Hi,

Good news: I feel with the wealth of practice problems, exams, and top notch instructors at Veritas, I've got amazing resources lined up to help me maximize my score.

Bad news: My score on practice exams has been up and down and pretty much plateaued during the last month.. to a level which is only around the range of my last GMAT exam!

Question:

How would you recommend a student to study smart at this point to get the best results? Or what resources/blog posts/etc would you recommend I look at?

With so much information, endless practice questions, and a plethora of different opinions in the blogosphere, I'd like to ensure I'm focused properly. I'm pretty far along in my studying and have completed all lessons and ~90% of the problems.

Here are my current study situation and tactics:

Focus on error log - I log all problems which give me trouble and working through and analyzing all problems for 2nd or 3rd time. I have gone back to focus on identified weak areas rather than continuing on with all problems in combinatorics and advanced word problems books.

Practice exams and review - At this point I take 1 practice exam a week and spend significant time reviewing every question afterwards. Troublesome questions go into my error log for 2nd and 3rd review later.

Both these activities take up most of my time now for studying. I'll add in 5-10 new problems/wk from OG or advanced word problems book also.

What do you think? I believe I've got a solid plan and adequate resources, but as things aren't panning out, I'd like to evaluate and get an expert opinion.

My targets are 46+ Quant, 41+ Verbal, 710+ overall, so my focus has been on quant as I'm further away there.

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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

Hey Tim,

Great question, and first let me say congratulations on taking such huge strides toward an elite score. You’re scoring well above average, you’re putting in a lot of effort, and you’re asking the right questions – those are all factors that lead us to believe you’ll get there.

In addition to what you’re doing with the error log and the quantitative focus, let me offer a few things that I think should help you. You know that saying that “90% of success is just showing up”? That will sound a little harsher than it needs to, but bear with me – there’s a point in the low 600s that most high-achievers (those with >3.3 GPAs from good schools) can get to simply by “showing up”, doing the homework, memorizing the important formulas, etc. That’s around the 75th-80th percentile overall. But to get much above that, remember that you’re competing against people that have already mastered the concept of “showing up”, doing the homework, etc. To separate yourself from that group you need to do a little more than master the content and have all the relevant concepts top of mind on test day. This is where the GMAT truly becomes a test of reasoning and higher order thinking. So with that in mind, let me recommend that you:

1) Get as comfortable as you can with the structure-based strategies for Data Sufficiency.

Data Sufficiency is often more about reasoning than math – if you can recognize the structure you know exactly where to spend time and have a good idea of the percentage likelihood of which answer is correct. The following blog posts will help, but more generally keep in mind – if the test makes it look like C is obvious, it’s probably not…you’re leaving some information on the table somewhere and you need to figure out what. If one statement is obviously sufficient, then the other is probably tricky – otherwise it’s not a challenging question. And if one statement is clearly not sufficient, then you probably need to consider why it’s there. It’s either a clue (some information you need but you may not have realized it until you saw it) or a trap (you might think you need it upon seeing it, but actually the other statement is sufficient, sneakily). Either way, the presence of an obviously insufficient statement should tell you that you need to consider exactly that piece of information.

Like I said, the following blog posts should help exemplify a lot of this…check these out:

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/12 ... difficult/
http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/11 ... s-obvious/
http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/09 ... fficiency/
http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/02 ... s-success/
http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/03 ... cant-c-me/


(due to SPAM) I am only allowed to post 5 links per reply, therefore my post will be broken up into a few posts)

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/04 ... ry-rudner/

You can save a lot of time and save yourself from several mistakes by just learning to “read” the test’s intent, particularly on Data Sufficiency.


2) Come up with a pacing strategy that works for you.

A lot of people in that content-mastery group in the low-to-mid-600s are perfectionists. They’ve studied as many formulas and shortcuts as they could, they’ve done every problem that they could get their hands on, and they’re bound and determined to not miss a single question. And so they spend >3 minutes on a few different questions, blow their pacing, and end up rushing and guessing for much of the exam. So instead of missing one difficult question every 5 or 6 questions, they miss several easier questions because of silly mistakes or the need to guess, and that limits their score. This article can help with that:

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/10 ... for-field/

3) Make a checklist of your 4-5 most common mistakes and keep those in front of you on test day.

Most of us are vulnerable to the same handful of mistakes regardless of how difficult the question is – as you’ll see in this blog post we call those questions “Shrumbusters”, where the problem is hard enough that once you’ve gotten through “the hard stuff” you let your guard down and fall victim to the kind of silly mistake you’ve made dozens of times. If you have that checklist in front of you and just click off each potential silly mistake before you submit your answer you can avoid the inevitable 1-2 silly mistakes that force you to get a question wrong when you did all the work right.

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/11 ... rumbuster/

4) Don’t chase obscure content – focus on shoring up the fundamentals if any are shaky.

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/02 ... un-talint/



All the work you’re doing will pay off, but hopefully the above strategies help you get past the content mastery level and break through to the 700s. Keep us posted!

Best,

The Veritas Prep Team

Thank you for the thorough response and resources! The info was very useful.

Well my GMAT journey came to an end today.

I'm happy to report that I surpassed my target score.. and I scored a 720!

It was a long and tough road (much more challenging than I ever imagined), thank you for your help.

First and foremost, congrats on your 720! We are happy that we were able to help you throughout your GMAT journey.



Best of luck!

The Veritas Prep Team