Timing help to break through to 760

[seane90]

I took the GMAT back in June and scored a solid 690 38V/47Q . I was happy with my quant subscore as it was the highest I had gotten up to that point but I was disappointed with the Verbal score because I had been hitting 44/45 in my MGMAT practice tests. The enhanced score report indicated that reading comprehension was the culprit at 56th percentile, whereas CR and SC were much stronger at 84th and 94th percentile.

I decided I would schedule both the GRE and another GMAT seeing as the material is similar and that I knew I could do well on both. I scheduled the GRE for August and the GMAT for October. I wanted a break from the GMAT and figured the "cross training" would be good for my second attempt.

I was able to use the quant I learned for the GMAT to get a 166Q score on the GRE. I also was able to get a 168V score after a lot of dedicated studying (lucubration?) and the use of the verbal questions 5LB book of GRE problems. So I'm glad to write that I achieved a great GRE score and will certainly be a competitive applicant for some great schools.

However, I still want to take the GMAT because I want the challenge and it's paid for already. So I've been going over all my weaker areas and have improved my quant and regained my verbal scores. I bought and took three different official GMATPrep exams over the last month and a half and scored 730 (44V/47Q) , 740 (45V/47Q) , 750 (44V/49Q). That last quant score is 2 points above my best and I think I may have one more point in me. I know 45V/49Q is 760 and that it's achievable for me since I've gotten both the Q and V score in full testing conditions (but on separate tests). But ultimately I think 45V/50Q is in play and maybe even 46V/50Q.

The verbal section I generally don' have an issue with timing but the quant sometimes I do run into trouble and waste time on problems that I ultimately get wrong anyway. What are the guidelines for skipping questions if your goal is a 49Q or 50Q. I've noticed in my review of my practice tests that there's at least 6 incorrect problems that I could have gotten right if I had more time on them. An extra 15-25 seconds per those 6 problems could have allowed for me to glean the insight necessary to solve, instead of being forced to rush and missing what the problem was really testing/getting at. When I look back at my practice tests I realize that that extra 15-25 seconds per question could have been gained by cutting myself off from several problems that were just drains on the resources of both time and mental energy. For that reason I'm fairly confident I can get to a 50Q provided that there's a reasonable number of challenging questions that I have an allowance to skip.

Do you have a guideline for the number of questions I should be skipping and making educated guess on if I want a 49Q or 50Q? I know there's going to be problems that I cannot solve in a reasonable time and I know I have some flexibility to guess but I don't want to over do it either.

[StaceyKoprince]

Great job so far!

At a Q49+ level, I generally recommend planning to (immediately) bail on 4 problems. Immediate bail = I recognize within about 20-30 seconds that this question is really bad for some reason (big area of weakness for me + hard, or similar), and I guess my favorite letter and move on. I have had multiple students do this on 4 problems and still score 50 or 51. (And on my last official test in January of this year, I bailed on 8 problems and still scored a 48.)

Note that you will also ultimately give up on other problems—you try but it falls apart and you have to guess in the end. So this doesn't mean that you will guess on only 4 problems—it means that you will guess really fast on 4 problems.

That will save you ~6 minutes that you can then distribute across those other problems. You might not even use all your time! On that one where I bailed on 8, I finished maybe 5-6 minutes early. I closed my eyes and meditated for most of the time—gave me a good mental break going into the next section.