Hi,

I did 2 practice exams (1 from GMAT life and 1 from GMAC), and resulting in 48/49 in Quan and 22/19 in verbal. I spent so much time in reviewing the questions on books and questions I got it wrong, but it doesn't help much for me to improve the overall score (570 and 560).

If I still want to hit at least 650 in the exam 3 weeks later, how my study plan should be? Of course I need to pay more attention to the verbal sections, but not sure how can I get the most of it. Should I postpone my exam further to buy some time in between?


Please advise.

Conrad

in addition, I scored 31 in verbal from one of them 800scores exam, but heard that those questions are fairly easy so scaled may be skewed.

Hey Conrad,

Great question - and, you know, I've always felt that there's exponentially more to gain from the practice tests by looking at them qualitatively and not just quantitatively. Your scores suggest that you have some work to do on the verbal section, but to maximize that work you should return to those tests and ask yourself:

-How was your pacing, and could you have benefited from going slower/faster or just allocating time more effectively (RC faster - an extra few seconds per CR to really internalize the conclusion of arguments)

-Of the questions you missed, were there major similarities (e.g. you're great at Subject-Verb agreement but almost never get Pronoun questions right)

-Do you make the same mistake repeatedly (e.g. out-of-scope answers on weaken questions or falling for idiom traps on SC)

-Are you employing strategies to focus on the proper portions of RC passages or CR stimuli? Or are you just reading and reacting?

See if you can come up with a list of top priorities based on how you're approaching the tests as of now, and work through those. If you just find 2-3 recurring mistakes that you make a few times each, you can save a ton of points by addressing those.

Hi,

Thank you so much for the suggestions. In the past 4 days, I pay higher attention to verbal, and my verbal score from 800score exam is improved from 31->34->37. However, the # of questions i got wrong only reduce 5-6. how could that happen? In addition, is the score from 800score exam a good indicator?

Thanks,

Conrad

Hey Conrad,

Congratulations on the improvement!

You know, that's not surprising that you can improve significantly but still miss a fair share of questions in total. The GMAT grading system is "adaptive", meaning that you get harder questions each time you answered the previous one correctly, and "easier" questions when you've answered incorrectly. So if you're getting enough additional questions right to merit harder subsequent questions, you're probably earning enough points and seeing hard enough questions to justify a significantly higher score. To understand the scoring algorithm more, check out this article (and the one linked within it): http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/09/gmat-tip-of-the-week-think-like-the-testmaker/

As for the practice test reliability...they're all decent but I wouldn't take those scores as pure gospel. Seeing improvement is very promising, but even more important is tracking how you're doing qualitatively. Ultimately the only score that matters is your test-day score, so I'd focus on learning things like:

-How are you pacing yourself?
-Which mistakes do you find yourself making frequently?
-Which question types are taking you longer than they should?
-How are you holding up, in terms of fatigue/stamina, toward the end of a long test?
-When you're rushing or lack focus, how are you having success refocusing?

Those items will help you improve, and improvement is the name of the game...like I said, I think the tests are pretty good as far as tracking, but tracking is much less important than learning/improving, and I do think the tests are great at giving you opportunities to analyze your performance and find items for improvement.

Keep up the hard work!