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Hi Barry,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. So, regarding your ESR, it’s clear that you did not score well in Geometry; however, you really need to take the information from your ESR with a grain of salt. Remember, your ESR is based on only 31 quant questions. So, for example, does your scoring 100% in Counting/Sets/Series mean that you are devoid of weaknesses in those topics? Not necessarily. To improve from a Q48 to a Q50, ensure that you are following a study routine that allows you to go through ALL of 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, 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. As you 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. Furthermore, you not only will improve your quant knowledge but also will get faster at solving easy/medium/hard GMAT quant questions. So, just focus on improving your skills for now; from there, speed will come.

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. 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.

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.

Regarding verbal, you are in a similar situation as with quant. Once again, you must understand that since the ESR is such a small sample size, you cannot overinfer as to what your weaknesses are. Rather than spending countless hours trying to find “analysis/critique” CR questions or “identify inferred idea” RC questions, spend time reviewing all aspects of RC and CR, so you will be ready for anything the GMAT throws your way on test day.

Feel free to reach out with further questions.

Let’s do this!!