Disappointing GMAT experience (fluctuating scores)

Hi DrowsyPirate03,

From what you describe, you spent approximately 6-7 months on your studies before your 1st attempt - but it's not clear how you were studying. While it's possible that you just had a bit of a 'bad day' on your 1st attempt, when these types of score drops occur, the two likely "causes" involve either something that was unrealistic during practice or something that was surprising (or not accounted for) on Test Day. Your 2nd and 3rd attempts are likely better indicators of your current 'ability level', but the variations in your Verbal Scaled Scores imply that you might be 'winging it' too often in the Verbal section. Before we discuss any of those potential issues though, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) What study materials did you use during your first 7 months of study? Did you take any other CATs/mocks besides the 5 that you listed?
2) Over the last 3 months, how many hours did you typically study each week?
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

Since you took this most recent GMAT at a Test Center, 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

Hi DrowsyPirate03,

I know at times it becomes frustrating and monotonous when you are stuck with something for a considerable period of time thereby risking your career, time and hard earned money. But it’s good to see that you are consistent with your efforts and are eager to find your weak areas and work on them to achieve your goal.

Many students lag behind with their score as they do not use the right methodology and strategies to solve the questions. They keep solving ‘N’ number of questions repeating the same mistakes instead of finding out their weak areas and turning them into their strength. And when they try to find out their mistakes, they end up wasting a lot of precious time on it, just like in your case.

Your mock scores indicate that there is still room for improvement in both Quant and Verbal thereby increasing your overall score.

What needs to be done?

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.

For example, for Quant, identifying your weaker areas and working your weaker areas should ideally get you a score of 49/50. For this, you need to have a strong understanding of the concepts and also use the right methodology to solve the questions. The good thing about GMAT quant is it tests only specific types of questions from each topic. Knowing how to solve those types of questions will help you solidify your learning and score well on GMAT quant.

Also, the inconsistency in your Verbal Score indicate that may be you need to iron the conceptual gaps in some topics by revisiting them, and then move to the next topic only when you are 100% confident. Verbal questions on GMAT are very tricky. For example,

• In SC, you have to read the sentence from the meaning standpoint and then start looking at the grammatical errors.
• In CR, you have to understand the argument, identify the premise and the conclusion and then pre-think the answer before looking at the solutions.
• In RC, you need to have the right reading strategies to understand the inferences which are not directly stated in the passage.

You should follow this order - SC->CR-RC. The reason for this is very specific. Each question type on the GMAT is testing a specific skill. SC tests your comprehension skills. CR tests comprehension & analytical skills. Finally, RC builds on the previous two skills and also tests your ability to be able to grasp the central point of the passage i.e. your inferential skills. Thus when you learn in this order, it's much more effective.

Finally, looking at your Verbal scores, there is a clear lack of consistency in your scores. One possible reason could be that you’re following too many sources of information and have now confused yourself. I would suggest you to only focus and study from one source, whatever it may be. There are wild swings in your Verbal scores which implies that you haven’t followed a very structured approach.

This is a misconception that if you practice the hard questions, it will help you clear your conceptual gaps. For scoring 700 and above, you need to get the easy medium questions right as GMAT test is adaptive in nature. For that, being conceptually clear on all topics is really vital. Not only this, you have to be good with application of concepts also because GMAT is a test of application of concepts.
Once you learn that art, the learning process becomes much simpler and easier as you tend to follow a systematic and methodological approach towards solving questions. Focus on improving the method you follow to solve questions because that's what stops people from scoring 700+.

GMATWhiz helps you with all these things as we follow a structured way of teaching things, which makes the learning process simpler and efficient. It also helps you to develop an understanding of the test maker’s intention behind asking the question. It uses an AI powered learning platform to provide you with real time improvement modules after every practice quiz. It provides you with additional concept videos and practise quizzes to help you improve. This helps you overcome your weaker areas in a specific topic right away without having to put in additional effort to identify your weaker areas.

You can check out GMATWhiz and go for its Verbal Prep Course.

Here’s a link to our free trial – https://learn.gmatwhiz.com/?page=signup

Hope this helped and feel free to contact if you have any further queries.

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 You can always write back to me here or the better way would be to connect over a call and have a discussion. You can schedule a free consultation call using the below link.

Hi EMPOWERgmatRichC

In the initial phase of my prep (before my first attempt) I relied solely on the official guides for practice. I used MGMAT guides to study SC and CR concepts. For quant concepts, I relied mainly on the resources on Gmatclub (specially the detailed articles by Bunuel). I felt quite comfortable with the concepts that are tested on GMAT quant. All the mocks I attempted were official. Post my 1st attempt my focus has been on non-official hard ques in quant and official 700+ level on verbal.

While I was indeed anxious during my 1st attempt, I believe the main reason behind my low scores was the fact that I was interrupted thrice by the invigilator while the timer was running. This might have affected my concentration.

I study for ~2hrs on weekdays and 4-5hrs on weekends.

I'm planning to apply to top 5 Canadian business schools (Rotman, Schulich, McGill, Sauder, Queens) this fall (R1).

I haven't decided whether I should purchase the ESR or not but I'll surely let you know in case I order it. Could really use some help in analyzing it. Thanks.

Hi ReedArnoldMPREP

I do struggle a bit with timing on Verbal. I usually guess on the last 4-5 ques. But the same is true for the practice tests. I don't think test day anxiety is hitting me hard. I was indeed anxious before my first attempt but in my 3rd attempt I was quite calm and well rested. I haven't decided whether I should order the ESR for my latest attempt (previous two were online)

I actually had pretty similar experience today. Not as drastic change as yours though. Wonder if they added more difficult questions lately.

https://gmatclub.com/forum/scheduling-5 ... 65820.html

Hi DrowsyPirate03,

I've sent you a PM with some additional notes.

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

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V28. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation, particularly for verbal, probably needs to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.

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 articles:

how to score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?