670 to 530 in one month! Not sure what happened.. please help!

Hi Lonewarrior414,

Since you have been studying since May and have not seen much significant improvement in your practice test scores, you may consider adjusting your study routine.

When considering how to adjust your study routine, you must realize that the GMAT is such a challenging exam because there are relatively few questions asked in a given exam, yet those questions come from a huge topic pool. Thus, the best way to get a great GMAT score is to have a thorough understanding of all the topics that may be tested on the exam. To develop such mastery, you want to strive for linear and targeted learning and follow that with focused practice. In other words, you want to master one topic before you move to the next. Have you been able to study in this way?

For example, if you are learning about Number Properties, you should learn everything possible about that topic, e.g., LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. After that, be sure that you practice with a lot of questions (50 or more) just on Number Properties. The results of that practice will help you to determine how well you have truly mastered that topic.

For verbal you will want to follow a similar study routine; focus on learning one section at a time: reading comprehension, sentence correction, or critical reasoning. For example, when learning about critical reasoning, you want to be able to cover all aspects of critical reasoning: strengthen and weaken the conclusion, resolve the paradox, find the conclusion, must be true, etc. Follow up your learning with focused critical reasoning practice so you can determine your specific weaknesses within that topic. You should follow a similar routine for sentence correction and reading comprehension.

I also, see that you have mostly been using books for your GMAT prep. Have you considered using a self-study course? In comparison to GMAT prep books, self-study courses typically provide detailed study plans and have granular analytics, so you can easily track your progress as you move through the course. By being able to track your progress, you will remain more engaged, and you’ll be able to forecast when you are ready to take your real GMAT.

Lastly, feel free to read my article that provides some actionable steps that you can follow to achieve a 700+ on your GMAT.

Hi Lonewarrior414,

The one thing that jumps out for me the is that you have not understood the concepts properly and have started solving the problems.
I would recommend you to take a step back and go to the course material that you have. If you want, you can have a look at the online courses as well. The courses have video lectures that can help you understand the concepts in a slightly better was as compared to a book (my personal opinion. You are entitled to yours)

In addition, look back at your practice questions and tests banditry to drill down deep to find the problematic areas:

SC: The questions test various concepts such as S-V agreement, modifiers, parallelism etc. Find out what troubles you.
CR: There might be certain types of questions that are troubling you. May be Assumption, may be conclusion, inference etc.
You need to find that out and then practice them
RC: This again can be drilled down into different types of questions and also different topics. See what questions and topics trouble you the most and then practice accordingly.
Quants: Again try to break the questions in topics such as Algebra, Number system (very important), Geometry, PnC etc.

As an addition, start preparing an error log and keep a note of all the mistakes you made and the lessons you learnt from the problems. This will ensure you do not make the same mistake again.

Make sure you complete all of the OG and the Verbal review and if required, you can buy the Question pack1 from mba.com

Also, I would recommend you to buy the Exam Pack 1 and 2 from mba.com and try to solve those.

You can improve RC comprehension by various techniques. The one I suggest is making a passage map. It might take a little bit more time in reading the passage, but it makes sure that your comprehension of the passage in excellent.