EMPOWERgmatRichC
HI Santora,
Taking 'shorter' practice Exams is NOT the solution. The Official GMAT is a rather specific 'event', which you can train for, but you have to be strict about the details. To score a Q49+, you have to properly handle the Essay and IR sections, THEN handle the full Quant section. If your goal is a high OVERALL Score, then you also have to handle the full Verbal section.
With a Quant Scaled Score in the Q44-Q46 range, your 'issue' is NOT with "hard"/700-level questions - it's with a lack of tactics and the silly/little mistakes that you're making.
1) How long have you been studying?
2) What materials have you been using?
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
Hi Rich,
Thanks a lot for the reply and also useful tips. The answers to the questions are as follows:
I took a free diagnostic test from veritas prep and scored 660 Q49 V30. this was last week of may.
I have been in serious preparation from beginning of June (daily 1 - 2hours of study, and 3-4 hours during the weekend). First I started with verbal, the whole month of June. I have been following e-gmat - verbal for non verbals for this. I also went through the manhattan verbal books. My score improved to a verbal of 31 from V30 (

). I almost constantly score V31. I still did not complete the verbal part of OG13. MY preparation for verbal is still not complete as I plan to go through all the questions and the explanation of answers from OG13 and verbal review. Hope it improves by 4 points after this.
The month of July I completely dedicated quant. For this I followed, e-gmat quant, Gmat club questions and OG13 questions. I also went though the explanations from
manhattan gmat books. Having an engineering background, the concepts were quite easy to follow. As I already mentioned, I got most of the questions right under so called NON-exam conditions. However, during a mock gmat test. I get almost 4 out of first 10 wrong, especially 700 level questions. some of them are wrong due to silly mistakes as you rightly pointed out. Some of them take too much of time to solve, I try these questions for 2-3 mins and finally end up guessing. I also tried in 1 of the tests to smartly guess the answer, but still its like taking a chance and I mostly get it wrong. maybe this part is due to the lack of tactics as you have mentioned.
I took
manhattan gmat mock test and scored 610 (Q45 V31).
I took 3 tests (only quant) from Gmat club Beta and constantly scored Q44, Q45 Q44. The trend of mistakes is make is the same. Its not the topics that I need to right now focus on as I feel. I want to rightly concentrate on accuracy in exam conditions. Do not know what strategy to follow to get this right.
I'd be happy with a Q49, V35. i also feel that this is possible with the level I'm in right now.
Please comment and advice.
Best Regards,
Santora