GMAT 620 Q(48) V(27)

Question

Hello,

I want to share my experience with the gmat since I feel a bit disappointed and I dont know what to do right now..

I have been studying Gmat for the last 4 months during 1/2 hours every day except for weekends, studying around 5/6 hours. I have focused mainly in Official guide, and Manhatten guides. I have always struggled with verbal, but these last months I felt much better since I spent many hours focusing in Sentence Correction, the area with the widest range of improvement, and my scores improved from the high 20's, to the mid 30's.
I started scoring low verbals in my first Gmatprep 1 and gmat prep 2, with scores of Q(45) V(27). I have to say that my verbal score has always fluctuated a bit. For example, I have scored 27/28 in some exams, and then 35 in some others. After that, i wanted to give a try to the official exam, since I don't have a real deadline (that doesn't mean I have not taken the study seriously), and I scored on the Official Gmat a 600 score, Q(44) V(28).
However, I knew that in that exam I got nervous and I made many silly mistakes in the quantitative, although I wasn't sure what went wrong in verbal, although this score was very similar to my GmatPrep scores. After that, I spent about a month focusing a lot in Sentence Correction and Quantitative, and got in Gmatprep 3 and Gmat prep 4 a decent 680 score in both, with a Q(48) and V(34). I knew that if I focused in time management, I could reach easily a 48 in Quantitative, and be around 35 in verbal, which would put me closer to a 700 score.
So I decided to do Official Gmat again, having practiced a lot in Sentence correction and Quantitative mainly. The quantitative section went as usuall, pretty well, with some difficult questions, which I had to do an educated guess in some of them. When I finished this section I knew that i would be around 48 again, so I just had to do a good verbal. My thoughts before the exam were that in a normal circumstance i would reach a 34/35 score in verbal, reaching a 680/690 score, and with a bit of luck, I could reach in verbal above 36 and reach those 700+. So I did the verbal section and again I felt that everything was normal, with some questions harder and some dense RC (I always feel that in the verbal section because i usually do not feel that I'm getting trapped or anything, although many times i get stuck with 2 options in SC). After doing IR and AWA, I saw the 620 Q(48) and V(27), feeling very very sad and disappointed. After receiving my ESR report, the funny thing is that the section with the lowest score with SC!! which is the section of the verbal in which I have focused the most, with a shocking 15th percentile (score of 17) ,and with CR and RC with 60th percentile, score of 33.
Right now I'm not sure what to do next, since I have spent these last 3 weeks focusing in quantitative and since it is summer and I'm not feeling very enthusiastic about spending another 3/4 weeks studying, but I also feel that if I stop during 1.5/2 months, I will lose a lot of what I have gained. I feel that if I retake the exam again, I could possibly score a 34/35 in verbal as I did in my last 2 GmatPrep exams, If I'm able to not repeat the disaster I did in SC, and keeping those 47-49 score in quantitative, but now I'm scared of spending this 3 weeks again studying mainly SC and keeping the level in quantitative and do the same disaster, having lost this 3 weeks in summer.

Do you have any advice on what to do regarding stopping or not in the summer, and what material/strategy should i follow?

PS: sorry for the long story

bebs · Answer

Hello,

Sorry to hear that you test didn't go as planned. Congrats on the Q48 though, it is a great starting point. I recommend that you try Target Test Prep to push your quant to 49+. You are a good candidate for the TTP accelerated study plan since you already have a Q48 in the real exam. I am currently using TTP and can't recommend the course enough.

For verbal, e-gmat seems to be the go-to course, especially for SC. I am also using e-gmat for verbal and I can feel my confidence growing up gradually. Some folks here have also recommended Ron's verbal videos on Youtube.

Overall, I think you should relax for a couple of days, and start prepping again. Please reach out if you have further queries.

Best wishes!

rohan2345 · Answer

Hi eljoel14,

Welcome to GMATCLUB! To improve your scores in verbal , you can consider e-gmat verbal online or the e-gmat verbal live course. They are both amazing courses especially designed for non-natives. They offer almost 25% of their courses for free so you can try out their free trial to decide which one you want to go for. Plus the e-gmat Scholaranium which is included in both the courses is one of the best verbal practice tools in the market. You can easily track your progress in that you can identify your strengths and analyze and improve on your weak areas.

Further taking multiple mocks might help. Apart from the GMATPREP, Manhattan GMAT tests and Veritas Prep Tests in my experience have good verbal and Quant section and will certainly help you point out and improve your weak areas.

I would also encourage you to purchase the GMATPREP QP 1 for some great additional practice. Further you should also consider LSAT Questions for some grea CR and t RC practice.

Hope this helps. All the best.

jglop · Answer

Thanks for the responses!

In case it helps, my ESR report is:

Quant: 48
- PS: 49
- DS: 47

Verbal: 27
-CR score 30 (55%)
-RC score 33 (66%)
-SC score 16 (15%) , It hurts so much writing SC results, since it has been the area in which I put the most efforts in verbal..

What I am most worried now, is if I should retake the exam en 2/3 weeks, with the same study plan, and hoping that I had an overall bad day in verbal, specially in SC, and try to reach be again around 35 or even higher, considering that i scored 35 in both gmatprep before the exam..

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

It is odd that your SC score was so much lower than expected. Any chance you rushed through SC questions to give yourself more time for RC and CR?

Regardless, I would not suggest taking the exam again in 2-3 weeks. An 80 point gain is not something you can achieve in 2-3 weeks unless you're studying for the exam full-time. You need to keep studying, but using the right methods this time. Do not take a long break. If you have motivation issues, you should considering hiring a qualified tutor. I would strongly recommend the tutor route if you're planning to apply this year at all. You have only a few months left to focus your time and effort on the GMAT; you need to get it out of the way and avoid constant re-attempts so as to save the time and energy for other parts of the applications.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi eljoel14,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. Since you scored V27 on your exam (with SC of 16), I think you likely need to spend some more, than just 2 or 3 weeks, improving your verbal skills, before you retake the GMAT.

I understand that you scored higher on your official practice exams; however keep in mind that the verbal score likely dropped because in your verbal preparation, 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.

The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. 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.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, as you experienced, 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.

Also, since you are pushing for 700+ score, improving a few more points in quant could really help. Thus, I agree that TTP could be the perfect course for you. We’ve seen many students improve from Q48 to Q50+.

If you have any further questions regarding your study plan, feel free to reach out.

Also, you may find it helpful to read this article about  How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT — A Mini Guide for Success .

Good luck!

jglop · Answer

Thank you all for the responses!

I am considering all the options you are mentioning. However, my real dilemma right now is that I feel that I can improve my verbal, and that the 27 mark does not reflect my level (and I'm just hoping that I had a bad day, since my scores in prep tests were around 35), and I feel like I want to retake the exam asap. The problem is that i will not be able to dedicate full time study during summer, and barely 2/3 hours per day. So my idea was to just keep practicing and maintain the level and hope that I do not have such a bad day in verbal again, focusing again a lot in SC questions.
My other option would be to forget about gmat now during summer because I won't be able to study that much, and start again in 2 months, and maybe consider to do a course or have a tutor. So the point is that I really want to give it another try because it didn't go as I expected, to see how it goes, but I also feel that and I'm not sure if it would be the best idea or not..

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

With all due respect, I think "bad day" is a largely exaggerated concept. If you take the exam again now, you may score V30, or V24, and most certainly not anywhere close to V35. You may do slightly better in SC, but CR or RC can get worse. This is the observation I have taken away from reading myriad GMAT experience stories on this forum. Is it possible you are the exception? I'm not saying no, but the chance of this happening is almost zero.

jglop · Answer

I understand what you say, but it not the case that I'm saying that I may score a 35 in the official gmat when all my scores always have been a 30 in verbal, no.In the 4 gmat prep that I took I scored 34, 35, 35 and 34. That's why I'm trying to be optimistic when I say that I think I could have had a bad day when scoring that score in verbal, and that's also why I'm saying that I really want to retake the exam again, although it may not be recommended. However, that said, I think you are exaggerating a bit when you say "the chance of this happening is almost zero". Anyway, I will forget about gmat a couple of days and then I may retake the study fully motivated

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

I would love you to be the exception. I will be cheering for you! Good luck!

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

eljoel14 , have you decided what to do? Keep us posted!

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