GMAT 650 (Q48, V31) ESR Analysis

rahulrm09 - All right, I will offer my two cents, since you took the time to post and share your ESR, which could give anyone not scoring an 800 a sense of vulnerability. I like to say that you are only as good as your worst result in practice, since you presumably were not practicing at a test center with other test-takers around to simulate the actual testing experience--first-time jitters can have a measurable effect. Your practice results reflect the same thing: the first practice test you took, presumably GMAT PREP 1, was a little uneven, since you were just getting used to the experience. Once you had gotten used to the format of an official GMAT™ CAT (and presumably studied some more), your results improved.

The actual ESR suggests that your time management is not a problem in any section--that is, unless you are too concerned about keeping pace and getting careless as a result. I read a posting not too long ago by someone who had scored above a 750, and in that post, he revealed that he had sacrificed pacing in order to stick with his plan of ensuring that he answered the first ten questions correctly, then the next ten, and so on. Sure, he scrambled at the end to click boxes and answer everything, and he also felt, according to his post, as if he had blown the Quant at the end, but it turned out fine, and his score was well above what he was expecting upon finishing. What I mean to say is that focusing on accuracy through targeted practice of weaker question areas might outweigh checking the clock each problem to ensure you were on pace.

Since you asked specifically about Verbal strategies, your ESR suggests a few problem areas that you ought to address before a retest:

CR - You are getting about 2/3 questions correct, regardless of subtype. It would be worth practicing any official CR questions you may not have encountered to see if you can pin down which question types tend to give you more trouble. If you have exhausted your official practice material, you can turn to third party questions, but that can be hit or miss. It goes without saying that if you have covered hundreds of official CR questions, you should take the time to review your incorrect/guessed on responses so that you might spot some patterns. Do not just look at the correct responses. Take the time to study what makes the incorrect responses fall short.

RC - Infer/suggest questions are 50/50 for you, and that is a problem, hindering any real progress in Verbal. The trick to these types of questions is to understand that regardless of the wording, the answer still has to come from the passage. There is no room for creativity. Again, targeted practice and analysis is called for. In practice, you might even not time yourself at first (if using a book), just to see if you can arrive at the correct line of reasoning. Once you get better at that, you can work on getting the correct answer faster, but you have to build a firm foundation first.

SC - Grammar is clearly a problem. I am not sure whether it is commas, idioms, or any of a number of issues, but you have to sort that out by maintaining some sort of error log. You can either pore over it yourself or get help from a friend, tutor, or teacher who might know more about specific issues that are giving you trouble. In terms of difficulty, your performance over the second quarter of the test shows that you were not ready to graduate to Hard questions. It is also interesting that this is the section in which you spent the shortest amount of time per question. What types of questions were they? I would guess you had fewer RC questions, but do you remember anything about that portion of the test? Were you rushing? Your performance over the third quarter suggests that you were mentally fatigued from that more challenging second part, with more than double the errors on questions that were not at the same level of difficulty as those from the first quarter. This is something else you can work on in practice, building sets of 27 questions or so and mixing the level of difficulty, just to see if you can focus on the question at hand instead of giving into mental fatigue.

Your Quant performance was more linear, as you can tell yourself. Good job on geometry. I guess you have that base covered. In any case, those are my initial thoughts on your performance and where to go from here.

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew