3 and a half weeks between jobs GMAT madness!

Thanks for your responses guys...A little more about my study history.

Firstly I haven't done maths since School which was 7.5 years ago (other than a stats course at University). I was actually pretty good at maths at school won a number of awards and stuff in junior high and late primary school. main problem is I basically taught my self for my senior high school years (I was home schooling) and I only ever taught myself the minimum to pass exams. As a result a lot of the concepts in GMAT courses are more of less new to me (even though I may have actually briefly half heartedly studied them before). Figuring how to solve a problem is something I am very talented at, the maths part I just haven't learnt and practised well enough (hopefully this makes sense).

Phase 1: I started GMAT study about 5 months ago, the first two months I was basically doing a several nights a week mostly doing OG questions and some other diagnostic test and then getting my tutor to help me learn how to solve the questions. looking back it was a bad approach because 1. I just needed more maths practice, 2. I was never timing anything, 3. I wasn't spending enough time and eergy focusing on it.

After this I went to Europe for 3 and a half weeks visited bschools the wifey and I decided, yep we were actually going to do this and yep I actually needed to knuckle down and focus on the GMAT.

Phase 2: Came back from Europe and started working really hard. Started doing more questions, finially cottoned on to the idea I needed to learn the content and time questions. Did GMAT CAT 1 (incl AWA and IR): Score 660, Q 42 and V 39. Bought Magoosh premium and started studying all the videos and doing questions to see if I could increase more accuracy and time per question. I got more accurate and faster so I was pretty happy with myself. Did some SC study as well. Retook the GMATprep CAT (same one and again doing AWA and IR) got 680, Q39 and V42 big problem was I didn't answer the last 7 or 8 questions on the quant at all (I have heard this has a penalty of around 1-0.75 points per question over an incorrect answer, not sure if this is true?). At this point I was pretty devastated because more quant score went backwards, read online about the impacts of not answering questions and felt a little better. Did some more magoosh study (videos and questions). Did a quant only practice test on Magoosh and got around Q42 (50-60% somewhere, can't recall the exact score). I then came to the conclusion that I had to take a more targeted approach and really drill down on specific weak areas and practice, practice, practice, especially more fundamentals then just GMAT questions.

Phase 3: Over the past 3 weeks or so I have been taking my kill weakness approach, done more diagnostic tests, found some more weaknesses, and started attacking them. Past week or two I have been focusing a lot on algebra, as I have notice my lack of consistency and speed here is affecting my success in heaps of different question types. I have not been as consistent and hard working because I had to do various job interviews and so on with the new job I just received an offer for. Had a few other problems with my wife being unwell and so on, so I just had to make the decision to take a step back unfortunately.

Hopefully that provides a little more clarity

Hi jishjohnny,

Given everything that you've described, and the limited timeframe, I think that you would find the EMPOWERgmat Quant Score Booster Study Plan to be quite helpful. Most of our clients can complete that Plan in under a month, so it should fit your timeframe. You'll have to do a lot of work in a relatively short period of time, AND you'll have to make some fundamental changes to how you 'see' (and respond to) the GMAT Quant section, but you can certainly improve (it's just a matter of how much, given the short study time and whatever 'bad habits' you may have developed).

We have a number of free resources at our website (www.empowergmat.com) that you can use to 'test out' the Course before you set up an Account.

If you have any additional questions, then you can feel free to contact me directly.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

It looks like time management is your biggest issue with quant. It was mine too! Like you I hadn't done math for 7 years and used to be good at it. Memorising formulas was easy but picking the fastest way to solve was the tricky part.

The way I did it was to do a lot of practice questions and time myself every time I practice. I'd do say 10 questions at a time and give myself 20mins to do all 10. I focused on doing the questions in the OG from back to front. I recommend you download the GMAT timer and use it to do your practices. I can't recall where I downloaded it from, but if you want I can file transfer it to you. The timer basically tracks exactly how long you spent on a question. So I would run through a set of questions say 10-20 and mark my answers on the timer. Then at the end of the practice run, the timer lets you copy and paste your answers along with the time of how long you took to finish the question. I then marked my practice and noted down which questions I had taken longer than ideal for and also the ones that I potentially could've cut down time on. For these questions, I then looked up videos on GMAT quantum https://www.gmatquantum.com/og13th/ and GMAT Pill and sometimes the GMAT club forums too to view different strategies for how I could answer the question more quickly. I also did this for any that I guessed.

Then for all the ones that I got incorrect/guessed, after the whole analysis, I would do them again and yet again the next day. This way I actually got into the habit of using those methods to solve the questions and improved my timing on them. To be both accurate and fast in quant, the methods used are NOT natural so it's about practicing the same methods over and over and making them a habit. You should then find that when you tackle a new problem, you can automatically think of more way of solving it and can pick the quickest one. The analysis takes more time than it does to do the questions, but I think it makes all the difference is whether you can break the 700 score barrier.

You really don't want to run out of time with 7-8 questions remaining on the actual test. It makes a big difference to your score. When I ran out of time on practice tests I ended up with a score below 700. When I finished on time I ended up with a score above 700.

Good luck and hope your wife gets better soon!
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Turns out this forum is brilliant and automatically linked the timer to the exact post It's a fantastic tool for quant practice