Hi everyone,
Thanks in advance for your time reading this and helping me. I am in desperate, desperate need of it after 3 years of failure.
Some background: got very good grades until about age 14, but had about a 15 year gap of any academic rigor or working with that sort of content prior to starting my GMAT path Jan 2013. Highlights below on what I have done since then. Please let me know where I am going wrong to only get a 40 point increase after all this effort, time, money. Thanks.
--Started Jan 2013 w/"GMAT Advantage - On Site" Kaplan course & their math refresher course. All I really got was a sense of what the test included. There was no depth and no individualized attention.
--After attending every single class and scheduling the GMAT mid March 2013 --I was so unbelievably unprepared and scoring so bad on CATs that I didn't even show up to the exam.
--I made several attempts throughout 2013 despite a crazy new job, starting with the fundamentals--math lessons from my engineering-degree dad and my boyfriend at that time who went to Haas, algebra for dummies type books, reading from WSJ, Economist, Scientific American, Kaplan's "GMAT on demand" program, memorization of formulas, some CATs.
--I took another exam Mar 2014 and scored a miserable 420. I guess it was not enough DIRECT gmat problems to make me feel competent at all at any of it.
--I decided to take semester-long live math classes at local junior colleges through summer 2014. I took intermediate algebra (got an A+) and intro to statistics (got an A-) and a math refresher class (28 hours) that covered things like geometry. Clearly, it seems there is something about the way the GMAT presents problems that's impossible for me to be successful at, where in other formats, I can be successful.
--For various reasons, I didn't restart again until Jan 2016. Since then, I've done nothing else. I reviewed all my formula memorization notes, creating audio files from them to hear during my commutes, I ordered the full set of
OG books and took several of their easy/medium/hard quizes (mixed problems) going through every single problem and the explanations thoroughly (which is also what I do with all the CATs I take too...which takes a tremendous amount of time, but I have been trying to shoot for mastery over sheer volume. I scheduled exams again--one for May 27 and one for June 24, I went through the entire quant review book's section 3.1 carefully, I watched a Manhattan full course recording (9 classes of ~3 hours each) and I spent 10 hours with a tutor.
--Results?? 550 CAT UNtimed on April 18 (3 IR, 37 Quant, 29 Verbal) and then a 420 CAT on April 28 (NOTE: ran out of time on quant--at 3 minutes left I was at question 20 and had to guess on several verbal too, IR 1.7, Quant 15, Verbal 32). That's when I decided to look for a new tutor.
--Spent about 18 hours with new tutor over the last month. He had a more structured lesson plan and more direct experience tutoring on the GMAT. He gave me assigned problems from the
OG books (389 I went over the past month timed and with a THOROUGH analysis of all the explanations), but in the last month alone I have spent $1,260 and virtually zero results to show for it.
--First of the two GMATs May 27 was a 460. I only increased 40 points from 3 years ago, AFTER ALL OF THE ABOVE EFFORTS AND AFTER UTILIZING TIME MANAGEMENT SKILLS TO GET THROUGH EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM in the exam, which I had never done before. In the past I skipped quite a few problems. The one May 27 was paced fairly well. 1 on IR, 26 Quant, 29 verbal. I canceled it, I was so devastated and confused beyond belief.
Some success stories seem to have pointed to tutoring, but I am not yet convinced. Is it because tutoring does not help much or I just found lazy thieves? The problem I have with both tutors is they don't take enough time to evaluate me holistically. Don't you think a tutor should take a more active role in evaluating trends, pin-pointing where EXACTLY my weaknesses are so we know where to devote more time and energy and they know exactly what I need to fix and how?
The school I am aiming for has a median 660 and I need to apply by end of June. The minimum they take is 600.
Bottom line, I have to date spent over $5,800 on this investment, including 1-3 years of my time and the opportunity cost of not doing other things, including running out of time to be able to start a family. This sort of gambling on life and scarce resources creates so much stress and negativity. At least if I saw some improvement worth mentioning, I could keep going, but psychologically I have been tortured. I really wonder what I am doing wrong here. I don't want to give up, but I really need some advice that will work, as I feel everyone who is supposed to help me has so far just scammed me out of $6K.
Lost, confused, frustrated, defeated, and very sad,
Truly yours.
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Updated on: 29 May 2016, 19:03
