EMPOWERgmatRichC wrote:
Hi tyrion,
You've provided a lot of information, which is good - I'll need some additional information to properly diagnose what's been going wrong for you on Test Day though.
1) How much time did you spend studying before each of your GMATs?
2) What GMAT resources (books, Courses, etc.) did you use?
3) Did you take any of these Veritas CATs more than once (if not, then which CATs did you use when you studied before?)? How did you score on the GMAC CATs?
4) What time of day did you take these CATs and what time of day were your Official GMATs?
5) On Test Day, did you ever have pacing problems in the Quant or Verbal sections? Did you finish early or have to rush just to finish? Did you have to guess on a bunch of questions at the very end (or did you ever leave any questions unanswered?)?
6) How long was the ride from your home to the Testing Center?
Here are the immediate issues:
1) Taking 6 CATs in the 2 weeks leading up to Test Day was NOT a good idea. You likely "burned out" a bit (and didn't even realize it during the Exam). You should take no more than 1 CAT/week.
2) The lack of sleep can ABSOLUTELY impact your performance on Test Day, especially later in the exam (during the Verbal section) when fatigue really starts to set in.
3) Your Official Scores are consistent. Assuming your Scaled Scores on your first GMAT were close to the scores on your second GMAT, there's some kind of "disconnect" that occurs on Test Day. As such, you have to make your next set of practice CATs "match up" with Test Day in as many ways as possible.
In answer to your question:
-Business Schools don't care how many times you take the GMAT; if you score higher on your third attempt, then THAT'S the score that they'll pay attention to.
Thankfully, all of these issues can be fixed. The GMAT is a predictable, standardized Test, so you CAN train to CRUSH it.
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
Thanks Rich for the great points. In regards to the additional information:
1) It's hard to say exactly. I'm a consultant and my work requires me to travel so even though my preparation spanned 4 or 5 months, I would probably say it's closer to 2-3 months of work that actually helped me improve my score on the practice tests.
2) I started off with GMATPILL to brush up on concepts that I wasn't familiar with but realised I needed to improve my Verbal so I went through the Manhattan SC book a few times till I felt I was comfortable with the concepts. This helped me look at the questions as logical rather than playing it by ear. I'm still tempted to read the entire sentence as pick what sounds good. I fear that may have happened on the exam. For CR, I used
e-Gmat. It was helpful in formalising a process to attack any CR question. I didn't have time to go through the SC part of
e-GMAT, something I plan on starting in the next few days. I didn't do any preparation for RC. For Quant, it was mainly the gmatclub's text book. It's a great book and helped me to pick up some of those more intricate GMAT specific concepts that I wouldn't have know otherwise.
3) No, I bought the Veritas CATs 2 weeks before the exam and took them only once. I took the GMATPrep CATs for my initial preparation. I scored a 700 and 710 but I can't trust them. I took them during the initial days of my preparation and wasted them by not taking them under test conditions. If I had known how precious they were, I would have saved them for later. I did buy the extension pack, but again I viewed the test as practice rather than a measuring tool. Regret making that mistake.
4) This is something that I realised probably affected my score. I took the CATs around 11 am and 12 pm. My GMAT was at 9 am. I woke up at 6:30 that morning. For the CATs, I woke up an hour before taking them because I was on holiday. I will need to fix this when I take my other CATs.
5) I've been replaying the day in my head. During my practice CATs, for the verbal section, I would take my time during the first 25 questions when I had a question that I found challenging. This would lead me to hurry during the last 10-15 or so questions and I would work through them a lot faster and maybe guess a few of them. However, on the GMAT, on both attempts I started worrying about time a little earlier and didn't spend as much time on the first few questions as I normally would have. I didn't feel like I was choosing the wrong answer, but maybe if I had spent a little more time, I would have realised some silly mistake I was making. To answer your question, I don't remember guessing too many in a row for the Quant, but on Verbal I do remember guessing a few in a row (not more than 3), and answering some other questions a lot faster than I liked.
On this point, is there a timing strategy that you would recommend? I've done a quick search and there seems to be a lot of articles on the subject. There's a post on here by bb that looks great.
6) It took me 20-25 minutes to get there.
Thanks again for your help and the immediate issues. I will start working on them
.