GMAT plateau at 660 ... WHY ?

I was having the same problem till a couple of weeks back, but off I am touching the 700 mark on GMAT prep. Never could do better than 680 on MGMAT.

What I could decipher from GMAT prep is that,in V, we need to get less than 10 Q's wrong to score anything around high 30's. Like 39 or 38. Anything above that, GMAT prep penalizes very badly, with the verbal dropping down to less than 35.

In Q, I found out that the more hard questions we get right, though we get some easy ones wrong, we get a good score of 48-49. Once I got only 9 questions wrong, in two tests, in Q and got 49 on GMAT prep and the other time I got some 13 Q's wrong, but still ended up getting 49 in Q.

What I analyzed was that, in the third case, though I got some easy ones wrong,silly mistakes; I got some toughies right, some combination's and probability and a couple of co-ordinate q's right.

So my personal suggestion, high accuracy in Verbal and getting hard q's right in Q will take you past 700 on GMAT prep.

I am still to give my GMAT, so I am not yet THE guy to give suggestions, but still, my personal experience.

Hi Praveen,

Good Observations, now that you mention it even I feel that you are right about the Verbal section -- Getting under 10 wrong to get a decent ~40 Verbal. Regarding math, I still get 14-16 wrong and I guess I am doing something majorly wrong which I am unable to pin point !

first off i wouldnt really say 3 cats = "plateau" or whatever.... it is only 3 tests! did you check your mistakes and use error logs to see how to fix them? Also DONT try to correlate between # wrongs vs score. First of all you wont know the number wrongs on test and 2nd it is dependent on difficulty of the question you got wrong so in theory 1 easy wrong is worth a lot more than 3 very difficulty wrong...

Great..wanted to kick-off a similar post myself.

Have my GMAT next week, took Gmat Prep & MGMAT and I am in the same position. Stuck around 650.
As per my observation for verbal, my maximum mistakes were in SC(more than 70%) and best was RC. For Verbal, the penalty is very high for incorrect answers but yes as someone pointed out, getting an easy one incorrect is worse than getting 3 difficult ones incorrect.

One more thing I noticed was that, the lesser consecutive questions you get incorrect the better your score is i.e. if you get 2-3 or more consecutive Qs incorrect, your score will fall drastically. Though obviously one cannot know if they make a mistake, this is something that everyone should keep in mind. If you answered a question with a doubt make sure you get the next one correct.

My exam is scheduled for next Tuesday and I need to improve on Quant & SC. Some of my friends who recently took GMAT said that the quant in actual GMAT is tougher compared to GMAT Prep which makes it even more important to work on my quant skills.

Experts help - SOS!

I am not sure if this might be of interest to anybody, but after a couple more CATs I managed a 690 and 720 on MGMAT. I am not sure what this means, but I like the range.

I agree with shaselai in saying it's not really a plateau or anything.

1. The number of questions you get wrong is no indication of anything. I got 8 questions wrong on my GMAT Prep and still got a 50 in Q; 6 wrong in verbal gave me a 47.
2. The difficulty levels matter. It's harder to gauge question difficulty in verbal more so than in Quant.

I highly recommend going through your weaknesses after taking another practice CAT and then working on them methodically.

For SC, go through the explanations of not just the questions you answer incorrectly but also those you answer correctly. Make sure you know the logic which led you to mark it as the answer so that you can duplicate it in the exams. Also, there is a finite list of concepts GMAT questions you on (e.g. Subject Verb agreement, Modifiers, Pronoun errors etc). If you are exposed to all of them time and again, you should fare much better in the exam. CR and RC sections are much more objective and if you chalk out the strategy you are going to follow and stick to it, you should be able to do well in them.

OG Quant is simpler than what you will encounter in actual GMAT (considering a score of above 600). Even GMAT prep test quant is somewhat simpler than the actual GMAT quant though it still is a fair representation. I would expect a score of +-40 of what I get in GMAT prep test.