Why did I get STUCK ????

Question

Hello people. I have been studying for the Gmat for more than 2 months by now and I boosted my score up of 30/40 points each new cat that I took, but then it looks like I have reached a level that I cannot exceed:

I am taking MGMAT CATs:

1) 530 (Q35, V28)
2) 570 (Q42, V27)
3) 600 (Q37, V35)
4) 540 (Q39, V27)
5) 580 (Q39, V31)

It looks like I am not improving. 
I do review each CAT but I am actually unable to tell which ones are my weaknesses.
I don't know how to get the best out of the assessment report, but primarily, I don't feel to have any particular weak subject. My main problem is that I make too many careless mistakes, let's say 10 careless mistakes per section. So I am working on how to avoid these mistakes but it looks like I am not able to do it.

Do you have any advice on how to do the review, avoid careless mistakes, or on something else that would be really useful for me?

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MarcoMining

GMAC has publicly stated that the Official Score that you earn on Test Day is within +/- 30 points of actual ability. Assuming a similar 'swing' in how your CATs function, your 5 CAT score results show that you essentially performed the same each time (about 570 +/- a few points). Thus, it's more appropriate to say that you handle certain aspects of the GMAT consistently well, but you also make certain consistent mistakes. Before I can offer you the specific advice that you’re looking for, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) What study materials have you used so far?
2) What is your goal score?
3) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
5) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

MarcoMining · Answer

hi  EMPOWERgmatRichC 
1) I have been studying from the MGMAT guides 
2)700+
3)on 2 weeks 
4) between December and March (dates are much spread out between the schools)
5)I have picked many, they range from middle-level ones, as Frankfurt School of Finance, to high-level ones, as LBS

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MarcoMining

Raising a 570 to a 700+ will likely require at least another 2-3 months of consistent, guided study - and you'll have to make significant improvements to how you handle BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections. Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. With just 2 weeks of potential study time remaining, there will be a limit to how much you can improve, so you might want to consider pushing back your Test Date.

1) What is the minimum Score that you would apply with to any of your chosen Schools?
2) Going forward, how many hours do you think you can consistently study each week?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

MarcoMining · Answer

EMPOWERgmatRichC

1) a 650 would be good for me. I could even push back the date, but then I wouldn't have the same amount of time to study as I did have these months. It would probably fall to maximum of 1h a day.

2) For the first 2 months, I studied at an average of 5/6h a day. Now I am keeping an 8/9h-a-day pace.

The point is that I feel like I have the content knowledge to beat the test, but I don't have the discipline: I rush, get frustrated, make silly mistakes, I random guesses on questions that look hard to me and then realize that I could have got them in 1m30s, ecc ecc

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MarcoMining

Raising a 570 to a 650+ will likely still require at least another 1-2 months of consistent, guided study. While there's no harm in taking the GMAT in 2 weeks, you would almost certainly have to take the Exam again later, so you can save some money (and aggravation) by planning for a more deliberate and realistic approach to this next phase of your studies.

"Review" is an exceptionally important part of the GMAT training process; your ability to define WHY you're getting questions wrong is essential to defining the areas that you need to work on (and the specific things that you need to 'fix'). As such, I'd like to know a bit more about your last CAT. While a full Mistake Tracker would provide a lot more information, there are some basic questions that you should be able to answer (and the more EXACT you can be with your answers, the better):

After reviewing each section of this recent CAT, how many questions did you get wrong....
1) Because of a silly/little mistake?
2) Because there was some math/verbal that you just could not remember how to do?
3) Because the question was too hard?
4) Because you were low on time and had to guess?
5) How many Verbal questions did you 'narrow down to 2 choices' but still get wrong?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

MarcoMining · Answer

EMPOWERgmatRichC

I have downloaded from the web the Empower Mistake Tracker and I fill it every time I complete a CAT. 
1) I get an average of 10Q wrong because of silly mistakes. They are due to miscalculations, not well-organized work, Oor "did the math in my head", which is something that I do on DS: I look one of the options and say " yes, it will surely work" WITHOUT PROVING IT)

2) "Couldn't remember how to do" is something that happens on Sentence correction when I can't remember a specific rule. On Quant, it may happen only on permutations and combinations.

3)"Because the question was too hard" happens on the Quant, and it happens at an average of 6/7Q per CAT ( multi-shape geometry, 3 overlapping, extc) but these are the kind of questions that I dump immediately since I have read that they do not count.

4) "low on time guessing" is something I succeed to manage on Quant thorough dumping the hardest questions (multi-shape geometry, 3 overlapping). So, even if I am early on, I would still dump such questions since I already know they would take too long and would not count that much. 
On verbal though, I do have this problem; in fact, to stay on pace, I usually randomly guess 1/2 CR questions.

5) "narrow down to 2 and still get the wrong one" is something that happens a lot on Verbal, and I do not know why!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MarcoMining

The broad category of 'silly mistakes' is one of the of the biggest factors in why Test Takers can't improve their Scores. Between the Quant and Verbal sections, there are only 67 questions - so if you're getting 10 questions wrong that you SHOULD have gotten correct, then that is significant. In simple terms, you cannot 'absorb' those types of missed opportunities and still hit 700+, so some of your immediate focus needs to be on your 'mechanics' (how you take notes, organize your work, etc.). By extension, you might need to make some adjustments to how you 'see' (and respond to) GMAT questions - meaning that learning and practicing new Tactics will also be required. The good news is that the work is generally fairly straight-forward; the bad news is that you'll have to do a lot of it (and you can't really "cram" that type of activity). If you could push back your Test Date to mid-january to late-january, then there is a Study Plan that I think can get you to 650+.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

MarcoMining · Answer

EMPOWERgmatRichC

thank you very much for your advice

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

HI MarcoMining,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. So, the first thing that I’m noticing about your situation is that you are pretty far from your 650+ score goal but continue to take practice tests. Thus, it’s clear that you are taking practice tests before you are ready.

GMAT practice tests best serve two main purposes. The first purpose is to provide diagnostic information. In other words, by taking a practice test, you can get a sense of what types of GMAT questions you’re comfortable answering and arrive at a reasonable estimation of how you would score on the GMAT at that point in time. The second purpose is, naturally, to provide a way to practice taking the GMAT and handling its various challenges, such as time pressure and the varying difficulty of the questions presented.

People often misuse practice tests as primary learning tools. You may have seen posts that go something like the following: A person with a score goal of 740 has been preparing for six weeks, has already taken all six of the official practice tests, and is wondering why her scores have been 600, 590, 570, 610, 600, and 560. In such a case, the person likely has been using practice tests as primary learning tools, meaning that taking practice tests has been much of, or possibly most of, what she has been doing to drive up her score.

Can practice tests be valuable tools for learning and continued score improvement? Yes, of course, if they are used properly and at optimal times in your preparation. However, practice tests should not be used as primary learning vehicles, because practice tests don’t really provide the kind of practice that you need to increase your score. To improve your score, you need to learn the basics of answering various types of GMAT questions, and then practice applying what you have learned by carefully answering practice questions in order to learn to answer them correctly. When you first learn how to answer a particular type of question, answering that type of question correctly can easily take way longer than the two minutes or so per question that you are allotted when taking the GMAT (or a practice test). Two minutes per question can fly by, and if you want to finish the sections of the test on time, in many cases, regardless of whether you have figured out how to answer a question, you may have to just answer and move on. So, while taking a practice test can be a great way to work on your overall approach to taking the GMAT, taking a practice test is not a great way to practice getting right answers to various types of questions. To effectively prepare for the GMAT, you have to practice answering questions of each type without the time constraints of the test and work up to a point at which you can answer questions of each type in around two minutes. When you take multiple practice tests early in your prep, the tests simply underscore exactly what you already know: you need to learn more content and develop more skills to hit your score goal. Why spend three hours taking a practice test just to learn what you already know, wasting a valuable learning tool in the process?

Of course, you can benefit from taking one diagnostic practice test early in your preparation. Furthermore, once you’ve done substantial preparation and mastered much of the content tested on the GMAT, when you sit for practice tests, they will actually show, to some degree, lingering weak areas that require further study. I say “to some degree” because although practice tests provide a pretty good approximation of how a person would score on the GMAT at a particular point in time, because the sample size of questions on any practice test is rather small (31 quant questions and 36 verbal questions), practice tests don’t do a very good job of pinpointing specific areas of weakness. For example, let’s assume that of the 31 quant questions on a given practice test, you encounter one Rate-Time-Distance question and get it wrong. Should you conclude that you need extensive work on Rate-Time-Distance questions? Of course not. Similarly, what if you correctly answered the Rate-Time-Distance question? Are you good to go on those questions? Maybe. But maybe not. In fact, let’s assume that you took six practice tests, saw a total of six Rate-Time-Distance questions, and correctly answered them all. Can you conclude that you’re solid on Rate-Time-Distance questions? Probably not. One thing that makes the GMAT challenging is the vast potential for variation in the questions. There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of variations of Rate-Time-Distance questions that can appear on the test. So, correctly answering five or six (or ten) Rate-Time-Distance questions doesn’t really tell you much. You must take care not to over-infer based on practice tests alone.

To truly improve your GMAT quant and verbal skills, and before taking any further tests, you will want to follow a linear study plan that allows you to slowly build mastery of one GMAT topic prior to moving on to the next. Within each topic, begin with the foundations and progress toward more advanced concepts.

If you’d like more detailed advice on how to improve your quant and verbal skills, feel free to reach back out, and I’ll be happy to help. You also may find it helpful to read this article about 
 how to score a 700+ on the GMAT .

MathRevolution · Answer

Hello, MarcoMining

As we see your score, it seems that the range of fluctuation in your verbal score is larger than Quant score. It is important to get great scores on both verbal and Quant, however you should take a step to improve one by one. As ‘Verbal’ needs more time to improve score than ‘Quant’, we recommend you to firstly focus on improving and having a solid ‘Quant’ score. (Of course, you should also make a constant effort on studying verbal.) Also, most of the reasons why people make mistakes are time pressure. Even though you tackle a lot of DS&PS questions and become familiar with time pressure on your practicing sessions, you could be obsessed with the pressure again if you are taking a real GMAT test. If you cannot make sure that your method can contribute to improving your math solving skills or managing time, we recommend you to change the way solving DS and PS.

To improve quant score quickly, the best way is to focus on the DS type of quant problems first. Our ’Variable Approach’ for DS that you have never seen before guarantees high accuracy and time efficiency. On average, our students improve +5 points on the quant and have about 10 minutes to spare before the math section ends. We apply ’variables–equations matching system’ to the DS questions, which is counting the number of variables and equations given in the question. By doing so, you can determine which answer choice will most likely be the answer.

Then, you can apply our ‘IVY approach’ to PS type questions. Our IVY approach for PS can give you lots of tips and techniques to find the answer quickly and easily. You can quickly solve the questions and have 10 minutes to spare.(More information about our approach: https://www.mathrevolution.com/gmat/vs)

We post our questions for DS &PS every week under Forum>GMAT Quantitative. It’s a good place to practice our methods. Also check out our tips on how to improve your score. https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-ultimate ... 09801.html.

Check out our free trial pack and free video lessons on our site at mathrevolution.com See if our materials work for you! While there, don’t forget to try our free diagnostic test!!

Please let us know if you have further questions.
You can reach us at info@mathrevolution.com

Success is within your reach,
Good luck!

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