How to overcome stagnancy

Hi KaranB1. Let me share my thoughts with you.

Since you have been preparing for 18 months now, I'm pretty sure that you're familiar with most of the concepts. So, clearly concepts are not a problem for you. The score range of 600-650 is somewhere most people see a plateau mainly because they are unable to consistently get the hard questions right. Let us understand what does this score signify.

Root-cause

What is happening in your case is that when the Algorithm serves you easy and medium difficulty questions, you get them right. No problems there. However, the moment the algorithm starts serving you hard questions, your accuracy starts to dwindle. Because of this you're unable to get a good number of questions right in a streak and unless you get questions right back to back, the difficulty level won't go up. It would mostly go back to medium difficulty level questions and hence you see your score stagnating around 640.

What's the solution

Now when in this scenario most students follow a simple approach that is Solve tons of hard 700 level questions. Clearly this isn't working. The reason it doesn't work or takes a lot of time to work is because the main reason why you don't the hard question right is that there is something missing in how you approach these questions. Unless you change your approach, practising tons of questions isn't going to help.

So the most important thing for you should be to focus on learning the right strategies for question solving and then going through the grind of practising questions. If you would like to discuss the strategies that you currently follow and get some advice on which strategies you should actually follow, you can schedule a discussion with me using this link

Hope this gives you a new perspective of looking at your preparation.

Regards,
Piyush Beriwala
GMAT Strategy Consultant
GMAT 740 (Q50, V41)