Got 710 on an MGMAT practice test, 5 weeks til GMAT. Advice?

First of all, a belated thanks to nickeymickey and plaguerabbit. I took your advice of some additional verbal review and it seems to have paid off.

I just took my 4th MGMAT practice test and got a 710 (Q44, V42). To recap:

1) 590 Q31, V41* (Verbal was readjusted after this test - it's not as high as it says)
2) 620 Q42, V33
3) 650 Q43, V36
4) 710 Q44, V42

Goal: 750 (Q46, V45)

While I'm reasonably happy with my progress, I'm most worried that my Q score has only gone up 1 point each time I've taken it. I've also been really busting my ass on the quant; it comprises at least 90% of my preparation. Something is amiss...

I've got 5 weeks to go (plus another test 4 weeks after that), 1 of which will be pretty unusable from a study perspective. I'll be taking two more MGMAT practice tests plus two official GMAC practice tests. In the meantime I'm doing the GMAC 11th and Quant review 5 problems at a time: checking answers, learning form mistakes. moving to the next five. I'm pouring through the MGMAT Quant books and doing all associated problems. I'll be adding some MGMAT question banks in there as well.

I'd love to hear from anybody with suggestions on how to make strides in Q.

Hey mayonnai5e,

Do you know if that applies to the current MGMAT practice tests or just their older ones? On their website they state:

NOTE: On April 23, 2007, at 6 pm EDT, our CAT scoring algorithm was RECALIBRATED based on data gathered since the launch in November, 2006. The purpose of this recalibration was to provide a CLOSER MATCH between CAT performance and GMAT performance. Our analyses showed that on average, our verbal subscore was moderately overshooting the GMAT, particularly at the high end. As a result of the recalibration, this overshoot and high-end skew has been corrected. (The quant subscore had less of an issue but has also been slightly recalibrated.)

I'm curious as to whether this still applies. I plugged my latest score into the 800score calculator and it states a Q44, V42 equates to a 700 so they're not too far off there. I'm just curious as to whether the V42 score itself is an overshoot.

Many people come to GMAT preparation in mortal fear of the quantitative section. Probability! Exponents and roots! The entire section seems like a parade of horribles. Unfortunately, many of these people spend the bulk of their study efforts honing their math skills at the expense of their verbal preparation. Certainly a great performance on each section is ideal, but experience has shown that an excellent verbal performance affects one's overall score more dramatically than does an excellent performance in quantitative.

Let's take a look at what happens at the highest levels of the exam: 700+. A recent test-taker received a scaled score of 45 in verbal (98th percentile) and 40 in quant (66th percentile) and an overall score of 700 (93rd percentile). Notice how much closer the overall percentile is to the excellent verbal percentile. If the overall percentile were simply an average of the individual percentiles, this person would have received about 640. But because the combination of an outstanding verbal performance with a fair quant performance is so rare, the overall percentile and score will be much higher than the lower quant percentile. Another person, who scored 49 in verbal (99th percentile) and 37 in quant (56th percentile), received 710 (95th percentile), even though the quant performance here was a full 10 percentile points lower than that in the previous example. Again, an outstanding performance in verbal significantly offset a middling performance in quant.

Does this work in reverse? That is, will an outstanding performance in quant so dramatically offset a middling performance in verbal? No. This combination is much more common, given the increasing number of international test-takers, who often have excellent math skills but relatively weak command of English. Even among native speakers of English, it is more common to see relatively high quant scores coupled with fair to middling verbal scores. Because these combinations are less rare, they are not rewarded as highly. For example, a test-taker recently received a 50 in quant (97th percentile) and a 37 in verbal (82nd percentile), but "only" a 670 overall (89th percentile). So the truly excellent quant performance was not enough to pull the overall score above 700.