AmanAngrish wrote:
Hi Everyone
2022 has not been a good year, but I wanted to end the year on a positive note by at least finishing off with GMAT. I had already started my preparations since Mid November and booked GMAT for 30th Dec. I had taken leave from my work and was averaging close to 10-12 hours a day for self study. With respect to mocks, I was consistently scoring between 690 and 720(Avg section scores: Q:48-50, V:35-39)and realized that with a little more effort I can touch my target score. On 26th Dec I wrote the official mock 1. I scored a Q50 but got an abysmally low verbal score of 29. During the verbal section, I kind of lost track of time and once I realized that I absolutely bombed the section. For the first 23 questions I got only 4 incorrect and in the last 13 questions I got 11 incorrect. I went into panic mode and started revisiting my verbal study materials and questions on GC. I dedicated the next couple of days solely for verbal. I did not even have the courage to sit for the second official mock as I felt that my practice may not be upto the mark. On the test day I brought this panic along with me to the test center. However much I tried, I just couldn't gather my nerves for the exam. I wanted to attempt verbal at first and wanted to get it off my way before I started quant. I had to hurry at the end of the verbal section(around the last quarter) and that kind of brought back the panic that I had screwed up with my verbal section again. I took my timed breaks, but subconsciously that below par performance kept hovering on my mind and I had a average performance in quant as well. Final split was Q:47 V:30 which has kind of devastated me.
I dont want to give up but I am not sure what changes do I need to initiate now. I have gone through a lot of verbal materials but now I am 100% confident that my verbal skills are not up to the GMAT standard. And I am not sure how to improve them. I am not inclined to get a course from any of the providers as I have already taken that road once. A tutor perhaps? But my work timings are very dynamic and I don't know how will I manage/afford that.
Requesting help/suggestion from everyone.
P.S Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year in advance. May this new year brings all the love and prosperity that you seek.
Hi
AmanAngrishI know it can be disappointing to not reach your target score after months of preparation. However, don't lose heart. If you prepare in a structured manner with consistent efforts guided in the right direction, you'll be there.
Time management is one of the most important skills for competitive exams that most students struggle with. There is a significant penalty for failing to complete any section of the GMAT exam, so it is also important to develop pacing skills. Once you hone your time management skills strategically by learning the right methodologies, you will be confident about not missing out on any questions on the test day.
The possible reason for struggling with time management:
One of the possible reasons could be nervousness or anxiety during the test and the fear of not being able to solve the questions within time. This ultimately must have demotivated you and slowed you down.
You are likely taking more time to solve RC questions. The reason for this might be you are taking too long to read a passage or you might be going back and forth to the passage for every question. This happens when you don’t use the right reading strategies. Students often read the passage from a detail perspective and stuff themselves with the details. And once they come across an inferential question or a main point question, they cannot answer it and they read the passage again to find the answer. This would often lead to the wastage of time.
While in case of SC, the reason could be -not having conceptually clear knowledge about how to approach SC problems thereby leading to confusion in eliminating the incorrect choices. You have to read the sentence from the meaning standpoint and then start looking at the grammatical errors and eliminate the incorrect choices.
There may be other reasons which you can share briefly to help me understand better
Important Tip – Don’t practice tons of questions directly. First focus on learning the right methods for each question. That plays a significant role in getting hard questions correct within 2 mins.
In case of Verbal:
• For
SC – Follow the meaning based approach.
• For
CR – Focus on Scope Analysis and Framework driven Pre-thinking.
• For
RC – Involve yourself in the passage and understand why the passage is written and not just on what’s written.
Having said this, I would like to know what is the approach you followed during the test so that I can suggest you a more structured plan. As you have an ESR, I can definitely help you in analyzing it. We can get in touch over a zoom conference call and we can analyze it together. This way we can figure out what exactly your weak areas are and then make a plan of action. Considering the effort you have put, I would really like to know the concerns and help you improve your score. Feel free to reach out to me on DM for further discussion.
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30 Dec 2022, 06:26
MockScores.docx [158.81 KiB] 
