mahendru1992 wrote:
Hey folks,
I'd be retaking my GMAT most probably next month as I only scored a 620, so I need some quick guidance.
For the last month or so I've been studying diligently and effectively and I think I've made some decent progress.
I gave a GMATPrep mock today and got a 710 but I think the score could be 20-30 points lower since I had already attempted 2 questions from quant and 1 question from verbal before.
Anyways I have a couple of questions that I'd like to ask you guys:-
1) My quant score was 49 and I know i should be happy about it, but honestly I'm not really confident about it. My timings are usually off when it comes to quant. Even in this test, I practically rushed through the last 3-4 questions. How can I really improve my timing while insuring that my accuracy remains the same
2) I've identified my weak areas are Sets, Geometry, Statistics and Probability. I'm definitely planning to improve in the first 3 areas but I've decided to leave Probability. My reason being that I've hardly seen any questions on probability in the mocks as well as the last GMAT Exam I'd taken. Do you think this a sound idea, as my aim is to get around 49-50 in quants?
3)I was always weak in the verbal section but I guess studying last month with my main focus on verbal paid off. My weak area is CR and maybe a little of SC although RC is my strength and I hardly get any of its questions wrong. So I'm thinking that I should practice RC just 2 hours a week for the next month and focus solely on CR and SC. Again, Do you think it's a good strategy?
4) How important do you think is IR for 2015 and what would be the idea score and how much time should I devote for it?
Thank you in advance!
You're under a lot of time constraint so you need to focus on getting the most amount of points out of your study time. In my opinion, your focus should only be on SC and CR. Maybe you can spend an hour or two a week doing quant problems to keep your skills refreshed. But it really doesn't make sense for you to dedicate any serious study time for that section.
Your quant is only 2 points away from the 99%ile, even if you spend your entire month preparing for that section, how many points will that realistically improve your score by? The same reasoning is true for RC. You're already scoring nearly perfectly on reading comprehension, so how would practicing more RC help your overall score? You don't need to really spend any time on it because your critical reasoning preparation will help with your reading comp (both require attentive active reading). And do not prepare for IR, it hardly matters to top schools and there's a lot of skills overlap with the Quant and Verbal sections.
So focus almost all your time on SC and CR. You can prep/refresh your knowledge and skills on other parts of the test by taking practice GMATS.
Hope this helps, good luck on your second try.