GMAT Retake Advice

[andreas.apostolatos]

Stacey,

Question regarding my next steps as I anticipate my GMAT retake in 3.5 weeks.

I hit a 680 on the official test about 3 weeks ago (46 Quant, 38 Verbal), and just want to get up to that 700 hump next time.

I'm sort of at a loss for how to proceed though.

For quant, what I'm doing is going back to all the OG problems after #70 or so (i.e. to try to get harder problems), and redoing each to try to fully master them. Each question gets highlighted in yellow, pink or green depending on my comfort level in solving. I'm using in tandem with the MGMAT OG solutions to really dig deep on the problems I get wrong, and those that I do get wrong I mark in yellow to go back and remaster.

For verbal, and here's the real problem, I just don't know where to go to get more practice. I want to practice harder RC/CR questions but have exhausted all the OG and OG supplemental content. I've thought about just picking up a Kaplan book or something to just get more practice problems, but want to make sure I'm seeing harder content.

For verbal, I feel like I just need to practice practice, and it's not a matter of trying to change my strategy/devellop theory at this point, but maybe i could be wrong...

Help!

[StaceyKoprince]

For quant, what I'm doing is going back to all the OG problems after #70 or so

Do you know, definitively, that this is why you didn't hit your goal - because you missed higher level questions? That's only one possible reason. Sometimes, the reason has more to do with making careless mistakes on lower level things that we already know how to do (or think we know!). And, even then, there could be multiple reasons why:someone might mismanage their time, leading to careless mistakes, or someone might have "holes" in their foundation, leading to mistakes on things that they only think they know how to do.

For most people, it's a combination of a lot of things, depending upon the particular question type and topic area. And, for most people, what holds you back is missing certain kinds of lower level questions or making careless mistakes on lower level questions - people are far more worried about the high level stuff than they should be. :)

So, my first recommendation: do they necessary analysis to figure out exactly what is holding you back. You'll probably find that, in many areas, it really is the harder questions - but that there are some areas where you're a bit weaker or where you tend to make careless mistakes. The difference between a 680 and a 700 could actually have more to do with missing a few lower-level questions than anything else - little things that pull you down 20 points.

46Q: 75th percentile
38V: 83rd percentile

Do the analysis described in the following article. Use a recent MGMAT test that you took under official testing conditions or as close as possible to official testing conditions (including essays). If it has been more than a month since you've taken a test or if your recent tests were under very non-official conditions (skipping the essays, not sticking to the regulation breaks, using the pause button, etc), then take another test under full official conditions.

http://www.beatthegmat.com/a/2009/09/23 ... tice-tests

If you want help figuring out what to do with your analysis, then post your analysis here and we'll help you interpret. (Try to interpret as much as you can, though, and then you can ask us if we agree with your interpretation - but try to learn how to diagnose your strengths and weaknesses yourself.)

I'm glad that you're using OGC (OG Companion) to dig deeper on the problems. Here's another article that describes the kind of analysis you should be doing on practice problems. This analysis should be done on ALL problems, even the ones you get right. Generally speaking, spend between 2 and 5 times as long analyzing problems (even the ones you get right) as you spent doing the problems in the first place.

http://www.beatthegmat.com/a/2009/10/09 ... ce-problem

If you come back to share your analysis of a recent practice test, I can give you more specific advice about particular question types, content areas, timing strategies, etc - it just depends what your particular strengths and weaknesses are!

For verbal, and here's the real problem, I just don't know where to go to get more practice.

Before I recommend anything specific, I really need to see your test analysis. I just want to mention that you don't necessarily need NEW material (or not right now, anyway). You don't learn much by trying a bunch of new problems - when you're trying new problems, you're doing, using everything you learned before you started trying the problem. Your review and analysis afterwards is where most of the learning occurs (and most comes from the deep analysis, not the initial review where you check the solution and see what you did wrong and how to do it correctly). You may not have extracted everything from the problems you already did - you may need to go back and actually analyze those, not just do and review. Read that "how to analyze" article above to learn more about this.

[andreas.apostolatos]

Thank you Stacey for your response.

As a follow up question:

I just took my first GMAT PREP exam and scored a 720 (Q46, V44). Complete simulated conditions with essays, etc.

I had taken the 6 Manhattan GMAT CATs prior to my first official test day (scores were 660, 670, 680, 690, 700, 700 - highest Verbal 41, highest quant 47).

My official score thus far is 680 (Q46, v38).

So from my test day to now, it seems quant is still at that 46 mark, but it's nice to see the jump in verbal though I don't want to get carried away just yet. One thing I will say is that the verbal section I just took in the GMAT PREP I finished with about 8 minutes to spare (never had gone at that pace before). In the past I had probably overdone it taking notes during the CR/RC, and this time around I took notes, but sort of just "read on" more, rather than taking a moment to really reflect on each sentence or two in note form. This certainly can account for the increased pace, but also I'm thinking it may have affected my comprehension (i.e. I wasn't pausing to take notes as frequently, and just sort of "ate the content up").

If you have any thoughts on this, let me know.

Secondly, I wanted to ask the following: when I viewed the results of the test, I noticed that GMAT prep told me I got 10 wrong out of 37 quant questions, and 5 wrong out of 41 verbal questions. While I'm certainly happy with those statistics, they kind of worried me when I saw it. On all the MGMAT CAT tests it seemed like I was getting many more wrong answers, even on a verbal section in which I scored a 41. So, I guess my question is, to get a ~44 on the verbal do I need to be only getting ~5 questions wrong, or was this just something to do with the scoring system used on GMAT PREP?

THANKS!

[StaceyKoprince]

This certainly can account for the increased pace, but also I'm thinking it may have affected my comprehension (i.e. I wasn't pausing to take notes as frequently, and just sort of "ate the content up").

The main question here is how this affects your performance. As people become more experienced with the test, some are able to take fewer notes as time goes on without this negatively impacting performance. If that's the case for you, great. (And, certainly, it seems to have worked on that one test.)

If it IS impacting your performance though - and you need to keep an eye out for this - then you're going to have to adjust. That doesn't necessarily mean going back to the old way. Perhaps you find a balance between the two: fewer notes than before but more than you've started doing recently.

On verbal, you scored a 44 - that's the 97th percentile, almost perfect. 5 to 10 wrong is about right for that kind of score. (On the real test, where the wrong answers fall relative to the experimental questions will also matter.)

On quant, I have noticed in the past that the number of wrong answers seems a bit too low for a lot of scores. I don't know whether they're adjusting somehow for the fact that the real test will contain experimentals or what. The real test actually only scores around 27 questions on quant, because the experimentals don't count.