Should I worry about breakdown, or just total score

Question

I took the gmat about a month ago (660, q44, v37), and am taking it again on 12/10. 
These are my last two practice tests Manhattan GMAT 2 and 3
#2 11/7 - 680 q46 v36
#3 11/16 - 690 q48 v36

I have put consistent effort in Verbal for the past 2 weeks, (MGMAT SC book), but have seen 0 results, to be honest I think its made me question common sense in certain problems. I'm a native speaker, and when it comes to SC I used the ear test in most situations... now I find myself trying to dissect sentences a bit too much, and missing obvious flaws. I'm not bothering working on my RC or CR because I'm a bit too set in my ways, I read carefully and answer, taking notes seems to make me lose focus.

Currently I'm about 80% on 600-700 Questions and 50% on 700-800 Questions on SC.

Now, should I just focus my efforts on hitting 50 on quant, which I think I could, and hope for a 36/37 Verbal, or should I continue to focus my energy on SC. Would schools care if I end up with say 710 Q50, V37 instead of a 710 Q47, V40.

The goal was a q50 v40 breakdown, but I'm starting to think 36/37 is about as high as I can get my verbal, and maybe its time to just focus the next few weeks on improving my quant. Thoughts?

highwyre237 · Answer

100% agree, I do well when I'm in that chapter, but when I'm finished, I dont know if I'm even retaining any of the info...

I'm planning on taking another practice either this weekend or early next week. I'm going to really focus on listening first, and then see if I can make sense of when to use what I've learned. I'm assuming I'm just overthinking SC now, I spend more time on them now, second guessing everything. I had a few on my last test that I switched from the correct answer to the wrong one...

rjkaufman21 · Answer

Hmm interesting. I found that trying to figure it out by listening didn't really work well for me, at least on higher level questions, because people speak incorrectly all the time so it tends to sound normal. What I always do is cut out the excess from the sentence so you are left with the very fundamental part of the sentence. Once you do that it makes it quite a bit easier to see if there are problems with verb/subject, dangling modifiers, correct tense, parallelism etc.

I would also suggest doing the SC questions from the OG in the order they are presented in the OG rather than doing them by error type as you would by following MGMAT. This forces you to look for every possible error type, rather than just looking for a specific problem that you just read a chapter on. I read through the SC guide within the first couple weeks of studying and found that just by doing a few random SC practice problems every day or two I never really had to revisit the guide, and by the time I finished the SC questions from the OG, I was able to pick out errors very quickly - to the point where SC questions would take me 30-45 seconds on average.

Last thing, and you probably already realize this, but it is common on low and mid level questions that multiple answer choices will have the same error, so you can often eliminate 2 or sometimes even 3 answer choices by finding a single error. Just make sure you have A-E written on your pad so you can cross them out as soon as you find errors.

You probably already know and do these things, but I figured I'd throw them out there.

bb · Answer

Your practice scores are indicating you can score within the same range of 660 (potentially more since it will be a second attempt and you will be more familiar and will know what to expect). You need to plug the holes (whatever they are and fast in time for the 10th). You should be getting 700+ in your practice tests to really make a difference and go beyond 660.

You may want to follow the strategies exactly as they are written. If you want a high score, you will need to inconvenience yourself

highwyre237 · Answer

update
#2 11/7 - 680 q46 v36
#3 11/16 - 690 q48 v36
 #4 11/20 - 700 q46 v39

Took MGMAT #4 over the weekend - 700! Q46 V39, highest I've scored on verbal so far, Q was a bit low. I have a feeling if everything is working out correctly, i could break 700 on test day, but yeah, I'm not confident where i am now. Started the MGMAT advanced quant book yesterday, hoping I'll do a bit better. Hoping to take a gmat prep cat over the long weekend.

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Should I worry about breakdown, or just total score

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