Hi, I just took the GMAT for the 3rd time (yesterday) and ended up with a disappointing score of 680
I am not sure if I would want to take the test again, since I am over-exhausted with all the pressure in preparing.
However, after I take some rest (around 2~3 months), I see my self re-opening the
OG again and visiting gmatclub for help.
I need some advice on how to improve Verbal (especially TIMING). I am rather slow and was never able to complete the whole verbal section on time.
First of all, some background information about myself.
I'm an engineer guy with 4 years of work experience in the field.
Non-native, therefore was very weak in Verbal.
Started preparing for the GMAT on Jan 2012 and have taken the test 3 times.
Test #1 (April): 600 (Q50, V23), AWA 5.0
Test #2 (May): 650 (Q51, V27), AWA 5.5
Test #3 (Aug): 680 (Q50, V31), AWA ?, IR ?
Preparation for test #3After the previous 2 tests, I had figured out that my weaknesses were in CR, and RC. I was pretty confident in SC. Therefore, for the 3rd test, which I hoped to be my last, I spent much of the time in preparing CR and RC. I knew I had to read faster and understand the authors point.
I figured out that I needed 2 mins for CR and if I needed more time, that meant I should guess and move on. I was able to improve on RC by taking notes. This helped to figure out the authors point, but at the cost of TIME.
The actual exam- AWA : was OK. Had enough time to proof-read my writing.
- IR : felt easier than the GMAT Prep software. Had more Quant based questions than Verbal ones.
- Quant : was more difficult than Test #2, but managed to finish the questions on time.
- Verbal : I managed to handle myself pretty well until halfway around Verbal (#20~25). My timing strategy was 2mins for every question. That went pretty well until I met a Science article on RC and this dragged me down. Because I am a science-oriented person, I somehow need to understand the concept of the passage (it was about neutrons and some kind of particle that led to an interesting conclusion on how to figure out the mass of the universe.) I passage was time dragging but the questions were even more. After I hit question #30 I found that I had less than 10 mins to go through the rest of the problems. This made me nervous, and after this point I somehow had to rushed through the questions, but SC kept on dragging me from accelerating. From questions #32, I used the "guess => solve => guess => solve" strategy, but under so limited time, I wasn't able to solve the problems confidently. I think I got too many consecutive questions wrong and this pulled down more scores even more.
I don't know how successive people manage to solve all the Verbal questions on time. During practice tests, I was able to maintain my speed (had actually 5 mins remaining after verbal), but on test day, with all the pressure, I was too slow for GMAT.
I would like some advice for improving speed on Verbal.
During the next 2 or 3 months of rest, I plan to focus on improving speed and accuracy.
Good luck to all who are preparing for admission this year.