Post-Mortem 690, Career Goal and Retake Advice

Hi Guys,

I took GMAT around one month ago and ended up with score which I hate the most “690” – 48Q and 37V. I am very disappointed as I did not cross 700. My essays stood at 4.5. This is a long debrief so please bear with me.


Quants –

Preview - I graduated from High school with A in math, had 770 in quants in GRE (7 years ago) and had A- in toughest math course in MS. So basically I enjoy solving problems and I generally don’t give in to a problem at hand, which according to my analysis was the reason of this debacle. I will revisit this point later.

I covered following books to prepare for the quant section.

1. All the Manahattan GMAT quant books to brush up the basics.
2. Veritas prep Statistics
3. Veritas prep Probability and Permutation Combination
4. OG 12 and OG workbook problems.
5. OG 10 PS. Could not attempt DS qusns.
6. Manhattan GMAT advanced problems – did not get time to review the mistakes

Other than inequality and initial hiccup with data sufficiency problems, I never really had too much trouble solving the GMAT problems. But I always ran into time constraint ranging from 7 qusns in last 1 min to 2 qusns in last 1 min. I think the poor time management led to the 48 in Q rather than 50. Actually I had 10 questions left to do in last 10 mins and was a déjà vu moment which I had encountered during first 5-6 tests that I had given.

This is the one of the primary reasons I am planning to retake the test. I am going to do the GMATclub tests but I read somewhere that not to time GClub’s test. Is that right? Are they super tough?

Verbal –

This is a section where I put in endless effort.

I have never been a good student of any language and I suck at constructing sentence. So I followed a ground up strategy. I started with grammar for dummies and Manhattan’s SC guide. By the time I was done with OGs I ended with 20-25 pages worth of notes on SCs. My SC problem areas have been perfect tense and comparisons.

I did CR power score bible and Manhattan’s CR guide. I had issues with assumptions and evaluate the argument but kept working on them till the very last day. In fact I did the power bible twice and I realized after finishing the OGs that power score puts undue emphasis on probability indicators such as few and most.

I had a success rate of 65 percent in both SC and CR and even after all that hard work the accuracy never seemed to improve, as if it had hit a wall. I always got 3-4 out of 14 CRs wrong and 4-5 out of 15 SCs wrong. The pattern in RC was strange - The success rate in RCs was greater than 80% in OG, even under timed condtions, but the figure came down to 50-60% during tests.

So primarily I prepared from –

1. Grammar for dummies workbook.
2. Manhattan’s SC guide
3. Aristotle SC grail + 100 qusns (did had 90% accuracy and is overrated)
4. Power score CR bibile
5. Manhattan’s CR guide
6. Manhattan’s RC guide
7. OG 10, OG 12 (twice) and OG Verbal workbook for SC, CR and RC.

I know I did not want to leave any stone unturned.

One last thing about Verbal – I felt the SC questions in real test were tougher than the ones I had practiced. In fact I think just 10-15% SC questions in OGs are representative of actual GMAT SC questions. I feel bad that I did Aristotle 100 questions rather than doing the compilation of SCs from GMAT prep.


Towards the end of 3nd month I started taking the mock tests. Please see the results below (Unfinished Q= Qusns done in last min)–

Date ------ Exam ------Score -------Unfinished Q

26-Jul ------MGMAT 1 ------630 ------5
31-Jul ------MGMAT 2 ------620 ------9
5-Aug ------Kaplan 1 ------560 ------0
12-Aug ------MGMAT 3 ------630 ------4
17-Aug ------GPrep1 ------650 ------3
23-Aug ------Kaplan 2 ------550 ------3
30-Aug ------Kaplan 3 ------580 ------1
4-Sep ------Kaplan 4 ------600 ------0
10-Sep ------G Prep2 ------680 ------2
15-Sep ------MGMAT 4 ------620 ------8
21-Sep ------Kap Free ------670
27-Sep ------800Scor1 ------710 ------2
2-Oct ------800Scor2 ------730 ------2
6-Oct ------MGMAT 5 ------690 ------2
10-Oct ------MGMAT 6 ------710 ------2

------ActGMAT ------690 ------5


Folks I want to make a career switch and going to university below top 15 is not an option for me. I am very passionate about investment management/research. I read books after books on investments and I enjoy going through company reports. I have my own little software to calculate the fair value of a company. Last year I came across some IB interview questions from UT Austin and was able to answer more than 60% of questions by the bank. I have never ever felt such clarity of goal and direction in life as in last few years.

I single handedly launched a website for mutual funds and will be shortly doing so for stocks.
https://www.mutualfundsforfuture.com/


I have been maintaining few portfolios since three years and have beaten the markets hands down.
https://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/PortfolioSharing/SharedPortfolioSnapshot.aspx?q=BC40CC613C939B0C

I have strong recos from my current and previous bosses who themselves went to MIT and Univ of Wisconsin @ Madison respectively, if that helps at all, but my GPA in MS is mere 3.3 (2.8 at end of 1st year and 3.7 at end of 2nd) and I come from IT background. I know that latter is nail in the coffin.

Bottom line is - Is 690 enough for career switch?

I have few questions for all the Gurus –

1. It is clear that my problem revolves around poor time management. So please advise me on how to take my Q to 50 and V above 40. Do I need to do more materials or just alter my strategy? How do I improve my verbal score?

2. I agree that drawing conclusion diagram in CR is helpful and I did that for questions in the OGs and while practicing stand alone problems but I rarely put this method into practice during exams. I felt that by doing so I would be eating away time from the whatsoever time I had. In fact I felt the same way for RCs. Taking mental notes of paragraphs in the passage is useful but putting the synopsis on the paper is very time consuming. Should I make this change and see if verbal score improves. I really need to figure out a way to get the verbal beyond 40.

3. Other than Gmat club tests are there any other material I need to refer. I have pretty much exhausted my resources. Should I start doing the 1000 series for CR and SCs?

Gurus I need help in reaching my goal.


Thanks
Sumeet