710 in GMAT prep to 650 in GMAT exam

Hi
As per your score, you are good in Verbal and little improvement would suffice. In Quant, you can improve more. You can try the Gmatclub tests for Quant. But given the short time for your retest, it may not help much. I would suggest to revise everything that you studied and stick to official guide. Else reschedule the test if possible.

I studied for roughly 2.5 months. For quants I practiced GMAT club tests and for basics GMAT club math book. I also did OG questions. For verbal I subscribed to EGMAT course. It did provide me with basic foundation but the rest was acquired through practice.I started taking my mocks 3.5 weeks before the test day. Started with MGMAT-then PREP 3-MGMAT2-Prep4-MGMAT 3-MGMAT5-PREP 5- PREP 6. All the exams were spaced properly and I reviewed each exam to analyse my mistakes.
I am planning to apply in R1 and my target schools are IIM A B C and ISB.
I have purchased my ESR and the only thing I understood was that geometry brought my quants down like crazy.Also the selection order of AWA IR first dint really help. I think I was too nervous the first hour thinking that the main 2 sections are yet to come, and by the time I Started attempting Quants my brain was too tired being nervous(I know it sounds funny, but its true) and then verbal ending was also messed up coz once reached question no. 25-26 I started thinking about he score and panicking.

Hi Midhila,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. Assuming you took your practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results of your official practice tests show that you should have been able to score higher than Q45 on test day. It’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. It’s also possible that you still have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. So, between now and your GMAT, you should spend time finding and fixing your weak areas. To do so, go through GMAT quant carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you would have had to know in order to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant courses.

You also may find it helpful to read this article about How To Increase Your GMAT Quant Score

Hi Midhila,

From what you describe, there were aspects of your studies that were not great choices - including waiting until the last 3.5 weeks to take all of those CATs. Before we discuss those issues in more detail, I'd like to know more about those CATs; you did not quite answer my questions in that regard though.

1) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?

In addition, since you have purchased your ESR, I'll be happy to analyze it for you. If you are interested, then you can feel free to PM or email it to me directly.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich