430-550-560-650 to 650 again. New ESR attached

Hi dcummins.

Let's start with the quant part of your ESR.

There are two things that jump out as interesting. One is the difficulty level of the questions that you answered and the other is your weak areas.

If you look at the difficultly level of the questions that you answered correctly, you see that the line is basically flat from the beginning of the quant section to the end. So, to score higher, you have to get correct some questions that are more difficult than are on average the ones you have been answering correctly.

Probably, doing some or all of the following would result in your answering more difficult questions correctly.

- Strengthen weaker areas so that you can answer more questions more quickly. By more quickly answering some of the quant questions you are seeing, you will give yourself more time to correctly answer questions that are more difficult.

- Work on accuracy. Much of what makes questions more difficult is their being set up to get you to make silly errors. Questions may be more tricky than complex. For some ideas on how to improve your accuracy, you could read this post. Improving Your Accuracy on the GMAT

- Do slow quant practice that involves working on difficult questions until you get to correct answers, no matter how long it takes. Get into the mode of correctly answering difficult questions, and then seek to speed up naturally by finding ways to be more efficient and developing skill. If you can get them correct in 10 minutes each, you can learn to get them correct in 2 minutes each. See how many difficult questions you can get correct in a row if you take as much time as you need.

Regarding your quant weaker areas, you can see which areas they are, with GEOMETRY coming in second place and EQUAL./INEQUAL./ALG. being the land of opportunity. You can't go wrong focusing on those weaker areas and making them into stronger ones.

OK, now, let's move to verbal.

Looking at the average difficulty level of your correctly answered questions in verbal, you can see that, although your hit rates in the quartiles jumped all over the place, the difficultly level was pretty steady, though not as steady as the difficulty level of the quant questions that you answered correctly. What this information seems to indicate is that the level of sophistication of the thinking that you are bringing to bear when answering verbal questions has to increase for your verbal score to increase. To get more difficult questions correct, you have to take your thinking to another level.

Regarding your stronger and weaker areas in verbal, you can tell that RC needs work and that, in SC, you have to be more aware of grammar issues. As you already are aware, you have room to become stronger in any area of verbal.

Just remember that, whether you are working on your own or working with a tutor, one of your verbal goals has to be to increase the level of the sophistication of the thinking that you are bringing to bear when answering the questions. Merely learning a bunch of rules and gimmicky strategies will not result in your increasing the level of the sophistication of the thinking that you are bringing to bear. Yes, your ESR indicates that you may benefit from reviewing some grammar rules, but doing so will not increase the overall level of what you are doing when you answer verbal questions. You have to learn to more clearly define the differences between incorrect or trap choices and correct answers. Part of your path to doing so will involve slow, careful practice involving carefully analyzing questions and answer choices to develop an eye for the type of logic that defines why choices are incorrect or correct. The more clearly you see the cool twists of the verbal questions and the ways in which the writers make the questions tricky, the higher will be the difficulty levels of the questions that you answer correctly, and the higher you will score.

Have fun driving your score higher!