Hello all, first, I would like to say that finding this site has made a
huge contribution to my studying. This site is awesome! I was hoping I could get some advice about my quant prep from you GMAT Clubbers since most of your quant skills are far superior to mine. I will start by saying that I am not an engineer and my quant skills are around average (37-39 according to the Official GMAT and practice CATS). I have taken the Official GMAT three times over the last two years and my quant scores have been stuck at 37-39. I have a fourth test scheduled for the 20th of April. I would say that during the last two years I have built up a decent base for the lower to mid-level questions but my goal score for quant is 44–47, of course anything above that would be great.
Materials I am using:
Manhattan GMAT guides and practice CATS - even though I have been through these CATS it has been well over a year so I don’t remember many of the questions let alone any of the answers. However, I do understand that any overlap
IS overlap no matter what, so I am not putting a whole lot of emphasis on these scores. I am using the diagnostics for these tests to hit my weak areas (wrong, too much time, guessed, right but took too long, careless errors, etc…) and I would say that I spend about 4 hours reviewing the quant section of these tests reworking problems and making notes.
Official Guide 12 – and the Quant supplement. I’m working through these books either focusing on weak areas or completing sets of 10 to 20 to work on stamina and strategy. Both under timed conditions. I have also read Stacy Koprince’s (expert at
Manhattan GMAT) recommendations about how to analyze GMAT practice problems and I try to do as much as that as possible.
I have been using an
error log along with a note book that I refer to often.
I have recently found this site and realized how awesome it is and I have been following some experts and doing problems from the daily follow email summary and putting into my notes anything new that I learn from the experts or anybody else. (Please let me know if there is a different/recommended way of using any of the problems here on this site.)
I have also heard that the GMAT Club quant tests are awesome so I was planning to go through (hopefully) a lot of these in the next month and a half. Is this a good idea considering my level?
My
fear is that I am not studying efficiently and/or effectively and that I will fall into the same traps I did on previous tests which is not being able to translate what I have learned to other different questions on the actual test.
My questions are: Is there anything wrong with my approach? Can I be doing anything different? Any advice would be great as I desperately do not want to sit for this beast again. I read one Clubbers success story about having to be brilliant at the basics and I wonder if I am taking the right steps to do that.
-Thanks all and thank you for this website-