Signed up yesterday

[BK87]

My ManhattanGMAT review class ended early June. Unfortunately due to a combination of not wanting to study over the summer and fear, I lost all motiviation to study when the class ended and never ended up taking the test. Yesterday, after a couple of weeks of self-reflection, I signed up for the GMAT's, with 2/7 as my test date.

Now that I have a test date in sight, my motivation is high, however without the structure of a class, I'm worried that I won't know how to best prepare. I was wondering if anyone who has maybe been in my shoes had any advice or feedback.

Thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

It sounds like you haven't been studying for a while, right? If so, I'd start by taking a practice test. You can use that to figure out what you still remember and what you've forgotten and set up your study from there.

(I know, I know - you're worried you won't do well on the test because you haven't been studying. And you probably won't do as well as you'd like, but that totally doesn't matter. What does matter is putting together the best study plan you can, and for that you need data!)

Take the test under official conditions, including essay and IR. I also recommend reading these two articles first:

First, read these two articles:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... lly-tests/
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... -the-gmat/

Then, use the below to analyze your CAT (this should take you a minimum of 1 hour):
http://tinyurl.com/analyzeyourcats

Based on all of that, figure out your current strengths and weaknesses as well as any ideas you have for what you think you should do. Then come back here and tell us; we'll tell you whether we agree and advise you further. (Note: do share an analysis with us, not just the raw data. Part of getting better is developing your ability to analyze your results - figure out what they mean and what you think you should do about them!)

Also, I'm probably going to recommend that, in general, you follow the old syllabus from class, but that you choose what to spend more vs. less time on based on your test results. But let's see what the results are first.

[BK87]

Hi Stacey-- thank you so much for getting back to me. Regretfully, I did not take your advice and take a practice test like you advised. Instead I thought I had a decent enough idea already of what make weaknesses are and wanted to study for a month or so before I took my practice test. I now realize this was a big mistake, and am seriously contemplating postponing my test date in early Feb.

Yesterday I finally gave a CAT exam a go and scored a 600. My splits were Q40 and V33, which is kind of disappointing because it shows I'm relatively weak in both areas. I also got a 2.47 in IR which is pretty pathetic I think. Anyway, I'm going to give analyzing my data a shot, but as you can tell from my IR score, I'm not very good at it.

On a macro level, I knew immediately that I was scoring poorly on quant. It seemed I had to guess on way too many questions and I very rarely felt confident in my answers. The data would seem to back this up as I answered incorrectly on 4 straight questions, 11-14. On the other hand, Verbal, at least at first, I felt I was performing much better on. The data would seem to support this as well as I had a 99% percentile after 13 questions. Unfortunately, I think my brain just had enough after my second RC passage, and I ended at 69%.

When looking at my splits, of the 22 PS questions I saw, I got 11 right, and 11 wrong. Of the 15 DS questions I saw, I got 7 right and 8 wrong. My average difficulty for right answers in PS was 600 and 680 for DS. My average difficulty of wrong answers was 680 PS, and 690 in DS. In terms of content areas, I was surprisingly stronger in Geometry with 4 right answers and only 1 wrong answer. Not surprisingly for me, Word Problems and FDP's were my weakest areas. My average difficulty right was 550 and 560, respectively, and my % right were 40% and 43%, respectively. I was also very weak in Number Properties questions only getting 43% right.

In terms of Quant timing, I hovered right around the 2:00 mark for average right time answers, except for word problems which was 3:03. For average wrong time word problems I was 2:18 which I think shows I had a decent sense of when to give up a problem. I think my gameplan for the next couple of weeks, after I'm done reviewing the CAT is to drill Word Problems, FDP's and Number Properties.

For Verbal my % Right were 53%, 57%, and 58% for SC, CR, and RC, respectively. My average right time was 1:27 for SC, 2:09 for CR, and 1:18 for RC. My average difficulty for Right SC questions was 730, 640 for CR, and 660 for RC. This is somewhat surprising to me because I thought SC was my biggest weakness on Verbal and I was stronger in the other two areas.

In the interest of wrapping up my post this year, it seems like the major lesson I learned from my CAT is that I have a lot to work on. One positive is that I don't seem to have much difficulty scrapping problems that I don't think I will be able to solve, but unfortunately that is just too many problems right now. I hope that my post wasn't too much of an incoherent, rambling. Anyway, thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your advice. I promise that this time I will do whatever you say.

[StaceyKoprince]

Live and learn I guess, right? :)

Okay, so first, the Q and V scores are not on the same scale (though they seem like it). Q40 is the 47th percentile and V33 is the 69th percentile. In other words, you are quite a bit stronger on verbal than quant. Take that into consideration as you plan your studies.

And it sounds like verbal is even stronger but your mental stamina isn't good enough yet to take you through the whole test. You'll need to get better at NOT doing things that are taking too much brain energy, even if you can get them right. I suck at combinatorics and I usually just skip those unless they're really easy - not necessarily because I can't do the problem but because I know that I will use up (proportionally) way too much brain energy for this one stupid problem. Not worth it.

Your stamina will get better as you take more CATs - this was your first one. You can also practice in a way that helps to build stamina.

For study sessions, plan out what you're going to do over a 2-hour period. Then GO for 1 hour, no stopping, no checking email, no getting up for something to eat, etc. Take a 10-15 minute break, then GO again for 1 hour. Then take a more substantial break.

(Note: I'm specifically NOT recommending that you do what I just described for 3-4 hours. It's actually *more* mentally taxing to study than to take a test, because when you're studying, you're trying to create new memories, not just access old ones.)

Re: IR, don't worry about the score too much. Our IR is really hard - harder than the real thing. If you scored ~2.5 on ours, you'd probably score 4-5 on the real thing. You do want to study IR some - but just enough to (a) score a 5 or higher, and (b) use a minimum of mental energy to do so.

The difficulty split on DS is interesting - it's basically the same for right and wrong. That tells me that you may have had some careless mistakes going on there that brought down the avg difficulty level for the wrong answers. Check out the individual problems.

Also, you're markedly better at DS than PS - even though the percentages correct were about the same, you were answering much harder DS questions correctly. Keep that in mind when studying. That kind of difference usually means that you've done a pretty good job of learning the theory and rules but you don't feel as comfortable doing actual computations.

For NP, ignore the combinatorics and probability categories; how were your results on the first 3 categories? Those are the ones that matter the most; if they're find, then just resolve to get combinatorics and probability wrong fast and use that time and mental energy elsewhere.

WP and FDP tend to have one big thing in common: stories. Were you struggling with story problems? (Also, don't forget to look at the times for individual problems, too. As long as you finish the test on time, your overall average times will be mostly okay - because you will have sped up on some problems to finish on time. Looking at the individual data points can really help you pinpoint serious issues.)

Here are some resources for story problems:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... into-Math/
https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... them-real/
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... ms-part-1/

One last thing. Your RC time seems crazy fast. Do you just know when you know vs. don't know? Or did you have some careless mistakes there, maybe due to mental fatigue? One side effect of mental fatigue can lead you to speed up (you feel like you just don't care anymore and want the test to be over) and cause you to make mistakes on things you know how to do.

Other than that, I agree with your focus / what you wrote. :)