadratic equations
IR

Bucket 3: Get Wrong Faster

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry that you had an annoying test experience. Please know that a lot of people have this problem on CAT 2 during the course: basically, you've learned a ton of stuff and it's all swirling around in your brain - then you freeze up during the test (or mess up the timing) and aren't able to apply it during the test.

The first thing you should do is email your instructor. Tell him / her exactly what you told me and ask for help.

Next, you've got two broad goals right now:
(1) continue to get as much out of class as you can, which means doing at least the quant homework before class
(2) shore up foundational holes first

Start by going through these questions from the test and figuring out why you messed up whatever you messed up. Worry about:
- lower-rated questions
- questions you thought you were getting right or thought you knew how to do
- questions you did get right but you were just kind of slow and could learn to be more efficient with practice

Wherever needed, use your Foundations of Math or Foundations of Verbal book to help you understand or practice whatever it was that you messed up.

Don't worry about hard / high-level questions and the ones that you just totally didn't know at all. You want to work on the "lowest-hanging fruit" first - the things that you're already pretty close to getting but are messing up for some reason.

Next, do prioritize. You have nothing in bucket 3 and that's just impossible. You have weaknesses (we all do!). You also got at least a few questions that were just too ridiculously hard. What were those? And how should you have known that they were too annoying and you should have skipped them? How will you know next time?

You mentioned in particular having issues dealing with patterns / recognizing what to do in quant. Read this and start studying in the way that it describes:
http://tinyurl.com/2ndlevelofgmat

Try all that out and also let me know what your teacher says!