Mental Breakdown: Need genuine strategy help for GMAT

Question

Hi Experts,

I am in a horrible state of mind at this point. I have no solution to my date for exam and I am looking  to apply to college this year ideally in R1 . My GMAT prep is just all over. I have daily been solving official questions and my speed is generally slow so at most I am able to only do 5 CR questions daily with the explanations and if I do not do CR then I manage to do about 15-20 Quant questions in a day after dedicating 5 hours or so.

Needless to say, my CR is very weak. Some experts attempt to tell strategies here but it is honestly not actinable. I am in a really bad state and have been daily gettin anxiety because this is my only way forward and I have been consistent in my prep and do not want to stop. I am really looking for some genuine and actionable steps today and get to course correct asap. If you are responding and willing to help please comment or DM- I am happy to share all my error logs for your reference and to give me a more specific study plan and guide me where I am going wrong.

Over the past year, here is what I have done
1. SC- from Egmat last year in May; no revision whatsoever ever since ( it was not so bad for me. Not the best but I feel relatively more confident in this but I have not done any revision so idk about now)
2. CR - from Manhattan, Egmat questions, Powerscore and now switched to TTP (2 topics down)
3. RC- TTP and rarely any revision. Solved a few passages but not been doing it of late. My weakness here is that I am very slow at reading passages and do mess up on some questions. It is better than CR but still not so great and my accuracy is primarily driven by the amount of time I am spending to understand (You'll know better when you see the error log)
4. Quant - TTP and now daily solving OG questions topic wise

For CR, to elaborate my issues that I have observed are that it requires a lot of thinking and you are expected to also think like GMAT, I generally do not understand the context completely and hence get manipulated by wrong chocies and tend to overthink or sometimes tend to face other issues of connecting dots and having some sort of idea on what the gap is and what I am looking for. Rarely, however, if I am clear about a certain logic or flow of the passage, I immediately figure the right ans but most of the times, my state of mind is such that I do not process the info completely or correctly and when I go to the answer choices, I just try to justify all. I only go to answer chocies in this case because I am short on time and spend too much time understandign the passage itself that I have no other option. Overall there are very rare cases in which I full understand and out of that too in a rare scenario, I would answer correctly despite a clear understanding ( I guess these errors must be because of me not thinking in the GMAT way). The rest of the major times, I am just in the water just trying luck.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi Elite097.

So, you spend about an hour on each CR question?

How much time do you typically spend answering a CR question before you choose a choice?

avigutman · Answer

This is precisely why you must stop,  Elite097 . You need a serious reset, ideally with some inner work on self worth and mindfulness. I've worked with many students in a similar situation, and in my experience "studying" GMAT in this kind of mindset is counterproductive.
Some excellent free resources can be found  here .

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

Consider taking a bit of a break and working with a study buddy with strong Verbal, especially CR skills.

Reading Comprehension  Solved a few passages but not been doing it of late. My weakness here is that I am very slow at reading passages and do mess up on some questions.

Getting better at reading can be helpful. Using articles from The Economist, for example, to practice might improve your speed. For RC, getting familiar with certain question types (inference questions) may improve your accuracy, too.

GMATWhizTeam · Answer

Elite097 After going through your post, I can identify 2 main problems - 1. Anxiety (which is leading to over-thinking) and 2. Lack of proper contextualization skills

In my opinion, a short break from the preparation should help a little, but I feel what you need more importantly is another view point of either a study buddy or better an expert. Let me share my 2 cents here

My understanding is that while reading information either you're reading it too fast which leads to re-reading information or you're not pausing at the right places or you're not connecting the information when you pause. It could be any of these 3. This is stopping you from understanding the context correctly, which in turn, makes you feel less confident when you attack the answer choices and that's what leads to anxiety.

I would like to connect with you on a call to understand which one/more of the above 3 is the case with you and accordingly I can suggest the path forward. Please feel free to schedule a discussion with me using this link: https://www.calendly.com/gmatwhiz/30min

Mental Breakdown: Need genuine strategy help for GMAT

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