Strategy on focusing on quantitative or verbal reasoning to score 760+

Hi naaam,

710 is a great start! To improve your GMAT score to a higher level, you need to go through GMAT quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable, and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see, types that you would rather not see, and types that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you had to know to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles about
How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT and The Phases of Preparing for the GMAT.

Feel free to reach out with any further questions. Good luck!

Hi naaam,

70 points increase in just a day seems unbelievable. I hope you have used the right methods to solve the questions and no luck played part in the second attempt. Because there were many cases in which students scored pretty high in their mocks but could not score well on the actual test. So, make sure 710 is the true reflection of your score.

The path ahead:

As you said, go through the concepts of the topics in which you feel that you need a little more practice. Learn the right methods to solve the questions from that topics. And most importantly, analyze the mocks carefully. Go through the solution of each question in the mock, compare your approach with the right one and then narrow down the gaps in the approach if any. Ultimately, you have to solve the question using the right method. If not, the test might go either way on the day.

And if you feel that there's a lot to improve in verbal and that you need to do your prep in a more structured way, you can use a standard course to study the concepts and the right methodologies. Because ultimately, GMAT verbal is about eliminating four incorrect answer choices rather than just choosing the right one. So, to do this, your strategies and the methodologies have to be perfect. So, make sure you choose the right resource which can help you plan your studies well for the next couple of weeks and help you to work on your weak areas as well. You can check out the Verbal course of GMATWhiz.

If you need any more help with the study strategy, you can get in touch with me using the below link.