Focus on quant or on verbal?

[WernerH863]

TLDR: What to focus on as a non native with 600 (Q42 and V30) to get up to at least 620 in 8 days?


Hi guys! Just got a quick question concerning my strategy for further studies

My GMAT is scheduled for May 9th, so I don't have much time left but need some improvement. The good news is that I don't need an astonishingly good overall score, since my bachelor's grade is quite good and the GMAT is not thaat important for admissions over here (Germany). I was aiming for 630 but with 620 I would probably be satisfied as well. The bad news is (like you might have guessed) that I'm not there yet and can't postpone my exam... In the last two weeks I went through all the MGMAT guides once and solved around 50-100 OG questions verbal and quant each. I took an official GMAT prep test yesterday (600, Q42 V30) and a MGMAT prep test earlier today (580, Q42 V29). In the quant part my timing was OK and I could have used maybe 3 mins more but in the verbal part the time killed me both times and I had to skip 5-6 questions or so. (Obviously) I'm not a native but I guess my English is not the worst in general (99th percentile on TOEFL, yay ). On RC I just need too long to read and understand the passages, on SC I need too long to understand the differences between the remaining answers after eliminating the really obvious wrong answers through the splits I found correctly, and CR is the only category I'm more or less comfortable with, since the passages are written easier imo.

The big question is: What to focus on from now on? Where do you think the impovment should be easier? Plus for quant: since I don't have the disadvantage of not being native on that part it could be easier to get better fast. Plus for verbal: I feel like I am doing really bad at the moment and because of the diminishing marginal benefit of studying it could be easier to get better fast. What do you guys think?!

Cheers, Peter

[StaceyKoprince]

Neither, really.

If you only need 20 more points, then basically you already know how to get that score. Your goal is to minimize careless mistakes and avoid traps - basically to have a really "clean" game / match.

Focus on making better decisions about what problems NOT to do during the test, so that you can be very methodical on the problems that you do answer. That will help you to minimize careless mistakes and to avoid traps on the things that you already know how to do.

Decide ahead of time which problem types you just outright hate (and get wrong, of course). I won't do combinatorics or 3-D geometry on quant, my weaker area. Verbal is my stronger area, so I'll usually try all of them unless I read something twice and still don't understand it.

But since verbal is your weaker area, identify the ones for you that should just cause you to immediately say, "Nope! Not doing it." For RC, you might do something like this: paragraph 1 was okay, paragraph 2 had some really hard detail, paragraph 3 was okay again. First, don't bother to really understand paragraph 2; try to get the main idea, but that's it. Next, answer main idea (of the passage) questions, questions that are about paragraphs 1 and 3, or questions that are about the main idea of paragraph 2. Detail questions about paragraph 2? Guess immediately and move on.

Next, know how you're going to stop yourself from getting sucked into a problem that you think you can do...but you really can't do.

If you ever find yourself thinking anything along the lines of, "But I should know how to do this! If I just had a little more time, I'm sure I could figure it out..." STOP IMMEDIATELY. Guess and move on. Again: immediately.

If you actually knew what you were doing, you wouldn't be thinking that you "should" be able to figure it out; you'd just be answering the question. Plus, you don't get to the point of thinking you "should" be able to unless you've already spent a decent amount of time. So once you realize that, get out before you lose any more time.

Other clues to move on:
- On verbal, I've been through the answers twice and I still have more than two answers left.
- On verbal, I'm down to 2 answers and I'm just going back and forth. (You can compare the last 2 answers. Once. If you don't know, guess and move on.)
- On quant, I thought I knew what I was doing but it didn't work out the way I thought (eg, on PS, I get an answer that isn't in the answers; on DS, I can't actually tell whether something's sufficient). Feel free to look over your work ONCE to see whether you made a careless mistake. Then move on.
- I find myself thinking "Ugh" to 4+ aspects of the same problem. Once or twice, okay. Three times...starting to get annoying but I might still try. Four times? No way! I'm outta there.

Your English is excellent, by the way! And you can do this!

p.s. Percentile-wise, your quant and verbal scores are pretty similar, actually. Although the two scores use the same numbers, they don't mean quite the same thing. So don't feel like your verbal is a lot worse just because the number is lower - that's the nature of the scoring scale, that's all!