gits wrote:
Hello,
I started preparing for GMAT towards the second week of March and study (includes practice time) for around 6+ hrs a day. Till now couldn't find much of an improvement. Score is still hovering between 540-590. Took
MGMAT CAT today and scored 590. Really disappointing! Please help me to improve and reach my target of 750. I know I can do it but I'm not finding any significant improvement yet. While I was reviewing today's test, I found that 2-3 questions are gone wrong due to silly error
. Few verbal questions went wrong because I could narrow down to two answer choices but chose the wrong one among the two. The latter happens for me at least in 33% of the questions. Unable to get rid of this. I am really scared about my performance on the actual GMAT.
Could anyone please guide me in understanding where am I lacking and what can I do to improve my performance in the short amount of time that I have?
Appreciate any sort of help!
Thanks
Hi there,
Here are a couple tips for dealing the errors you mentioned:
•
"Careless" Quant Errors. These are always the most frustrating! Kind of makes you wish the GMAT gave partial credit, since you did all the hard work on the problem
. Think of it this way, once you've gone to all the trouble of correctly setting up a problem, rushing through the final computational stages means throwing all your hard work out the window! And of course, the test will be waiting with the wrong answer as a trap! If you feel that you've got a problem set up correctly, you should actually slow down a bit and make sure your computations are accurate. Rushing is never a good way to save time on this test – find that extra time somewhere else!
•
Verbal "Down To Two" Errors. Ah, everyone dreads this one! It's very common, by the way; most Verbal questions have 2 or 3 answer choices that can be easily eliminated, even at the highest level. Develop a system for dealing with this scenario with every different question type. For example, if I'm down to two answers on a Critical Reasoning problem that's asking me to find the assumption, I always go with the "negation test" – negating the correct assumption will severely weaken the argument. The important thing is that you have a plan for getting out of this scenario so you don't end up spending too much time and second guessing yourself.
Cheers,
Mark