My Nemesis... Quant! Help me beat 690! 42Q!

I have Veritas marerial and in many cases it repeats OG questions or presents either very simple/very difficult questions. I agree that they don't cover the word problems properly and their tricks are nothing special.

As far as MGMAT books... I have them... I went through each and did well on problem sets at the end of each chapter... Then, I went and did the question banks on their website that come with the book and my scores were horrendous... I could only solve 15 question out of 25 and was sure about my asnwers... the rest were guesses on questions that were so time consuming... and the questions are not very close to OG. Can someone comment on the difficulty of those... the material in their books is fairly straight but their quant test banks blow my mind and damage my confidence level. Extremely scared to take their CATs.

As far as 800Score... I really think it is a good practice when you start timing yourself... the pacer was of much needed help to learn value of time spent per question. However, I think their math has some very difficult and very easy questions and the verbal SC is not representative. The good verbal practice from their tests is CR and RC for sure!

u2lovergirl

PS my Powerprep quant score recently was 43 and quant range at the moment is 37-43... any ideas how to increase it??? thanks

Interesting... People on here swear by those tough online MGMAT questions. Haven't tried 'em yet myself. I agree that the pacer on 800score is good, but there questions don't seem to come in a logical order of ascending difficulty. I greatly question their test methodology.

Mark,

I'm in the same boat...I'm crushing the verbal (only getting a couple wrong on sentence correction) but only getting about half of the quant questions right, with no apparent pattern. I took the GMAT back in 1987, and that's the last time I used a lot of these concepts. I'm also finding that time management on the quant is a big problem for me...I get stuck on a couple of questions, burn up the minutes, start panicking and then make stupid computational errors that put me deeper in the hole.

I've found the math review section at the back of the Kaplan Premier book to be much more helpful than the Official Guide or the OG Quant Review book. It has a lot of helpful tips that simplify some of those weird set or number properties questions. I just picked up the Kaplan Math Review...it looks good, but I really haven't started using it yet.

I need about a 650, and I think my verbal scores would get me in the ballpark, but I'd really like to get the quant to at least the 70th percentile.

Hope this helps.

What are you scoring right now in quant? If you are crushing the verbal I'd expect you'd be well over 650 as I am... just looking to get a more balanced score. I got the Manahatten books yesterday (3/5 of them anyhow). They look good, very good at teaching you "how to solve" the problems, better than Veritas materials for quant. I will get the other 2. I see my score coming up. Even now just having done Veritas problem solving I am seeing my score likely increasing to 44. I think with perms/comb from Veritas and the Manahatten stuff I can get to 46 at least. 44 should put me at 700. 46 maybe 730. If I could get a 48-49 I'd be looking at 750ish. Gotta work hard to solidify the quant and get it in that range where the verbal is.

I got a 26Q (ouch!) on my first Kaplan test, at the beginning of my study. I took the diagnostic test in the OG after a couple of weeks and got 29 out of 48 (60%) right, with 5 careless mistakes. I haven't taken any more practice tests yet, but based on my success with the timed practice questions, I'd say right now I'm probably around a 38Q.

I worked through the whole OG Quant Review book, which helped, and which lifted my success rate on the Problem Solving questions. Still, on the hardest Data Sufficiency questions, I'm only getting about 50% right and sometimes timing out. I took a breather and went through the OG Verbal Review, and found out that I just need a little work on Sentence Correction. Now I'm going to hit the Kaplan Math Review.

I'm not as concerned about cracking 650 as I am about having a really weak quant score that sticks out. A 42-43Q score would do me just fine. I've got five weeks till I take the test, so I'm hopeful I can get the job done.

I'm going to check out the Manhattan books, thanks for the tip.

I'd definately take another practice test... How about GMAT prep. People on here say Kaplan is very difficult. Take that which is most like the real thing... Again, GMATprep. I was intially hell bent on spending as much time as possible on first 15 questions thinking that they are the most important in a CAT test. I actually am doing better if I occasionally give up one here or there and try to actually get thru the rest of the test without say guessing on the last 10. My speed is improving though after doing more tests. The 800score ones are hard but the timing practice is great. Timing is very important in quant... Just another reason to do more practice tests, as long as they don't disallusion you.