Feeling Very Discouraged - 430 to 360 - I Don't Want to Give Up

Based on your score, you have a lot of conceptual gaps in Quants. Please go through with all the concepts first. Try a trial version of TTP in GMATClub. It would definitely help to get all the concepts. Then practice the sectional wise questions in TTP as well as GMATClub. PM me for any support.

i scored 410 on my first sample exam, i took that sample exam before i even studied. i decided that i want to do the gmat exam and i wanted to see how much work i need.after some work i reached a much better score between 600 and 650 on sample exams. official gmat sample exams and kaplan exams are good but i will share a few tips to improve your score, i didnt attempt the exam yet but i feel i made a huge leap and it looks like my plan works.

i followed these steps:

step1: i buyed gmat official books and spent almost 10 days working on math and verbal review, i didnt solve any question for the first 7 days i was just building a solid knowledge,refreshing my memory and getting familiar with the math chapters again.i revised some grammar because it is helpful in sentence correction.

step2: i started solving the book questions and everytime i got a question wrong i used to keep note. for example, i would write on a piece of paper that i couldnt solve problem 50 page 51 and continue on solving. after finishing the books and solving all what i could solve with my existing knowledge i started tackling the questions i couldn't solve one after the other until i was able to solve all questions in the official gmat books i buyed.

step3: start solving sample exams specially those of the official gmat and kaplan and everytime you get a question wrong do the same process in step 2 to identify your weaknesses and work on them. also i would like to note that gmat club tests are good tests with harder than usual questions that will help you progress faster.

step4:once you establish a score above 650 in the sample exams for several times you should be ready to attempt the real exam.

Hint: dont solve the same sample twice because this will inflate your score. solve each sample once.

Thanks for providing these tips. I'll remember to incorporate this into my new plan.

Don't give up yet..there's just so much room to improve. You see, GMAT is a standardized test and it's all about being smarter and identifying patterns. You just have to choose a right way..you want want to take help from a tutor or prep courses available out here. But this time when you hit the battlefield, make sure you load your arsenal the right way. Goodluck

Hi brianshepherd,

Firstly don't get discouraged by this attempt. You can find lots of stories, on gmatclub, in which people have achieved their dream score in subsequent attempts.

Your score suggests you are lacking basics in both Quant and Verbal.
For Quant, I would suggest you go thru Manhattan Quant guides and couple them with GMAT club tests.

For verbal, I would suggest you enroll for egmat.

Please purchase EP1 and EP2. They are the real indicators of the GMAT exam.

All the best!

Thanks for reading my post and providing your recommendations. Would you recommend a full Manhattan course, or just utilize their guides for Quant?
Could you provide some reasons why you suggest egmat for verbal specifically?

Thank you,

Hi

I'm sorry to hear that your 2 Official Exams didn't go as well as planned. 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. Before we discuss any of those potential issues though, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on your timeline and your goals:

1) When are you planning to apply to Rotman? What deadline(s) are you considering?
2) Are you considering any other Schools?
3) Going forward, how many hours do you think you can consistently study each week?

Based on your Score Goal, it's worth noting that you do NOT need to correctly answer ANY questions that you think are too hard or too weird to earn that type of Score, but you'll have to keep the little mistakes to a minimum. Unfortunately, based on your two Official Scores, you would have made a lot of little mistakes on Test Day. This might mean that you know the content well-enough, but "your way" of approaching questions is problematic - but it might also mean that you don't know the Quant and Verbal content as well as you need to. Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level.

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

Here is the thing, the fact that you score was this low indicates that there is a lot of room for improvement. This means that if you manage to master a single topic (e.g. sentence correction) your score will increase significantly. The most importan part about this is exam, is to understand that it’s just an exam. It doesn’t, by any means, reflect how smart or capable you are.

Sometimes things don’t work and rather than trying to fix them we ought to dispose of them and replace them completely. It seems like Kaplan’s learning strategies don’t work for you.

For this exam, it is essential to understand the basics. I was scoring in the high 600s and in the middle 700s before my official exam. Guess what? I failed miserably. I relied heavily on strategies learned through online prep websites and whatnot, not realizing that in order to apply those strategies, a deeper and more complex understanding of the topics tested is required.

The day of the exam, I left the testing center and drove home in shock. The first thing that I did was to throw out all my study materials. I opened my computer and order MGMAT’s entire strategy guides. I’ve always found knowledge to reside on freshly printed book pages, so that was my escape. I decided to forget everything I had been through and started fresh. Two weeks later, after reading the books and getting to the core of each section I took a CAT from the GMATprep website and scored a 760. Yesterday, I decided to test whether I was truly there and took the last practice exam I had available and scored a 760 again. MGMAT is by far the best resource for this exam and I cannot stress this enough.

I have the official exam again in a week so now I am filling in gaps.

My recommendations to you:

1-Start anew
2- Learn the basics (only way to mastery)
-Concept
-Practice
-Analysis
-More

3- Be honest with yourself... identify your weaknesses and strengths. Don’t neglect focussing on your strengths.... sometimes a well polished strength or skill helps more than a half-learned concept that you barely manage to understand

4- Use MGMAT Navigator (best piece of tracker I’ve seen in a while)

5- Take a day every week to analyze your study habits, your progress, and the improvements that need to be made.

This is a hard exam but life is harder and if you are managing to deal with “life” you’ll certainly beat this exam. Focus and don’t rely on anybody else’s strategies. Listen to everyone’s advise but craft your own approach to everything. Every test-taker sees things differently and the GMAT counts on it. No questions repeats itself but the patterns are always there. There are only so many ways to test the same, never-changing, math concept/math rule.

I truly wish you the best. I know that if you set your mind to you’ll climb this wall. Best of luck!

Hello,

Thank you for your response. I think lots of small mistakes tend to be my downfall.

1) I plan to apply for the first round in November of this year.
2) I'm considering two other schools Degroote and Schulich. However, I've spent the most time researching (going on tours and attending seminars) and dreaming of Rotman.
3) As many of you professionals, I sometimes work 50 hours a week and it can be difficult to dedicate time to study after I finish work. For my new plan to write at the end of September I've planned to dedicate 12 hours a week to study.

I feel like I know the exam structure really well, but perhaps got caught by a lot of trap answers on test day.

This post truly resonated with me, thank you for sharing your experience. I felt the exact same way, I wanted to just toss out my study material and start fresh. I looked at MGMAT's material and have been told by quite a few people that it is quite useful, especially for quant. I like that they have a book for each portion within portions of the exam to really focus study on problem areas.

I'm going to be redefining my study schedule and taking the advice that you and several other kind members of this forum shared with me. This whole GMAT experience has been more than I ever imagined it would be. For those that are not naturally born geniuses, that work full-time demanding jobs, it challenges you more than just academically but in every other area of your life as well.

Thanks again on taking the time to give me this advice. Good luck with your official exam next week. I hope that in a few months time I can send you a message to say I scored above my goal score and learn that you did the same.

Hi brianshepherd,

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

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

Hi Brianshepherd,

I’m sorry to hear about how things went with your GMAT. First off, try to hang in there my friend. Sure you are bruised and battered, but you gotta get up off the mat and keep moving forward. The good news is that if you can make some adjustments to your study plan, you CAN achieve your score goal. Moving forward, you want to 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 mastey. 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. For quant, as has been mentioned, TTP would be perfect for you. We teach GMAT quant from the “ground up”, so you’d be able to linearly and gradually learn all aspects of GMAT quant. We offer a full-access 5-day trial, so you should give it a shot.

Lastly, you may find it helpful to read this article about Developing the Proper Mindset For GMAT Success.

If you have any questions about TTP or would like to discuss your study plan, feel free to reach out to me directly. Good luck!

Thank you so much for the very detailed write-up. This process makes sense, and I'll be incorporating this in my new study method targeting to write at the end of September.