Attempt 2 : 560 (Q35 V31). Help!!

I scored 91 in math in 10th standard. I have always scored at least 90% in math my entire school life (Which I think forms a pretty major chunk of GMAT math).

I did Engineering in 2010-2014. Was out of touch with anything to do with studies post that. Did not score well anytime in Engineering and graduated with a 62% overall.

I had a private tutor for math for GMAT. He took classes for about 2 months. I feel confident with theory and concepts. But this is not translated well when it comes to solving questions.

For Verbal, I still rely on my coaching centre notes and strategies. I did not practice verbal at all this time. Last I practiced verbal was 2 years back.

I had joined a coaching institute for both math and Verbal. But that was 2 years ago and I had not focussed and did not complete the course. Wasted a lot of money though.

I did OG, and quant review. I have tons of question banks for both math and verbal but I stayed away from all of it because I assumed (basis the discussions on these forums) that sticking to official material is the best strategy.

I have never referred to MGMAT, Veritas etc.

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That is very kind and honest of you to admit.
Your past score has nothing to do with how you'll do on GMAT, however, it does have a lot to do with the dedication that you can put yourself through. 10th standard is quite basic but I'd still say you can improve in quant, you can get to a Q45 easily. It is generally based on Higher order thinking skills.
As for coaching, I still didn't get a name, so I'll just assume a non international coaching, the one popular in your locality but not globally, no offence.

Let's get to it now.
A Q45V35 will get you a 660

Lets work for that first.
Do not rush into the testing phase.

As for others, I'd suggest you a mixture of courses, do not get confused, by other ideas, just take a leap of faith, not in me but yourself.
Okay let's see, an engineer other than chemical or elec engineer is almost always good at math.
We'll call it your strength.
Now, take up a new course, I'd personally suggest any top course but I do feel you can benefit from MGMAT on demand course, you'll get 9 sessions spread out in 9 weeks, you'll get access to all strategy guides from Manhattan and practice test.
Follow their study plan

Meanwhile, you could compare that course with a similar one from Veritas, they also have live online sessions 12 to be exact, you'll get access to Veritas strategy guides and tests and you'll benefit from those definitely.

So take either of these courses, and follow their strategy guides

I'd suggest any of those.
Veritas guides are a lil costly though if you buy from outside course, so its overall economical to buy course from veritas and take more books from manhattan

Work through each problem of OG again, during the course and follow the link at the end of the post

Please leave a like if I've truly helped you in my posts

Here's the link to a better study plan
https://gmatclub.com/forum/beginner-to- ... s#p2313182

What materials did you use for your study both in quant and verbal? It seems that your quant score is low.
What materials do you use for quant specially?

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Hi ATRIKHA,

I posted the following message in your other post (in the GMAT Experts Forum):

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day did not go better. To start, a CAT is really a 'measuring device' - when used correctly, it will give you a realistic score and help define your strengths and weaknesses, but it will NOT help you to fix any of those weaknesses. To raise your scores, you have to learn the necessary Tactics and put in the proper practice and repetitions. The CAT will show you whether your studies are helping you to improve or not. As such, you really shouldn't take more than 1 FULL CAT per week.

GMAC has publicly stated that the Official Score that you earn on Test Day is within +/- 30 points of actual ability. Assuming a similar 'swing' in how your CATs function, most of your CAT score results - along with your Official Score - show that you essentially performed the same each time (about 570 +/- a few points); the 650 is an 'outlier' - and so we have to be a bit skeptical about how accurate that one result was. You handle certain aspects of the GMAT consistently well, but you also make certain consistent mistakes.

Before I can offer you the specific advice that you’re looking for, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) How long did you study for this recent attempt? How many hours do you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far?

Goals:
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
4) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

You might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report. While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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

I’m sorry to her how things went with your GMAT. I know you are frustrated; however, your GMAT score actually falls within the range of your practice test scores.

In any case, to improve your GMAT score, it’s clear that you need to take a gradual and linear approach to your prep. In other words, moving forward, you should follow a study plan that allows you to individually learn each GMAT quant and verbal topic and then practice each topic until you’ve gained mastery. Studying in such a way will ensure that you methodically improve your quant and verbal skills and ensure that no stone is left unturned. Let me expand on this idea further.

If you are learning about Number Properties, you should develop as much conceptual knowledge about Number Properties as possible. In other words, your goal will be to completely understand properties of factorials, perfect squares, quadratic patterns, LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, and remainders, to name a few concepts. After carefully reviewing the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions, practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties. 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. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

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.
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, types that you would rather not see, and types 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.

Follow a similar routine for verbal. For example, let’s say you start by learning about Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to fully master the individual topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken The Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you learn about each question type, do focused practice, so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you get a weakening question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. Keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to analyze such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as The Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, you likely will have to work on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not really a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning the grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.

This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending less than two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.

There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and none of those reasons are that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answers were always the ones that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.

As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey logical meanings. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice until you start to see the differences that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to take the time to see the differences between answers and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.

To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off, and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did to arrive at that answer and what you could do differently to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could do differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your skills improve, you will want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple Sentence Correction topics.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant and verbal courses. You also may find it helpful to read the following article about The Phases of Preparing for the GMAT.

Feel free to reach out with any further questions. Good luck!

Hello everyone

Thanks a ton for the guidance. I have uploaded my ESR. Would request you all to please have a look, and suggest if any specific areas are to targeted.

Hi ATRIKHA,

Before we discuss the data in your ESR, it would really help if you could answer the questions from my prior post (on how you've been studying and your goals):

Studies:
1) How long did you study for this recent attempt? How many hours do you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far?

Goals:
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
4) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

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

Studies:
1) How long did you study for this recent attempt? How many hours do you typically study each week? — prepared for 2 months. I typically study for 5-6 hours each day.
2) What study materials have you used so far? — Study material from a local coaching institute (Jamboree), OG and GMAT Prep. The more number of sources I refer to the more I get confused. So I have really limited it for now.

Goals:
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School? — I had planned to apply R1 this year but seems a bit out of reach now.
4) What Schools are you planning to apply to? — ISB, NYU Stern, Wharton is my dream (but I know how tough it is), Tepper (CMU), Insead Paris, HEC Paris, Said (Oxford), And some schools in Germany (Mannheim Business School, ESMT)

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Hi Akanksha,

I've sent you a PM with an analysis of your ESR and some additional notes.

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

Hi,
Sorry about the disappointing score. A lot has been said above about which materials to use. Overall, I will say that any material or course you subscribe for should be followed painstakingly. You should be patient with every question you answer and take your time to analyze both questions you got right and the ones you got wrong. All the best.

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560 (Q35 V31)

Have you studied and tried all OG questions? I suggest that finish all OG questions. If possible, do also OG Quant Review and OG Verbal Review too.

School/university math is rather different from GMAT Quant, in that GMAT Quant tests not various application of math formulas but our Quantitative reasoning/logic.

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Just use gmatclub test Quant to boost your Quant performance. Feels your Quant score really needs such exercise.

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