Hi GMAT Experts,
I am an
e-gmat live prep student. I recently gave my gmat and scored 650 (Q50 V27). Clearly I am not happy with my verbal score (my target was 750) and purpose of writing this mail is to get some advice from you before I re-appear.
To give you a complete picture I will highlight all important aspects of my verbal preparation.
1) I started my preparation in mid August and appeared for GMAT on 13th November. I studied for around 7-8 hours per day. Since I took some time leave from office I was able to dedicate more than avg. time for my prep
2) As discussed in the
e-gmat strategy sessions I studied their concept files, attended live sessions and moved to scholaranium for practice after finishing
OG. My ability in scholaranium was as follows
RC - 68%
CR - 58%
SC - 68%
In CR and SC accuracy was about 50% for tough questions and more than 80% for easy and medium questions
For RC there was no such trend and accuracy was evenly split between medium and tough questions. For easy questions it was a little higher
I would like to mention that my biggest pain point among the 3 sections was CR. I struggled a lot in that. After reading about some experts advice on GMAT club i started solving some questions from LSAT. I thought practicing from LSAT helped me as I was not afraid of tough questions and started becoming comfortable with the thinking that is required for CR. This is my takeaway but i would like to gather some thoughts from you.
3) Also I give GMAT prep test after 1.5 month of my prep to see where I am standing. At this point of time i have already covered all my concept files and live sessions and moved to scholaranium for practice. I scored 700 (Q49, V35). I was happy to see 700 but wanted to move close to 750. I didn't take a diagnostic test before the start of my prep. I realized this was a big mistake
4) After 15 days of more practice I give another gmat prep test and this time scored 690 (Q49, V33). I thought i need to do more practice.
5) Since I have completed all the difficult questions in scholaranium I moved to gmat club to see what other resources I can use to practice. There I got comprehensive documents for all the three sections RC, CR and SC. These document contain questions form gmat prep and is one of the biggest resource of official questions. I practiced all these questions.
I saw that I was improving in all the three sections
a) My RC accuracy was increasing steadily and timing was also improving. Also I started practicing from LSAT
b) My CR accuracy was also close to 85%. Thanks to LSAT i was able to see the change
c) My SC accuracy was around 70%. I kept working on it and solved more and more questions
6) I also signed up with
MGMAT tests to see whether my test scores are improving or not. My test scores were as follows:-
MGMAT 1 - 660 (Q48, V31)
MGMAT 2 - 640 (Q45, V32)
MGMAT 3 - 650 (Q43, V36)
MGMAT4 - 690 (Q46, V38)
I was never worried with my quant scores (Manhattan quant is too difficult) and was happy that my verbal scores are improving.
I thought if i can get close to V40's my target of 750 is possible as i was confident about my quant
7) At the end of my prep I took the
e-gmat verbal workshop and got a score of 41. I was disappointed but thought may be it was a bad day and i should continue with my prep.
8) At last i gave a free veritas prep free mock test and got a score of 650 (Q49, V32). In verbal I found many debatable OA's. I tried to forget it and focus on my actual exam
9) I appeared for GMAT and was devastated to get a score of 650. After getting V27 i got depressed and started looking at my 3 months work as complete waste. Today I generated my EPR report to see what went wrong in the test.
My EPR scores for verbal are as follows
1) CR - 23/51
2) RC - 26/51
3) SC - 31/51
I just don't understand what happened with my CR and RC. After having practiced so much how can i screw these sections.
Also i was not nervous during the exam. Infact my quant section was very smooth. I finished my quant 5 mins earlier and I was hopeful that I can nail this test. Also verbal started good and I think it was this third RC around question 22-23 where things started slipping away. I wasted a lot of time on that RC and was not able to identify right answers and ultimately had to guess. After that I started seeing some very simple questions. Also I was able to reach till question 38 and ultimately had to guess the last three questions.
10) I just wanted to understand how should I prepare now. I want to reappear within a 1-1.5 month and what should be my strategy.
Also I would like to gather some thoughts from you on the following points
- Does practicing from lsat helps? What do you think? Should I continue?
- Also I have exhausted most of my resources what all resources I can leverage now?
Please provide some tips so that i can improve for my next attempt.