Exhausted my prep material in first attempt. Need help!

Question

Hi, I took the GMAT a few weeks ago. I scored 620( Q48/V-27). On the GMAT prep tests, I was scoring 690- 700. However, on the exam day, out of anxiety my score dropped. I am attempting to take the exam again. However, I have exhausted all the materials I had, namely 
1. Economist subscription
2. OG 2018 full solved. 
3. GMAT test 1-4

My weakness is CR and RC. 
Also, I want to increase my score in Quant to 49/50 at least.

Please guide with respect to- 
1. material I can use to strengthen my weak areas and continuously practise
2. make a plan for the coming one month

Currently, I am totally lost and directionless. A constructive advice will be really appreciated.

I am a young female from the field of medicine.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi ruchi2208,

I've sent you a PM with some notes and advice.

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

rohan2345 · Answer

Hi ruchi2208,

For verbal, especially for CR and RC, I would highly encourage you to consider e-gmat verbal online or the e-gmat verbal live course. They are both amazing courses especially designed for non-natives. They offer almost 25% of their courses for free so you can try out their free trial to decide which one you want to go for. Plus the e-gmat Scholaranium which is included in both the courses is one of the best verbal practice tools in the market. You can easily track your progress in that you can identify your strengths and analyze and improve on your weak areas.

I must add that if you are particularly looking to discover and improve on your weak areas in Quant; a subscription to GMATCLUB tests is the best way to do that. They are indeed phenomenal and will not only pinpoint your weak areas but also help you improve on them.

Further taking multiple mocks might help. Apart from the GMATPREP, Manhattan GMAT tests and Veritas Prep Tests in my experience have a good verbal and Quant section and will certainly help you point out and improve your weak areas.

Further another advantage of taking many mocks is to build up your stamina. Apart from the GMATPREP tests, taking practise tests of any major GMATPREP company ought to do that.

I would also encourage you to purchase the GMATPREP QP 1 for some great additional practice.

Hope this helps. All the best.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi ruchi2208,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. Let’s look at the good news: Q48 is a pretty great quant score, right? So, good job! Now, although I can’t give you an exact study plan for the month, I can give you some really powerful advice on how to improve your Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and quant skills.

Starting with your first question, there are plenty of quant and verbal resources you can use when studying for the next month. Take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses  to see what has worked well for other test-takers.

Regarding your second question, despite the fact that nerves probably can take the lion's share of the blame for your score drop, it’s also quite possible that you went into test day with some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on the GMAT. Thus, over the course of the next month, you have to go through GMAT quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For example, let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, Find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken the Argument question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what, if anything, you would have needed to know in order to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice, but keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to analyze such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Although your quant is stronger, you can follow a similar process for that section. For example, if you are reviewing Number Properties, be sure that you practice 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. Again, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering those types of questions. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

You also may find my article with more information regarding
 how to score a 700+ on the GMAT  helpful.

Feel free to reach out with any further questions.

Good luck!

EducationAisle · Answer

Hi Ruchi, do you have a ESR that you can send across?

Also, apart from the resources you've mentioned, there is an almost an inexhaustible source of official questions available on this forum, from Official GMAT tests (largely  GMATPreps ). That's also something you might want to utilize.

akela · Answer

Hi ruchi2208 , As you've completed both free tests, you can start these official questions: https://gmatclub.com/forum/all-gmatprep ... 87679.html https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-most-com ... 40372.html They're from gmatprep bank. You've mentioned that you've finished OG2018. But, there are other OG editions. Check out this thread: https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmac-officia ... 40610.html Start from the earliest edition, then move to the next one. Every subsequent edition has new questions, and they are marked in the corresponding thread. GMATclub has almost all the questions, so learning to use search might be helpful: https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-searc ... 27157.html As mentioned earlier, you can use Manhattan CATs, and gmatclub tests. You can also register at bellcurves.com. Finally, it is worth buying Exam pack 1, 2, 3, 4 and question bank. They are very helpful in the final stage of prep. Hope this helps!

Bismarck · Answer

ruchi2208

For improving the quant score, I would recommend the GMATCLUB test subscription.
For CR, Please go through Powerscore CR Bible.
For RC, follow  workout  and try to solve 2 RC everyday

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