A disappointing 520 (Q44, V17)

Question

Hi,

I took GMAT today, score on verbal was surprising for me. 
GMAT Prep1: 600
GMAT Prep2: 640 (Q47, V31)

My reliability in English has been very poor, but not poor to the extent to get a 17 i have been getting scores in range of 25 to 31 in all the CAT i took.

Maths also came as a surprise, but I realized in 3 questions within the 1st 20 i had done some silly mistakes to get them wrong after confimring the answer.

Need help from you guys/girls for my 2nd attempt. I want to attempt it in this year itself (you can make out from my post why I am struggling in English). I feel my approach to questions is wrong especially in Sentence correction. I have gone through some of the posts & planning to device my strategy for the retake on Verbal. Could you please give me few quick tips to schedule my studies (for a retake all schedules are for a fresh take) & correct my approach.

For Maths i will go through Kaplan problems hope it will suffice to take it up to Q 49 - 50.

Thanks in advance for your help.

resh · Answer

Hi Vaibhavw,

Dont loose heart. You already have a good Quant score and have been doing well in Quants in mock tests also consistently. So, you have to work on improving verbal only.

Do share a little more about your preparation materials.

Also, do refer to best-gmat-verbal-prep-books-reviews-recommendations-78094.html?highlight=ml308 for the recommendations of verbal preparation.

Dawgie · Answer

Don't lose faith and start over again. If you score a 700 on your next attempt it help your confidence and this confidence will show up on your applications as well.

Good luck!

kissthegmat · Answer

For math section I'll suggest to go through gmatclub test.

dokiyoki · Answer

What study material have you used for verbal ? Can you throw some light on your verbal prep strategies ?

rtewari · Answer

If you have access to Manhattan they have good strategy guides that cover verbal. For RC - read as much as you can as often as you can. This will help with SC also. For CR - the OG is the best resource.

vaibhavw · Answer

Hi,
Thanks for such a quick response, its really encouraging. 
Materials referred:
I have been using OG 11th edition & for grammar reference I used MGMAT CR. Also I solved 250 question from 1000 SC set.

Accuracy:
My accuracy was hovering around 50 - 60% equally in all the 3 sections. The biggest issue I was facing is that i was not 100% sure on the answer i was selecting. 
I take roughly 120 to 135 sec for SC, close to 180 Sec for RC & CR questions each.

Gaps according to me:
I did not keep a track of mistakes i had been making, by the end i was confused so as to what is my weak area. 
The approach i took for questions is to try & eliminate wrong choices in CR & SC. In RC i used to struggle with Inference or tone questions rest was fine.

What books do you recommend, for more practice as i have already completely solved OG 11.
I am also planning to use error log for all the future practice sessions.

For Maths i will go through the GMAT club questions.

Thanks.

NewSc2 · Answer

The best advice I could give would be to write *everything* perfectly. That includes these posts. When I just graduated from college, my English was very good, but my job required me to communicate more casually. This was hard at first (and in fact I'm losing that "casual" tone from GMAT prep), but it basically involved writing a paragraph, looking it over, deleting a few words, rewriting it, revising a bit more, then sending out the e-mail, often with a couple grammatical errors that I forgot to edit out when I re-worded a sentence. Yes, this also meant a 2-3 paragraph e-mail would take me 5 minutes to write and another 5 minutes to edit, but over time this got easier.

Other than that, try some of the SC in the GMATClub's SC forum. It really helps to have people debate about a certain answer, rather than just reading the OG's answer. Often times you're picking between two answers, and the OG or MGMAT dismisses the other answer with an explanation of "awkward." GMATClub members in the SC forum actually try to break down and explain how they avoided the wrong answer's trap.

(And yes, I did routinely go through and re-word and re-edit my sentences in this post too.)

shaselai · Answer

definitely focus on verbal a lot more - maybe 80/20 time split. Use error logs on quant and I suggest an overhaul on verbal since it seems you havent grasped the concepts yet for verbal.

vaibhavw · Answer

Thanks for the quick tips...i will work on it & let you know the progress that i have made...will need more help in future for sure..

Thanks guys..

redjam · Answer

This is great advice. I've been doing the same, catching errors in my sentences and editing my emails before I send them out. You can even do this to improve your reading comprehension. Even though my job itself isn't technical, my work is, so I spend an extra few moments understanding the technical aspects of the argument instead of just skimming it over as I used to do. It's great practice. (I also edited this post for correctness, although my SC still needs work)

sandeep800 · Answer

hope u do well next time!!all the best

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A disappointing 520 (Q44, V17)

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