feeling devastaded and hopeless with a 530

Took my first GMAT test today and feeling devastaded and hopeless. After dedicating around 180 hours of intensive prep scored a 530 with a split v21 and Q42. I practiced good amount of verbal but not sure about which pulled my score down. I had trouble with focusing and giving my 100% in the verbal section. Please help. I want to retake and get a 690+ atleast.

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If you're not in a hurry to get an admission, plan to conquer section by section or even more granular, topic by topic within each sections. Start small, like sentence correction with "subject-verb" agreement only. Get the speed to answer them in 1 minute, even for harder questions. Once you're strong, I believe you can reach your goal with good amount of practices- but it takes time, dedication, consistency, plan to strengthen weak areas, strategy of exam mindset, avoiding pitfalls of question, resolve any timing issues etc. Everyone would have started low, remember, to break into the top 85%-90% of the already very competitive MBA aspirants( including those who have done several retakes) the level of difficulty will get higher to get into that level. The algorithm is less forgiving once it knows someone weak in easy questions, which is based on past performances of dedicated test takers like you and me.
Good luck with your next attempt & I truly believe you will be successful!

Hi JaySivakumar,

Although I'm not quite sure about how you have been studying, since you are having some issues with verbal, here is a great article you can check out:

How to Score High on GMAT Verbal

Feel free to reach out with any questions.
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Hi JaySivakumar,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day did not turn out better. Before we discuss how you might best proceed with your studies, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) How long a period of time did your 180 hours of study occur (re: 1 month? 2 months? etc)? How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far? What “brands” of CATs/mocks have you used?
3) On what dates (or approximate dates) did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
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Thank you for your encouraging words and tips to improve my score. i'll be sure to follow them from now on.

Hi Scott,

I have been preparing since march 2021 but was not so serious until the beginning of July since there was so much to handle at work.
In the last two months i have dedicated around 180 hours for the prep. I had signed up with e-gmat and their prethinking and negation approach didn't work for me as my accuracy was very low with those methods. I had to find alternative approach to tackle CR and ended up spending time on GMAT Ninja's methods for CR. It improved my accuracy however I noticed that I was taking too long to answer each question and was unable to concentrate on the questions completely and rushed through a few of them on test day. I also noticed that i take too long to clearly understand the meaning of the sentence in SC. Despite these pitfalls i never got a score lower than v25 in my mocks and seeing a v21 on my test day brought down my morale. I am planning to follow the topic-by topic and untimed practice approach from your link above. Thank you so much for the link and helping me understand where to begin with.

Regards,
Jay.

Hello Rich,

Thank you for your response.

1) I studied for the last two months and would dedicate 3 hours a day in the and 21 hours in a week. i was rusty with the concepts to begin with and it took me a really long time to go through the concepts, take notes and cement them while taking practice quizzes.

2) I took the E-gmat course and their CR and RC video concept files took too long for me to complete and ended up not working out for me (prethinking and negation techniques) however their quant helped and in SC i was struggling to understand the meaning of the sentence accurately and would end up spending more time on it. I took their sigma X mocks.

3) 1st mock - 410 (feb 9)
2nd mock- 520 (Jun 23)
3rd mock- 480 (Aug 15)
4th mock- 560 q38,v29 (Aug 31)

4) I am planning to apply for Japanese Universities (Hitotsubashi ICS, Doshisha, Ritsumeikan APU, NUCB, IUJ etc) some of their R1 deadlines are coming up in the next one or two months. However I am fine with applying for R2 since i would like to improve my scores and apply since that would compensate for my low GPA from my UG.

Regards,
Jay

Hi JaySivakumar,

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

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