To hit 700....

[NMencia09]

Hello,

I'm currently scoring in the 89% for Verbal and the 70% for Quant, and am looking to hit 700.

My sentence correction is around 93% (which I see as the easiest to bring up)

I understand that I need to either bring up Verbal to about 93-95% or bring quant up to maybe 78-80% (need bigger jump in quant to get score higher than for verbal).

I figure I can either:
1) Study 600-700 level problems in quant like crazy until I get very few wrong, admitting that 700+ level questions I will only get right maybe 30-40% of the time.

2) Try and master the verbal, although I find that I often get to between 2 different choices and am unable to Really distinguish the difference between 2 answers even after reading the explanation.

Which strategy would you suggest if I have about a month left to study?

Thanks in advance-

[StaceyKoprince]

Both. It's easier for you to improve verbal, since it's your strength, but you don't have as many opportunities for improvement since you're already so good. So you do both. :)

On quant, your plan is exactly right - you don't want to miss ANY lower level Qs if you can help it. The harder ones don't matter as much, though certainly feel free to study harder ones that are in your area of strength. But really hammer on not making careless mistakes and getting all the points you can on the "lower" (for you) questions.

For verbal, you've articulated one of the main differences between an 85-90th percentile scorer and a 95+ percentile scorer: distinguishing between the hardest wrong answer and the right answer.

Here's how you study this (on any verbal Q type):
- Why would someone PICK that tempting wrong answer? What's the trap? Why does it look *better* (in some ways) than the right answer? (Now I know that this is a bad reason to pick an answer, since it leads to a wrong answer.)
- Why would someone ELIMINATE the right answer? What's the trap? Why does it look *worse* than at least one of the wrong answers? (Now I know that this is a bad reason to eliminate an answers, since it leads to eliminating a right answer.)

Of course you should also study why the right ones are right and why the wrong ones are wrong... but you were already doing that, right? ;)

Also, search online for discussions about the problems you're studying. When you get stuck, can't articulate the trap, can't understand the explanation - the online discussion might help.

[NMencia09]

thanks Stacy.

[StaceyKoprince]

you're welcome!