GMAT First Attempt : Heartbroken 690. Need help to reach atleast 740.

Hi anishraina,

I am sorry to know that your scores were not in line with your expectations. In order to give you precise inputs, I would like to check the data of your preparation on Scholaranium and course dashboard along with all the information you have shared here and your ESR. Please send over your ESR through the registered email id to support@e-gmat.com.

Regards,
Aditee

Indeed; this however, does not seem to have translated into results in the third quarter.

Done

Hi anishraina.

At 690, you are pretty close to your score goal, and I may be able to add an additional aspect to the explanation for the difference between your GMAT Prep scores and your verbal score on the actual GMAT.

Here's what I seem to be seeing happen in many people's GMAT preparation.

All the GMAT Prep companies are doing their best to teach people to answer GMAT verbal questions, and one of the things that they do is go through the GMAT Prep verbal questions to determine how GMAT verbal questions are designed. The thing is that doing so can have a side effect, in that what can happen is that students using GMAT preparation materials that are based partly on the questions on GMAT Prep tests can learn how to answer the questions on GMAT Prep tests without fully learning how to answer GMAT verbal questions in general.

So, in addition to your not having spent a lot of time working on verbal, you might have had such an experience.

The remedy is to change the way you are preparing for GMAT verbal and the way you answer verbal questions.

Here's the deal with GMAT verbal questions. Above all, they test your skill in noticing details and your skill in using logic. So, to score high in GMAT verbal you have to work on developing those skills. In other words, GMAT verbal question writers are constantly coming up with new twists, and so learning certain patterns and rules won't get you all the way to a high verbal score. You have to develop your vision and logical skills. so that, no matter what twists or tricks come your way in verbal questions, you see how to answer them correctly.

How do you develop those skills? By working slowly and carefully when answering practice questions, seeking to notice a lot about the logic and details of every aspect of the questions. Doing so could require spending ten minutes or more per question at times. and you have to work on each question until you clearly see why one answer is correct and the others are not. You have to develop your vision and use of logic so that you almost always choose correctly between those last two answers. Getting 80% of harder OG questions correct is not going to do the trick. To get a V40+ score, you have to be getting at least close to 90% of hard questions correct in practice.

In seeking to get hard questions correct consistently, you will be training yourself to see what you have to see and use logic well. You can get easy and medium questions correct with holes in your approaches. It's the hard questions that will show the holes and force you to improve your approaches. That's not to say that you can't learn a lot by carefully analyzing easy and medium questions. You can, but harder questions in particular will challenge you, and generally you won't get the harder questions correct by just using some patterns that you picked up somewhere.

So, you need to practice verbal a lot more, and practice very slowly at first, learning to get virtually all the questions you see correct before you seek to speed up.

For more official verbal questions with which to practice, you could get the Question Pack or use these GMAT Prep files. https://gmatclub.com/forum/all-gmatprep ... 87679.html

Wow..Kudos Kudos Kudos..

Thanks alot. You gave me a good reality check. I will definitly be more thorough with my Verbal Prep.
Also if you have the time can you help me figure out whether my quant section was of more than usual level of difficulty or is it normal?

My best guess regarding your quant section is that it was not harder than normal in general, but that it was harder than normal for you.

What makes a quant question hard in general is how challenging it is for people in general to get the correct answer, and getting a correct answer can be difficult for various reasons. Answering some questions doesn't involve reading a lot or doing much, but they are difficult because they are tricky. Other questions are difficult to answer because they provide a lot of information that you have to handle appropriately in order to arrive at the correct answer. Others are difficult because, in order to answer them in the time allotted, you have to see something key.

Questions of these different types may be correctly answered by the same percentage of test-takers and thus may be considered of equal difficulty, but it may be that they are not correctly answered by the same group of people. Some people could be stronger in handing tricky questions or in seeing something key, while others could be stronger in handling questions that involve handling lots of information.

So, it seems possible that your strength at the moment is in handling "short" questions, and you happened to get a lot of "long" questions on the test when you took it.

The upshot of all this is that to lock in your goal score, probably you should spend some time becoming expert in answering the types of quant questions that, currently, you would prefer not to see on the test, i.e., "long" questions. I am sure that you can figure out what types you don't like to see. Once you have, you could do some research into how to efficiently answer questions of those types and then answer dozens of questions of each type, until you get the hang of consistently answering them correctly and quickly.

I'll give you an example from my experience. When I took a CAT style GMAT for the first time, I hadn't bothered to practice answering advanced overlapping sets questions very much. If I recall correctly, I got three overlapping sets questions and spent a ridiculous amount of time answering them, and I ran out of time before I had answered the last couple of quant questions. Before I took the test the next time, I made sure that I worked on advanced overlapping sets. Partly because of that work, the quant section was easy for me that time - whole different experience.

The beauty of doing this work is that, once you become good at answering "long" questions quickly, you will likely quickly answer any that you see and cruise through the quant section, giving yourself time to do things such as check your work and spend time hacking questions that you don't immediately see how to answer.

wow. impressive first start. don't give up!