GMAT ESR Review Request

Here are my takeaways from your reports:

First of all, you had a great strategy for Quant and correctly answered all questions in the first 2 quarters - that's amazing! The superb performance in the first half of the Quant section is primarily responsible for your Q49. Now in the second half of the section when you got into the high difficulty level territory, you missed over half of the questions. It is obvious that you were also pressed for time, so I don't blame your math skills. In order to improve your Quant score, if you care at all, you should perhaps increase your efficiency so as to reduce the amount of time spent on each easy question. Note that I said efficiency, not speed. Never sacrifice accuracy. Ever!

In reviewing your time distribution for Quant, I've noticed that you spent about as long on each correctly answered question as on each incorrectly answered one. This suggests that you could not quite separate difficult questions from easy ones, and that you likely answered wrong questions that you did not find difficult. You need to focus on accuracy more and try to limit careless mistakes.

Otherwise, your Quant performance is well balanced. You'll need to improve across the board if you'd like to reach a perfect score on the Quant section.

Now when it comes to Verbal, which is the section you'll want to improve on the most, the situation is quite complex. It isn't clear which sub-section is your weakest. Your score progressions in Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Sentence Correction are 16-37-25, 37-33-51, and 39-34-29 respectively. Whereas your weakest section in the first attempt is obviously CR, CR became your strongest section in the second attempt. While your performance and improvement in RC were remarkable, these came at the expense of weakened performances in the other sub-sections. I have two possible explanations for the wild fluctuations in each sub-section. Either you were given relatively easy questions in one sub-section and more difficult questions in the others, or you focused almost exclusively on one sub-section for each round of studying.

Either way, your Verbal performance has been inconsistent as you have already acknowledged, and from your notes I'm guessing that you may have relied too heavily on rules and tricks and been inflexible with new question styles and formats. In order to improve consistency, you'll need to learn the fundamentals of logical reasoning and grammar. Once you master these skills, it will not matter much whether you deal with easy or hard questions on your real test. Familiarity with questions is a double-edged sword. You can crack the 600's by getting used to all types of questions that have shown up on official GMAT administrations, but in order to break the 700's, you'll need to improve your thinking capacity.

Some people may point out that you ran out of time at the end of your Verbal section, but I would argue that the final quarter is not really important, as evident in the difficulty level of questions changing little between the 2 final quarters. By the time you reach the final quarter, your score will have already been more or less determined. What you need to learn to do is to answer correctly more difficult questions-most questions you got right fall in the Medium range and most questions you got wrong are of above-Medium difficulty.

It sounds like you have hit a plateau in your studying. If someone has tried so hard and so long for so little gain, I recommend that the person hire a tutor that can teach you how to think. A few hours with a quality tutor will do you wonders and can be a real game changer.

Hope this helps.