It is evident that the Verbal was smashed up bad and the Quants score, on a starting note, was the saving grace. I did pretty much go through the same journey (but for me Quants was the villain). But that did not prevent me from getting to a 630 on the 1st attempt. I am in a way just summarizing my journey (not yet complete for me though) - may be it can help you gain some perspective. The best remedy here is introspection – Check if you had in the first place seriously studied the Verbal Manhattan (VM) Guide, if you are sure that you gave your best on that, then go deep and see if you were making a mental note of all the important points from the VM Guide. The key is to immerse yourself onto the book for a period of at least 10hrs, go over some specific and “tangible”(operative word) rules over and over till it becomes second nature to you(Subject-Verb Agreement, Proper reference to antecedents, Verb Tense match, Proper usage of common idioms/phrases etc..). Make sure that while practising questions from the
OG, you identify the rule that was not followed even in the wrong answer choices- most of us will cut to the right answer and forget where exactly the other options went wrong. For Verbal, IMO the golden rule is Quality over Quantity (the other way around for the Quantitative Section). For RC the main stress should be on improving your ability to focus and think actively while wading through an already information dense GMAT passages – the bottom line here is stamina and purely mental stamina. LSAT RC passages are tough and I have a plan to do at least 10 of them before my 2nd attempt. My other observation on doing RC’s effectively, is to shut down the CR kind of thinking. To be more precise, on the actual test, say, after doing 3 CR questions in a row, there is an involuntary spillover of that hard core logical thinking spree onto the RC passages. I personally found shifting gears a toughie. RC is mostly all about assimilating the information given and eyeballing the question and ticking the right answer – whereas in CR you have to assimilate the information (stimulus), eyeball the question stem, iterate to the right answer using logical thinking and tick the right answer. For Quants keep the plan simple – Focus first on the most important areas such as Number Theory, Inequalities, Ratios/Percents, Geometry & Work/Rate problems. Again Manhattan Quant resources are your best buddies. Go through all the indexed questions available on the GMAT Club Data Sufficiency and Problem Solving sections. Keep it simple and focus hard, GMAT is definitely not the proverbial Goliath and even if it claims to be one, it definitely is not an unslayable Goliath.
Do not get depressed, it by default puts you in a no-win situation. Snap out of it as quickly as you can and ensure you learn the habit of recovering from upsets – there is always a chance that some of the scores in the practice test will hurt and again this habit may also come in handy on your actual test day.
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17 Sep 2012, 01:24
