Improve GMAT score in 1 month

Hi xavier8.

Since schools tend to be more concerned with quant scores than with verbal scores, since it's often easier to increase one's quant score than one's verbal score, and since you have room to increase your quant score by several points, you may want to put most of your energy into increasing your quant score.

To increase your quant score, you could work topic by topic, finding one weak topic at a time and focusing on that topic until you master it, by (1) learning all about that quant topic, and (2) doing dozens of practice questions involving that quant topic. As you strengthen each weaker area, your expected GMAT score will increase. You don't need any particular study plan to work in this way. You just have to keep finding high ROI topics to work on and work on them one after the other. It's reasonable that, by doing so, you would increase your quant score by 2 to 4 points in a month, driving your total score 20 to 40 points higher.

For verbal, the one thing you do NOT want to do is drive your score lower by "learning" approaches that don't really work. So, be super careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that you can increase your GMAT verbal score by learning a few gimmicky approaches. People often do so only to find that their verbal scores decrease rather than increase.

GMAT verbal is a test of vision and use of logic, and so, to increase your verbal score, you have to improve your vision and your skill in using logic to arrive at correct answers. Accordingly, the most important thing you can do to increase your verbal score is to carefully analyze and answer many questions, untimed, to learn to see and articulate what's going on in them. Once you can better see what's going on in the questions, you can seek to speed up and answer them under time constraints.

If your SC performance is not strong, it could also help to learn some sentence construction rules and concepts, but remember, SC is not a grammar test. It's a test of skill in seeing what's going on in sentences. So, don't become overly focused on grammar and other rules and concepts. Learn to use that information without allowing it to distract you from seeing what's going on in the questions.

By learning some SC rules and concepts and by doing lots of untimed verbal training to develop your skill in seeing and articulating what's going on in the questions, you should be able to drive your verbal score higher by 2 to 4 points and, thus, your total score higher by 20 to 40 points in a month.