ESR Review

I've also taken the test at Holborn, many years ago though, good to hear that center is still open.

Your ESR is a bit unusual (by which I mean your test was a bit unusual). Your Quant score is very strong (a Q48 will be good enough for any school in the world). You really shouldn't read too much into the breakdowns by topic in an ESR, since they're based on very small samples of questions, but it can be worth paying attention to large discrepancies. Especially if data from your prep leading up to the test indicates that Geometry and Number Theory are weaker areas, you might want to devote some time to reviewing those, since you didn't do too well in either subject on this test. If, though, you know you're good at those subjects, don't take the test data seriously -- it could just be bad luck, or it could be that all your Geometry questions were 800-level. And when you said you had trouble moving on from hard questions, I was expecting to see serious pacing issues in your timing data, but your pacing in Quant looks very good overall -- not quite perfect, but much better than average. The only area I'd pay attention to is the last quarter of your test. Up to that point, you were performing like a Q50 test taker -- you did extremely well on your early medium-level questions, and then did fairly well in the middle of the test, when your questions were extremely hard (the difficulty graph in the ESR never seems to go to the very top or very bottom, so you had a very hard Quant test overall except at the start). At the end, in the final quarter of the test, your performance was not good (in fact it was worse than random guessing). That might have been because of fatigue, since you were being bombarded by 800-level questions for most of the test. But it might have been because you were rushing through the last quarter. If so, that's something you'll want to adjust. If you have, say, 10 minutes left with 7 questions to go, you shouldn't be devoting 80 seconds to each question. When people spend that little time per question, they end up effectively guessing at everything. Instead, make an instant decision, if you see a question that you don't know what to do with, to guess twice, and spend the 10 minutes solving 5 questions properly. You'll often get four or five of those right, and might even get a lucky guess on another question, so you'll get 4-6 questions right that way, instead of the 1 you got right on your test. But besides that one adjustment (which alone might get you to Q49-Q50), your pacing looks good.

Your Verbal section was a bit unusual - your test started with very easy questions, which can happen but isn't common. Your performance on those early questions wasn't strong (which would be fine if they were hard, but they were easy) and doing badly on easy questions is very hard to recover from. Your hit rate is actually very strong overall, which suggests you're capable at Verbal, but since you didn't see many questions that were medium-hard or hard, it's difficult to say how you might have done had your early performance been better. And it's also hard to guess why you did badly at the start - maybe you have some gaps in your Verbal foundation (which proved important on test day, but less important on your diagnostics), or maybe it was test day stress, or maybe just bad luck. You'll only reach your overall target score by making meaningful Verbal progress, so that should be your priority, but you can't really tell much from an ESR about what you need to do. The question type breakdown suggests RC is the area where you need to improve most, but I wouldn't take that data too seriously unless you have outside confirmation, because those question type stats are very volatile. You're also running short on time in Verbal, but Verbal pacing is an issue for almost everyone at your scoring level, and the higher priority should be improving your hit rate on easy/medium questions -- if you can do well on those, then you can guess at hard questions later in the test, and those guesses won't hurt you very much. It's getting easy questions wrong that is the most damaging thing you can do on an adaptive test. Good luck!

Hi Ian, thanks for taking the time out to review my esr. I do not recall any geometry questions, so probably it was just the one. I regard my quant skills to be sufficient (but not good). I tend to do a lot of silly mistakes (like really silly) down to copying the wrong numbers. My problem in quants is again word problems, I usually spend a lot of time just identifying the information provided. I am not good with reading text and getting the information out in a short time.

Regarding fatigue, this is a real problem for me. For example if I take take the verbal test on its own (without any other tests, fresh in the morning) I score around 34-35. But on a full test, I always take quants before my verbal and almost never get past the 30 mark. Is there anyway you can suggest to overcome this mental block?

My RC is very hit and miss, the ones where I understand the subject matter - my accuracy is great. But it often happens that some passages I read and do not comprehend; its like it does not register in my mind at all.

SC is almost always down to the last two choices but I rarely manage to definitively zero in on the right answer. I still use my ear for choosing options, which is not at all a great strategy.

CR - i have tried and failed to pre-think. I need to read the answer choices and then evaluate it. So when I started my CR accuracy was very low, but after reading a book from Powerscore, my accuracy has significantly increased in common question types like - weaken, assumptions etc.

To sum it up, I really want to get a 730+ score, and of course currently it is wayyyyy less than my target, do you feel that is it possible for a test taker like me to achieve it? Any advice is welcome, and I appreciate you taking out time from your already busy schedule.

Hi AnierudhaS,

First off, nice work with quant! Q48 is a very nice quant score. Looking over your ESR as well as the score breakdowns from your practice exams, it’s clear that in order to hit your 730 score goal, you’ll need to improve your verbal skills. That said, would you like some general advice on how to improve your SC, CR, and RC skills? Also, you may find it helpful to read the following articles:

How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT — A Mini Guide for Success

How to Learn More, Learn Faster, and Retain More Knowledge While Preparing for the GMAT

Thanks for replying Scott. I would go through the links provided, thanks. I would be grateful if you could please give me some advice to improve.

Hi AnirudhaS,

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

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

I'm happy to help! I'll start with CR.

When studying Critical Reasoning, you need to ensure that you fully understand the essence of the various question types. Do you know the importance of an assumption within an argument? Can you easily spot a conclusion? Do you know how to resolve a paradox? Do you know how to properly evaluate cause and effect? Do you know how to properly weaken or strengthen an argument? These are just a few examples; you really need to take a deep dive into the individual Critical Reasoning topics to develop the necessary skills to properly attack any Critical Reasoning questions that you encounter.

As you learn each Critical Reasoning problem type, do focused practice so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you incorrectly answered a Weaken the Argument question, 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 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 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 answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice, but keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be stimulating. So, to better prepare yourself to tackle such bland passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the New York Times, 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. Furthermore, the likely reason that your Sentence Correction performance has not improved is that you have not been working on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, to be successful in Sentence Correction, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not just a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning 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 meanings that make sense. 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 repeatedly until you start to see the differences between the choices 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 put in the necessary 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’ll then want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple SC topics.

I will take your advice on board and start preparing. Will do some focused practice to get my fundamentals right first as suggested. Thanks for this.

My pleasure!