Hi all,
I've been studying for the GMAT on/off for close to a year now. I took GMATPrep 1 as my diagnostic in February and came out with a 610, scoring a 35 in Quant and a 39 in Verbal. My goal is to score a 49/50 in Quant so, taking the advice on here, I started with the Foundations of GMAT Math book and I studied on and off (averaging a couple of hours a week) until July when I went into it at earnest. I study verbal in the morning for approx. 2 hours either at the office or on the train in and I do Quant afterwork for 2 hours. I also study approx. 5-7 hours per day on the weekends. I did not touch the OG13 during this initial period because I wanted to make sure the questions would be put to the best use so I went over the Foundations of GMAT Math book and
MGMAT Math books multiple times. Looking back, I believe this was a horrible approach as I should have been doing the OG13 questions as I went.
In the beginning of August, I started incorporating the OG13 into my approach while also bringing verbal into the mix. I have taken 3
MGMAT practice exams since then.
9/13 –
MGMAT CAT 1 – 610 – Q42, V33
11/23/13 –
MGMAT CAT 2 – 610 – Q42, V33
12/1/13 –
MGMAT CAT 3 – 650 – Q36, V43
As you can see, my quant score has not made any improvement.
I’ve been through most of the OG13 questions 2-3x now and am consistently getting ~25% wrong. I do have made an
error log of all the questions I have gotten wrong. I do believe I have not utilized this to the fullest.
I’ve also read over the compilation of links regarding raising a Quant score from 40-45 and from 45-50 but I’m curious if anyone has any other information to provide.
What I've been doing after every test is going back and redoing all the OG13 problems from the sections of any questions I got wrong. However, because I get questions wrong in so many questions, I'm running into atrophy issues trying to work through them all.
I’m lost as to how to proceed here. I get questions wrong across the board and don’t seem to have any strengths (maybe work/rate problems but even those are iffy). When I review the tests and the OG13 problems, I understand the math behind nearly every problem. My problem is that I just don’t see how to proceed on these problems when I read them. And these are on OG13 questions that GMAT Club argues are easier than what I'll see on the actual test. I can’t pick apart what the question is looking for with regards to the initial steps regarding setting up the problem. Once it’s set up my arithmetic is usually sound enough to bring me to the answer.
I’m currently looking into private tutoring and the person I met with recommended just going over setups of questions in order to build my pattern recognition skills. Is this the right approach?
I'm pretty frustrated right now (will keep chugging along) so any advice would be greatly appreciated. I was hoping to take the GMAT by the first week of January in order to make R2 deadlines but this is looking like a pipe dream at this point.