Practice Exam Debrief - Recommendation Needed for Further Studying

Question

I’ve been studying for about a month (mostly just working my way through practice questions in the 2019 OG guide) and decided to take an official practice exam yesterday to get an idea of my progress to this point. All in all, it went pretty well - I got a 730 (45 Q, 45 V, 8 IR). I was encouraged by the score and the fact that I have a decent amount of room for improvement for Quant. I’m almost done with the questions in the OG guide, so I’m wondering what I should do next. Would I be better off getting the OG supplemental quant guide, or perhaps something like the Manhattan Advanced Quant guide? Or something else entirely? I think I could use more of a conceptual overview, but not sure if I should jump all the way to the advanced guides or start with some of the more fundamental ones. Another quick question - the format of practice exam was slightly different than that of the current GMAT. There were 37 quant questions and 41 verbal ones, and I was given 75 minutes for each section. I downloaded the software about two years ago (when I first had the idea hat I might do this some day), so I’m wondering if that’s the reason for the change. If so, am I able to re-download a more current version of the software so that I can try practice tests that more accurately reflect the current format of the exam?

Answer 1

Wow! Well let me first congratulate you on your score and on being self-aware enough to take an official practice test to test your studying structure thus far! Your verbal is extremely high (45 is 98th or 99th percentile) and your quant could definitely be improved from this point. Just to give you an idea, if you increase your quant to 48 or 49, you will be looking at a 750-760 total GMAT score which is absolutely fantastic.

Here are some basic questions to better understand your situation before I give advice!

1. When is your test scheduled for? (I.e. how much time do you have to improve your quant?) If you have not scheduled a test, you really need to in order to have a goal in mind while you are studying. Especially since you are already scoring 730.
2. What types of quant questions did you miss on your practice test? That should be where you start your focus to brush up your quant.
3. Are you committed to only using the GMAT OG guide or would you consider using online tools? There are some tools online that are really effective at focused quant prep. (thinking about TTP)

With regards to the GMAT software, I'm not sure. It probably wouldn't hurt to re-download the software just to make sure you are up to date.

One last thing, you can send me your AWA from the practice test and I can tell you if it is in the range to make a 6. If you did not do the essay, definitely do it in the future. The key for essays is repetition and structure for the GMAT.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Trey