Score stuck at 590 - Q43 V29

InspiredSoul - First off, congratulations on that 150-point climb. You are knocking on the door of a 600, and that 600-700 range falls into a desirable category for many schools. As a tutor, I like to see the sort of plateau you have described: a consistent range within which you score across several practice tests, a range that lies markedly above where you started. To push past this point, however, you are going to have to look back on questions you have missed and be strict about tracking your errors. For example, do you tend to miss more suggestion/inference questions in RC or according to the passage questions? Does the content of the passage (e.g., economics, science) matter? If you forge ahead and expect anything different, you will probably make the same mistakes that you should be correcting now, and you will also be burning through valuable practice material. First, then, I would recommend going back through missed questions or those you had guessed on. Do NOT just look at the correct answer and tell yourself, Oh, of course that was it... I won't make that mistake again. Trust me, you will fall into the same trap down the road, and your track record would probably reveal as much. Rather than analyzing what makes the correct response correct, see if you can understand what makes each of the others incorrect. You will notice that on posts in this forum for Verbal questions, GMATNinja often has the most helpful expert reply. Read those posts, and you can see the quality of the analyses for yourself. It is not that GMATNinja just writes about the correct answer, but that he carefully discusses the content of the incorrect answers. If you can adopt that type of thinking, looking to disprove incorrect responses rather than search for correct ones, and if you start to pore over your past mistakes in the process, you will start to make gains. Of course, you also need to consider your Quant/Verbal split. You stand to gain much more ground in the latter, so that is where you should devote more time.

It can help to find a study buddy who may be stronger than you in certain areas of the test so that you can see what that person might have to say about a problem or a content area you seem to have trouble with. And if, at some point, you still feel stuck, and you do not think you can break out of your own rut, then it might be time to look into getting help either online or through in-person tutoring.

You still have plenty of time to prepare, and if you address that Verbal deadweight sooner rather than later, you will be posting here again within the month asking about how to break beyond a 650. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew