Any recommendations/resources on studying smart to push past a plateau?
I'm fairly far along in my GMAT studying, having completed Veritas online course, done almost all of the problems in their books, and now taking 1 practice exam/week. Based on a lot of the posts here, I think I've come up with a solid study strategy, but I've found that my score has flattened out and more or less hovering around the 640 range for the past month.
In the spirit of re-evaluating my strategy, I wanted to check with the community for other opinions.
Here are my current study situation and tactics. All material is Veritas, GMAT prep, and I've taken one
MGMAT practice exam:
* Focus on error log - I log all problems which give me trouble and working through and analyzing all problems for 2nd or 3rd time. This is a decent size list of 100+ questions so it keeps me quite occupied.
* Practice exams and review - At this point I take 1 practice exam a week and review in depth every question that I got wrong or spent a good amount of time on. Troublesome questions go into my error log for 2nd and 3rd review later. I take notes on timing performance to try and build good habits there.
* Expert review of challenge questions for me - I'll check the forums here for smart solutions to problems I come upon, and I regularly check with Veritas instructors to get their perspective in solving problems. The idea is to learn new approaches and to emulate the reasoning of experts.
These activities take up most of my time now for studying. I'll add in 5-10 new problems/wk from
OG also (although I'm very early in
OG progress). I've started watching Thursday's with Ron also, as I think those are great for strategies on various topics.
It's frustrating to seemingly follow a solid plan and not have it pan out..! Wonder now if I'm not approaching things in the best way..
My targets are 46+ Quant, 41+ Verbal, 710+ overall. My verbal is pretty consistent and closer to my target, so my focus has been on quant as that is still a struggle. Full practice test scores below.
I've redone some of the books in specific challenge areas, and right now I think my strategy would be to focus on my
error log in those challenge topics for me.
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Test Date Completed Quant Verbal Score
GMAT Simulator Set 1 2012-11-11
40 41 640
GMAT Simulator Set 1 2012-11-18
36 42 630
GMAT Simulator Set 2 2012-11-25
42 44 680
GMAT Simulator Set 2 2012-12-03
47 26 610
GMAT Prep 2012-12-09
43 38 660
GMAT Simulator Set 1 2012-12-16
41 41 650
GMAT Simulator Set 2 2012-12-24
45 39 670
MGMAT 2012-12-30
40 36 630