GMAT Experience and Retake Strategy

Question

Hi GMAT Club community and experts,

I would greatly appreciate your advice and insights (based on your experience) on the situation described below:
  Started formally preparing for the GMAT in June 2020 
 Enrolled in Manhattan Prep GMAT online course from June to August 
 Studied thoroughly every week using MPrep Quant and Verbal Review books and practicing from OG problems 
 Revised every day and built an error log. Typically for every 30 min spent doing problems, I spend 1h reviewing them 
 Practice CAT record (Month, Source, Score & Sub-score): 1) June, MPrep, 620 (Q43, V32); 2) July, MPrep, 630 (Q44, V32); 3) August, MPrep, 630 (Q44, V32); 4) September, Official GMAT Practice, 730 (Q49, V40); 5) September, MPrep, 670 (Q44, V37)
 
  First GMAT attempt  last Friday 25th September 2020:  630 (Q47, V30)  
  Target score: 730  
  Target re-take date: Late October 2020

I was surprised (and disappointed) at such a low Verbal score - it was far below the level I expected when I was taking the test, as I did not find the questions to be especially easier than those I took on my latest practice tests. Moreover, the V30 score is significantly lower than my performance in the practice CATs I took before the test and my perceived ability level when doing OG problems. During the test, I did not feel like a sub-section went particularly bad, and despite timing was not optimal (had to speed up as I got caught on one long RC Bio passage), I still managed to finish the section without making over 2 semi-guesses at the end (approx. 7 in total for the section). The ESR is not very revealing either.

Below are the main items you could help me with:
  Share your experience and re-taking strategy if you went through a pitfall on Verbal like the one mentioned above 
 Thoughts on potential causes/diagnosis of what may have happened above (I can provide the test ESR and further details upon request) 
 Advice on how to re-focus revision for a re-take, given that I am comfortable with Quant but need substantial improvement in Verbal 
 References/links to candidates (or posts) you know that went through a similar experience 
 References/links to useful posts on: 1) Re-taking strategy, 2) Re-building a study-plan, 3) How to resume and re-structure Verbal practice for improvement

Your help is much appreciated! Many thanks in advance.

Russ19 · Answer

Hi

Who was your Mprep Live course tutor? I think you can consult with Mprep tutor Jeff Volmer to have a proper guideline. I also did my live online course with a good tutor. I also recommend you see the youtube videos of GMATNinja and read his articles at the gmat club. Practice more challenging questions from the link below: https://gmatclub.com/forum/search.php?view=search_tags

mufasa96 · Answer

Thanks for your response and for the references. My MPrep tutor was Jamie Nelson (she was great). Jeff Volmer provides retaking advice?

tuan1995 · Answer

OG questions are far more easier than real test questions. You can practice more by purchasing GMAT club test, which allows you to take up to 9 verbal CATs.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi mufasa96,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT.

Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V30. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, 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.

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

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses .

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:

how to score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?

mufasa96 · Answer

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your response.

As mentioned in the post, I prepared with Manhattan Prep's online course (10 lessons of core curriculum), used MPrep's strategy guides for revising content and doing questions from the OG. I took 5 practice CATs (found MPrep's harder than the official mocks).

For Verbal in particular, I found that an important weakness for me is reading for purpose and structure - I struggle retaining information and catching the main point of GMAT RC passages unless I read slowly, take detailed notes or read through parts of a passage more than once. That, in turn, takes up too much time and it becomes a question of time vs. accuracy, one of which is compromised. Therefore for RC I must improve my reading & retention skills, to better understand the point and structure of passages after a first, effective read.  Any tips on how to improve & practice reading and understanding skills are much appreciated.

Developing the above skill would also help me capitalize a greater accuracy and efficiency on CR (to read and understand arguments clearly and faster). Then on CR, the point you mention on analyzing questions and answer choices deeply becomes the differentiator to improve performance. May I ask what you explain what you mean by ?  It would be great if you could provide an example to illustrate how to do this exactly to get the most useful takeaways.

On SC, the large majority of my mistakes come from 2 root causes: 1. I can't find a legitimate issue to eliminate ALL the choices, and end up using my ear to choose the best answer or 2. I notice a specific issue with the sentence (e.g. parallelism, structure, modifiers...) but I am not sure which answer choice best fixes the issue. Again,  any advice on how to address both issue above is greatly appreciated  (i.e. how to effectively learn the application of grammar rules for meaning in GMAT SC, and which are the most important/common traps of SC questions by topic).

Many thanks in advance for the support,

Pedro

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi Pedro,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day 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 how you've been studying and your goals:

1) How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) On what specific dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks?
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). Since you purchased the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you. If you would rather not post it publicly, then you can feel free to PM it directly to me.

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

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi Pedro,

Sorry for the delay here, but if you are still studying for your GMAT, I have two very helpful article for you:

GMAT Sentence Correction: 8 Essential Tips

GMAT Reading Comprehension Tips: Top 8 DOs and DON’Ts

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