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

Question

Hello world,

I gave my first gmat on 18th of Oct,2018. I scored a 690: Q49 V35 AWA 5 & IR 8 and was pretty much heartbroken on seeing that score; My gmatprep scores will further show you why. I have attached my ESR at the end but I would suggest anyone who wants to help me to read what I have written about my prep

Background:  Indian, Just completed my Bachelors in Technology and have started a job in an MNC. I prepared for gmat in the 1.5-month gap I had in between my college final exams and the joining date for my job.

Materials I have or used   :

OG 2018 and Verbal Review 2019 : Finished completely (only once)

E gmat prep : Studied SC and CR from there ( Didn't have time to revisit the videos or use scholaranium so have just seen them once ) This was my only source of prep for verbal along with some magoosh blogs(love each one of them) I studied at the end of my prep. They were mostly blogs on that v which and so on. Also studied a little on idioms from magoosh idioms book, it was indeed very good and informative. For RC, didn't study the theory from anywhere, just used my CR skills to pass through them. Combining RC's from OG and Verbal Review, I would say I had 90-95% accuracy in Easy-Medium RC's and 80% on the Harder ones(700+).

gmatclub tests  : Just managed to attempt 6 quant tests but I revisited every wrong and flagged questions. My scores were Q47,48,49,50,49,50 (Just used Gmat quant club guide to study quant sinceI have a pretty solid base in maths) Although now I feel I took quant a bit lightly since the quant I encountered in my GMAT was much harder and had very lengthy questions.

MGMAT : Just have attempted 2 mgmat and scored 680( gave it in the initial stage of prep) and 720 (gave it 2 weeks before my exam). Have 4MGMAT mocks left.

GMAT prep : Now here is why I was shattered on test day. This has been my performance on gmat prep. I have used 5 mocks once and have 1 mock that I haven't used at all.

GMATprep1: 720 - Q50 V37 ( Gave it 2 weeks after I started my prep )
GMATprep2: 720 - Q50 V38 ( Gave it 1 week after mock1)
GMATprep3: 770 - Q51 V42 ( Gave it 2 weeks before my actual GMAT)
GMATprep4: 740 - Q50 V40 (Gave it 1 week before my actual GMAT, had 2 questions wrong on quant )
GMATprep5: 740 - Q51 V40 (Gave it 3 days before my Gmat)
GMATprep6: Not attempted yet

In the last 4 gmatprep mocks, I would say out of all my verbal mistakes, 75-80% of them were SC while the rest RC or CR, varying from exam to exam. Usually had I would have either 2 rc 1 cr wrong or 1 rc 2 cr and around 5-6 wrong in SC. I tried a lot to improve my SC but for some reason, it has been very hard to improve. Although I would say I have loved Magoosh content, esp the blogs and idioms book.

Manhattan SC/RC/CR book 6th Edition  : Yet to touch them

GMAT ninja videos on SC  : Added to watch list and will watch them soon. Didn't have time before I gave my GMAT.

Time in hand  : Now that I have started my job, I would say I can give 2-3 hours per day to my gmat prep everyday on weekdays and 8-10 hours on weekend.

I haven't decided when to give my next attempt and I want to give it my all. I don't want to give it a third time. I want to conquer this in the second attempt.
I want to reach a minimum of 740 and I know I can get Q50 V40 if I study smart. I want to focus on SC alot and work on my quant side my side seriously too. I doubt if I even saw more than 4-5 easy questions on my gmat quant. Meanwhile on gmatprep, even on gmatclub I saw atleast 10 questions that I would say were rather short and easy to do.

Anyway, I'm done with my story and eagerly waiting for your advice, be it from BB himself or from a new member. I just feel constantly restless and I won't be completely stress-free until I reach my goal.

ESR attached below.

EducationAisle · Answer

Hi Anish, looks like the third quarter in Verbal, gave you a lot of grief. Your accuracy rate is just 43%, even as you spent an average of almost 3 minutes per question!

On the other hand, the first quarter went phenomenally well: With just 1 minute per question (that's really less actually), you were able to maintain 88% accuracy rate. I understand that considering your performance, the difficulty level must have gone up in the third quarter, but still, it somehow seems to me that you had a bit of concentration lapse in the third quarter.

Do you recollect any of his?

anishraina · Answer

Umm, If I can recollect correctly, I would say I encountered around 2 RC in this stage. Now If I am to compare them to OG verbal RC, I would say they were of lvl 700+. I also seem to recollect 2 RC and 1 CR question where I spent at least 3-4 mins on them (max 4.5 mins on two of those 3 ques, I was ahead of my target time so thought might as well spend it here). I would say in all 3 questions I was terribly confused in between 2 options. I tried to be focused throughout verbal since I knew it was my weak area and a good score here will def be the push I need to reach 740.

Also, I would say my first question on quant was either wrong(0.1% chance) or just incredibly hard. Here is a blunder I did, I spent around 6 mins on it. I doubled checked everything, every single word of the question but I couldn't figure out what the hell went wrong. In any of the mocks never did I ever get such a hard question as the first question. I spent so much time on it because ik the first question is v imp and I feared maybe it was an easy question and I am missing something. If I get this wrong, I will never be able to recover. 
Also, I took this much time because ik I'm good at quant, many questions in quant were pretty basic for me and I can do them under 1 min so I took that risk. Unfortunately, never did that many easy -medium questions show up and thus halfway through I realized maybe I will only get such hard questions and I'm seriously not on the time I should be. On checking my esr, it just confirmed my guess. In all 4 sections, I got questions of the mid to high difficulty and I was behind. I feel so stupid why I did that. But honestly, I have studied maths from elementary to college and aced it all these years. I did solve that 1st question and my answer wasn't even in the options. I triple checked but that bore no fruit. I got frustrated, made a guess that I felt could be the answer and moved on. I still remember that question *sigh* PS It was from ratio and proportion. A relatively easy topic for me during prep and mocks.

egmat · Answer

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

EducationAisle · Answer

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

anishraina · Answer

Done

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

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

prabsahi · Answer

Wow..Kudos Kudos Kudos..

anishraina · Answer

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?

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

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.

BullMarkets · Answer

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

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

Prep Toolkit

Top 5 GMAT Debrief Videos

615 to 715 in 15 Days (Ria's Strategies)

More than Quant/Verbal Abilities: Speed vs. Accuracy

745 with Only Self-Prep and GMAT Club

From 555 to 765: 210-point Improvement

Perfect 805 Score Debrief by Julia

My Rewards