Dear Sir or Madam,
I hope you are doing well.
Thanks a lot for your effort, especially in the timing strategy. I found your tips most helpful and am not running out of time anymore.
Initially, I wanted to take my official GMAT Exam on December 23rd, but I decided to reschedule my Exam to End of January, as I aim for a score of 700+ to get into my target university. I am lost and don't know where to improve. I feel I have done everything in my power to prepare for the exam. For context, I have tried to summarise my studies.
Having finished the Manhattan Prep 12 week Programme (in 1.5 months), I felt I was prepared a lot better for the actual GMAT. Moreover, I have the data from the OG Questions from the navigator tool in Atlas.
I have answered all OG 2021 questions and reviewed those I got wrong on the first attempt (I still have half of the Questions from the Verbal and Quant Review (about 400)). I have timed myself for the first attempt at every question and used an open book approach if I ran out of time, but marked the question as wrong anyway.
However, my MCATs differed consistently, between 550 and 590. For Verbal the discrepancy was from 30 to 32 and Quant from 35 to 40.
I have also taken two MBA.com CAT's, scoring 620 (V34, Q42) and 640 (V29, Q47). I started with Verbal on the first and Quant on the second mock.
I have gone through every single mock and evaluated every answer. I used the CAT Review tracker (which is a big help) for the MCAT's.
Please can you help me with the following questions?
Would you recommend taking all other practice tests now or leaving them for later?
In my opinion, the quickest improvement I could make is to level out the fluctuations between verbal and quant. Do you agree?
I am not sure whether I can tackle this by myself in the given timeframe of 5 weeks. (I will take one week off over Christmas, doing up to 3 hours of revision per day). Are you confident that tutoring will help me reach my target score (no promises;)? I have the whole of January off and am willing to treat revision as a full-time job.
Thanks in advance for your response!
Have a Merry Christmas!
Regards,
Felix
GMAT Forum
4 postsPage 1 of 1
- FelixB841
- Students
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:54 am
- dmitryknowsbest
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 78
- Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 8:50 am
Re: GMAT Strategy Inquiry for the final weeks
Hi Felix,
That's definitely an aggressive time frame, but I can make some recommendations about where to focus. Whether to hire a tutor is entirely up to you. If it helps to have someone to work through concepts with, or if a tutor can help to keep you on track, then that may well be a worthwhile investment for you. But as you suggested, it's hard to guarantee success, especially when time is short.
The first thing I'll say is that verbal needs attention. That doesn't mean, of course, that quant should go by the wayside, but the quant scores you're getting allow for a 700 score, and the verbal scores don't. One reasonable target for 700 might be Q45/V40. If you land a bit higher on quant, then you can be lower on verbal, but that's the overall level you need. Given your CAT scores, verbal will need a big push to get there. Much of this will be driven by an increase in accuracy. Unlike quant, verbal requires a fairly high level of accuracy as you approach a score of 40. Usually, we're aiming for single-digit misses, so 75% or greater correct overall, and of course you don't want to see a crash where you miss multiple questions closely together, as in a timeout.
Here's some general advice for pushing verbal up:
*Don't just focus on the mistakes you made or the explanation for the right answer. Make sure you understand why every single answer choice is right or wrong on every question you do. The best time to do this is actually before you find out the answer (blind review). After a timed practice set, go back untimed and see if you can justify all your choices, find alternative routes, etc. Then check the answer/explanation and re-review as needed.
*For CR/RC, you also want to work on prediction. How well can you predict each answer before going to the choices? If the answer is something you didn't predict, could you have predicted it, at least in broad terms? If so, how? If not, did you at least know what the question is asking for? (Surprisingly often, we miss questions because we aren't actually addressing the question that was really asked.)
*The key skills in CR/RC are inference and assumption. Inference is about what you can know from reading the text. What must be true? How do the wrong answers go too far from what is known? Assumption is about where (in a CR question) the conclusion has strayed too far from the premises. So in a sense, the same process you use to knock out bad inference answers can be used to spot flaws in the conclusion and therefore identify assumptions. This applies to Strengthen/Weaken/Evaluate q's, as well.
*The key skills in SC are sentence core, modifiers, parallelism, and meaning analysis. First, are you able to consistently see through to the sentence core? No SC answer will fly with a flawed core (e.g. subject-verb mismatch, or flawed parallelism in the core). If the core is okay in most or all of the answers (alas, it often is), you then need to branch out to modifiers and meaning. Are there flaws within a modifier, or in the way the modifier interacts with the core? Once you've made eliminations there, you can look at the overall meaning of the sentence to make sure it makes sense as a whole. but don't emphasize this step sooner than necessary, or you'll use up a lot of time reading and rereading flawed answers that you could have cut for other reasons.
As for your fluctuations in quant and verbal, the first culprit I can think of is timing. Are you slowing down on some questions and rushing elsewhere? We've written a lot about timing elsewhere, so I won't produce a whole essay now. but what I can say is that timing is probably the single most important consideration on this test. It's more important to stay on time than to be right! At the same time, you don't want to rush, because you usually end up missing a lot of questions without saving much time. So the key is to avoid long times (3 minute quant/CR, 2 minute SC, etc.). If you do fall behind, drop something to get back on track.
Another common contributor to fluctuations is test anxiety. There are many resources here, as well, and it's worth spending some time to make sure that your approach is healthy and conducive to a calm(ish) test-taking experience. It's also interesting that your subscores seem heavily dependent on what section you do first. This isn't the norm, and it might suggest that you are getting really fatigued after the first section. It's worth considering every element of your routine: sleep/wake times, caffeine consumption, exercise, food, etc. However, if timing and/or anxiety are making each section severely exhausting, then your biggest gains may just come from staying on time and avoiding excess work on problems you would have been better off skipping. When I'm reviewing student exams, I frequently see that the questions people spent the most time on are mostly misses, anyway. Do yourself a great favor and get good at identifying signs that you need to drop a question. Even for top scorers, planning in advance to bail on questions (especially in quant) and then identifying good places to do that is essential to the process.
The other thing I'll say is to avoid the "quantity over quality" trap. If you have worked through the entire OG in a short time, you're not getting what you need from the review process. The blind review techniques I mentioned above can help. It's quite normal to follow up a 5-question timed set with up to an hour of review. As long as you are learning from the process, that time is well spent. Binging on huge sets of problems very rarely produces the score improvements folks are hoping for. In fact, I often meet students who tell me they have "exhausted the OG" without any improvement at all! Having said that, the run-up to the official exam is a good time to keep doing timed sets, but keep them short and emphasize review and takeaways for every question. As for CATs, I usually recommend weekly tests in the last month before the exam, so if you are taking some time off for Christmas, maybe go for weekly exams in January. Blind review isn't as practical for those long experiences, but definitely click through and review every problem, right or wrong. More importantly, look at your overall performance and make sure you aren't ingraining bad habits, such as running behind on time, jumping straight to the answers on RC/CR questions, or jumping to the DS statements without attempting to rephrase. In the last stretch, every CAT is a "dress rehearsal" for the real event, and you want to make sure you're working the same way on these that you should on the official GMAT.
I hope this helps. Let me know if I can clarify anything.
Have a wonderful holiday, and I wish you the best of luck.
That's definitely an aggressive time frame, but I can make some recommendations about where to focus. Whether to hire a tutor is entirely up to you. If it helps to have someone to work through concepts with, or if a tutor can help to keep you on track, then that may well be a worthwhile investment for you. But as you suggested, it's hard to guarantee success, especially when time is short.
The first thing I'll say is that verbal needs attention. That doesn't mean, of course, that quant should go by the wayside, but the quant scores you're getting allow for a 700 score, and the verbal scores don't. One reasonable target for 700 might be Q45/V40. If you land a bit higher on quant, then you can be lower on verbal, but that's the overall level you need. Given your CAT scores, verbal will need a big push to get there. Much of this will be driven by an increase in accuracy. Unlike quant, verbal requires a fairly high level of accuracy as you approach a score of 40. Usually, we're aiming for single-digit misses, so 75% or greater correct overall, and of course you don't want to see a crash where you miss multiple questions closely together, as in a timeout.
Here's some general advice for pushing verbal up:
*Don't just focus on the mistakes you made or the explanation for the right answer. Make sure you understand why every single answer choice is right or wrong on every question you do. The best time to do this is actually before you find out the answer (blind review). After a timed practice set, go back untimed and see if you can justify all your choices, find alternative routes, etc. Then check the answer/explanation and re-review as needed.
*For CR/RC, you also want to work on prediction. How well can you predict each answer before going to the choices? If the answer is something you didn't predict, could you have predicted it, at least in broad terms? If so, how? If not, did you at least know what the question is asking for? (Surprisingly often, we miss questions because we aren't actually addressing the question that was really asked.)
*The key skills in CR/RC are inference and assumption. Inference is about what you can know from reading the text. What must be true? How do the wrong answers go too far from what is known? Assumption is about where (in a CR question) the conclusion has strayed too far from the premises. So in a sense, the same process you use to knock out bad inference answers can be used to spot flaws in the conclusion and therefore identify assumptions. This applies to Strengthen/Weaken/Evaluate q's, as well.
*The key skills in SC are sentence core, modifiers, parallelism, and meaning analysis. First, are you able to consistently see through to the sentence core? No SC answer will fly with a flawed core (e.g. subject-verb mismatch, or flawed parallelism in the core). If the core is okay in most or all of the answers (alas, it often is), you then need to branch out to modifiers and meaning. Are there flaws within a modifier, or in the way the modifier interacts with the core? Once you've made eliminations there, you can look at the overall meaning of the sentence to make sure it makes sense as a whole. but don't emphasize this step sooner than necessary, or you'll use up a lot of time reading and rereading flawed answers that you could have cut for other reasons.
As for your fluctuations in quant and verbal, the first culprit I can think of is timing. Are you slowing down on some questions and rushing elsewhere? We've written a lot about timing elsewhere, so I won't produce a whole essay now. but what I can say is that timing is probably the single most important consideration on this test. It's more important to stay on time than to be right! At the same time, you don't want to rush, because you usually end up missing a lot of questions without saving much time. So the key is to avoid long times (3 minute quant/CR, 2 minute SC, etc.). If you do fall behind, drop something to get back on track.
Another common contributor to fluctuations is test anxiety. There are many resources here, as well, and it's worth spending some time to make sure that your approach is healthy and conducive to a calm(ish) test-taking experience. It's also interesting that your subscores seem heavily dependent on what section you do first. This isn't the norm, and it might suggest that you are getting really fatigued after the first section. It's worth considering every element of your routine: sleep/wake times, caffeine consumption, exercise, food, etc. However, if timing and/or anxiety are making each section severely exhausting, then your biggest gains may just come from staying on time and avoiding excess work on problems you would have been better off skipping. When I'm reviewing student exams, I frequently see that the questions people spent the most time on are mostly misses, anyway. Do yourself a great favor and get good at identifying signs that you need to drop a question. Even for top scorers, planning in advance to bail on questions (especially in quant) and then identifying good places to do that is essential to the process.
The other thing I'll say is to avoid the "quantity over quality" trap. If you have worked through the entire OG in a short time, you're not getting what you need from the review process. The blind review techniques I mentioned above can help. It's quite normal to follow up a 5-question timed set with up to an hour of review. As long as you are learning from the process, that time is well spent. Binging on huge sets of problems very rarely produces the score improvements folks are hoping for. In fact, I often meet students who tell me they have "exhausted the OG" without any improvement at all! Having said that, the run-up to the official exam is a good time to keep doing timed sets, but keep them short and emphasize review and takeaways for every question. As for CATs, I usually recommend weekly tests in the last month before the exam, so if you are taking some time off for Christmas, maybe go for weekly exams in January. Blind review isn't as practical for those long experiences, but definitely click through and review every problem, right or wrong. More importantly, look at your overall performance and make sure you aren't ingraining bad habits, such as running behind on time, jumping straight to the answers on RC/CR questions, or jumping to the DS statements without attempting to rephrase. In the last stretch, every CAT is a "dress rehearsal" for the real event, and you want to make sure you're working the same way on these that you should on the official GMAT.
I hope this helps. Let me know if I can clarify anything.
Have a wonderful holiday, and I wish you the best of luck.
Dmitry Farber
Manhattan GMAT Instructor
Manhattan GMAT Instructor
- FelixB841
- Students
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:54 am
Re: GMAT Strategy Inquiry for the final weeks
Hi Dmitry,
Thank you very much for your quick and very informative response.
I have joined the tutoring today and would be happy to work with you, as I feel that you already know a little about my journey.
Regards,
Felix
Thank you very much for your quick and very informative response.
I have joined the tutoring today and would be happy to work with you, as I feel that you already know a little about my journey.
Regards,
Felix
- StaceyKoprince
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 9360
- Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
- Location: Montreal
Re: GMAT Strategy Inquiry for the final weeks
Hi, Felix! Dmitry was filling in for me while I was on vacation. I'm glad he took good care of you. 
Good luck with your studies and let us know if you need anything else!
Good luck with your studies and let us know if you need anything else!
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
4 posts Page 1 of 1