Study and Strategy questions relating to the GMAT.
tanay.chaturvedi
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GMAT in the next 6 days!

by tanay.chaturvedi Sat May 24, 2014 2:56 am

Hello,

I have been preparing for the GMAT for close to 4 months now and had taken the test a couple of months back where I scored a 640. At that point, I believed I messed up because of exam day tension but the last two months of prep clearly showed me that I was far off from my target of cross the 700 barrier.

I have been scoring decently well in my GMAT Prep's which I have taken atleast 3 times each. I also bought the exam pack series.

My scores have been in the range of a 700 to a 750.

Six days from my test, I have absolutely no idea what to do. Its not that I am stressing but just that I now feel a lot has been done and feeling a certain degree of exhaustion. In the past couple of days, my focus levels have reduced. I am jumping from one topic to the other. My fear is that this attitude in the least few days might hamper my score.

Is there anything that I should be focusing on specifically to sail through these days and eventually get that big score I am desperate about.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Tanay
StaceyKoprince
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Location: Montreal
 

Re: GMAT in the next 6 days!

by StaceyKoprince Mon May 26, 2014 11:07 pm

Your practice test scores sound good - but you say that you've repeated those tests, so have you been seeing questions that you've already seen before? If so, your score is going to be at least a little artificially inflated. (More so if you have been skipping essay and/or IR.)

So, first, be aware of that.

Second, you're right to be worried that your mental exhaustion is going to cause problems on test day. As you lead into the real test, you need to do two things:
(1) STOP trying to learn new stuff. Just review what you already know - major strategies / major topics only. You know what you know and you're not going to change what you don't know - not at this point.
(2) Do a little LESS each day. The day before, don't review for more than an hour or two, max. The day before that, don't review for more than 3 hours. Think of it as a mental marathon - if you ran a practice marathon within a few days of the real thing, your performance would be terrible at the real marathon.

If you are really feeling so mentally exhausted that nothing seems to be working, then reschedule your test. You'll have to pay the whole $250 again because you're within 1 week of test day, but that's better than going in there exhausted and bombing the test.

Finally, you're exhibiting some anxiety about the test. This is normal, of course, but if you're also mentally exhausted, then that anxiety can ratchet up so high that you literally can't think on test day - and that won't do anything good for your score, of course.

Read these and look for anything that can help you to manage the stress:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... mat-score/
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... anagement/

Let me know what you decide to do. If you decide to postpone, give yourself at least a couple of weeks to get things back together - and then we can talk about how to use that time.
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep