28 days more to go

I got only 28 days before I write the main exam. I am preparing not bad except I spent the whole weekend with out studying and was enjoying with friends (back of the mind i didnt even think about GMAT:)
Anyway, I took the courage yesterday to write my first GMAT Prep exam. I got a 730 on it, with Q50, V39, but I got 4 CR which I already know, so I feel that my verbal score is inflated by 20-30 points. One thing I felt good was that I got only 1 RC wrong. I applied the timing deadlines to verbal and math sections and followed them rigorously.

For Math, I kept a pacing strategy of 7 questions for every 15 mins, and for verbal 8 questions for every 15 mins. Except some questions overall math I could perform well. I did silly mistakes in 2 questions and on some hard questions, I did know there was no information to support choice C, but I selected E. (I have this weird feeling when I do a hard question that may be I dont know the concept so thats why the answer is C. But it turned out that 3 of such questions which I have answered C turned out to be E, the correct answer which I predicted while doing the question- next time I will select what I deduce and just move on).

Coming to verbal, I am losing grip in CR. I have almost worked on atleast 700-800 LSAT CR questions and at one point of time my accuracy was very good, but when I moved to OG from LSAT, I started doing less number of questions and especially harder ones and now after some time I get harder ones wrong. I should have continued doing LSAT instead of switching to OG completely. Anyways, yesterday I worked on like 50 CR questions from KAPLAN, GMATFIX and my accuracy went down. Kaplan answers are weird though, so I stopped doing them. GMAT FIX was also not so ok too, as I faced some trouble answering even easy CR's.

Coming to Verbal from GMATPREP exam, I think I need to still improve, I got 4 cr, which gave me around 8 mins of free time and 4 correct answers which skewed my score to 39. I should have waited for 2 mins for each of those questions and then answered. Anyways, I am ramping up my prep from tommorrow onwards.

I was searching online to read some debriefs of people who excelled from low scores to high scores and I found these two links, both these guys had an amazing improvement from previous scores, key was speed reading combined with LSAT CR and LSAT RC.

http://www.beatthegmat.com/770-q50-v45-from-uzbekistan-t31620.html
http://www.beatthegmat.com/760-q51-v42-from-uzbekistan-t55430.html#240574

So I have thought to keep working on LSAT CR/RC until the end of the exam. Based on that I have made the below schedule for tommorrow.

Morning 5:30 AM - 1 PM (7.5 Hours)
RC - LSAT 1 (1.5 hour)
CR - LSAT 1 (1.5 hour)
MATH - 50 Questions (2 hour)
SC - 1 Hour

4:30pm - 6:00pm Free time

6:00pm - 9:00 PM (3 HRS)
6-7 : CR/OG CR Review
7-8 : RC/OG RC Review
8-9 : SC Notes

Below is What I did today:

1. Completed reviewing GMAT PREP Exam1 (Took around 4 hours)
- Made some notes of wrong ones (I had math 8, verbal 11 incorrect ones)
2. Read some speed reading exercises ( read 2 words instead of 1, dont repeat, keep concentrate while studying -no nail biting or moving legs etc., just focus, Imagine what you are reading. ) Initial WPM was 246, but working on fixation I could move to 350.
3. Did 6 LSAT CR/ 5 OG CR
4. Did 3 OG RC
5. Did around 50 Math questions.


I got only 28 days more to go. I should make sure I follow strategies I have written for each topic and revise notes that I have written.

Below are my upcoming exam schedules:

07/10/2010 MGMAT1;
07/13/2010 MGMAT2;
07/15/2010 KAPLAN 4;
07/18/2010 GMATPREP1;
07/21/2010 MGMAT 5;
07/23/2010 Kaplan 5
07/26/2010 GMAT PREP2;
07/29/2010 Kaplan 6;
07/30/2010 GMATPREP 3;
07/31/2010 Kaplan 7;
08/01/2010 GMATPREP 4;
08/02/2010 Kaplan 8;
08/03/2010 GMAT PREP 5;
08/05/2010 Main Exam

Good night and happy gmatting..