GMAT Strategy

Hello Everyone,

It great to be a part of this forum. Our past few months I have been posting queries and thanks to all of you for helping me out. I have been preparing for gmat for an year though but that was in patches. My work takes a lot of time so my study pattern was awkward. I am in my mid twenties and want to pursue in MBA.

Two months ago, (April) onwards I started studying seriously and am off from work. My verbal & quant both was on weaker side so I did put in lot of effort. I have completed OG 11th edition (quant full), verbal partly. And I have also completed kaplan 800, princeton review and Gmat Sets 20-30 (thus 10 sets). I have also practiced other material here & there. I did refer to manhatten sentence correction guide. My major area of weakness in verbal is CR & RC.

I have my exam date after two weeks and still I feel something is not right. I did give few 800score full length tests and scored have been around 550-600.

Today I gave powerprep test 1 and scored a miserable 530. Quant Score: 43 (75%) & Verbal 20 (18%). I am surprised as to how come my verbal score is so low. I havent ignored verbal.

I am puzzled, what should I do ?? My aim is to score close to 700 but it seems so distant. My exam is not too far.

Moreover can anyone tell me how close is powerprep to actual gmat. In the mid verbal section I was completely drained. I will soon give GMATPrep also but I mean this cant be happening.

If anyone can help me out I would be grateful.

Thanks a lot,

Cheers,
JG

do you know which part of verbal u lack in? if its something specific you could concentrate a bit more on that to improve.

i sometimes get fed up and finish my verbal with 10 mins to go, time which i could put to much better use so i hope u arent doing the same.

try manhattan gmat for Sentence Correction.

ive got my gmat too in 4 days lets hope i do ok
good luck to you

yoyoma wrote:do you know which part of verbal u lack in? if its something specific you could concentrate a bit more on that to improve.

i sometimes get fed up and finish my verbal with 10 mins to go, time which i could put to much better use so i hope u arent doing the same.

try manhattan gmat for Sentence Correction.

ive got my gmat too in 4 days lets hope i do ok
good luck to you

As mentioned above, I sure have gone thru manhatten sentence correction. In verbal CR & RC is an area of problem. Is powerprep close to actual gmat.

2 additional resources for SC I am finding useful are grammar smart and kaplan 800

SC is not a big issue for me. But my verbal is not going good due to RC & CR. I have my exam in 10 days, I am confused as to what should I do?

sorry for not reading your post thoroughly

how do you tackle the RC. Do you just read and answer? Do you make notes about each para and then refer to them to answer ure questions?

i hope some of the people who have cracked the gmat can help you too

I gave GMATPrep test yesterday and although did not get an overall high score but I got a Quant section score of 46 and verbal score of 21. (overall 550)

As you guys see the reason my score is dropping is becoz of verbal. Now I want to raise this verbal score which is in twenties to at least close to 40. Moreover analysis indicates that in verbal my SC is okay, CR is not good and RC is worst.

Though I have re-schedules my exam, I have little less than a month to take it. Can I reach my verbal score of 40+. I have started to focus more on OG 11th ed verbal. I also have powerscore book on CR. I hope I do improve, just worried about RC.

I took the GMAT exam today (official) and got a similar score - Q 48 and V 21, overall 570. During my practice tests I was scoring in low 30s in Verbal (with Q in mid 40s or higher, and a overall score of mid 600s) and it was very surprising for me as to why I scored so low in Verbal in the official exam.

There is no one single weak area for me in Verbal either that I could have improved in 2-3 weeks of practice. In practice tests, I would usually miss about 14-18 questions and they were all in RC, CR and SC roughly split evenly. The scaled scores were in low 30s as reported by practice tests. Once or twice, I even scored in high 30s, and sometimes in high 20s.

I believe that the official GMAT scaling is somewhat different from what the practice tests do(Veritas, 800score, Manhattan, Kaplan, Arco etc.). I realized that missing 14-18 questions is not good enough after taking the official exam. I should have focused some more on Verbal to obtain in the mid 600s.

Bottomline, do not trust the scaled score in practice tests, especially for verbal. Ensure that you get the first 10-15 questions right!!