GMAT plateau at 660 ... WHY ?

Question

Currently I am scoring 650-660 consistently across 1 GMAT Prep and 2 MGMAT Tests. I have 10 days left for the GMAT. Can someone please advise on how to reach the elusive 700 Club, in these 10 days.

My Quant scores are ranging between 45-48 and Verbal scores are 35-37. I am almost frustrated as I have no idea how to improve on either of the 2 sections. While taking the exam I always feel that I am tested to the limit and that these are the toughest questions, even then that is not the case.

Finally in Quant I am getting around 14-16 questions qrons and still recieving Q47, while in Verbal I get only 12 wrong and get V37, why is there such a huge discrepancy between the raw scores in Verbal and Quant. Also can someone tell me what should be my focus going ahead.

Thanks and I appreciate all your responses.

arindamcanada · Answer

The Manhattan CAT quant section is a lot harder so for the Q section I would go with the Q score on your GMAT Prep. For verbal, though the GMAT prep is a great resource, it does not analyze your weaknesses. I suggest you do 1 more MGMAT CAT and create a report for all your three tests. Then you can see where your weakness is. Then you can practise that part from the GMAT club verbal book or Slingfox's verbal notes.

FYI I never crossed 680 on the MGMAT CAT's and never got lower than 710 on my GMAT Preps. But both resources are excellent for tracking performance.

Posted from my mobile device

FYI I never crossed 680 on the MGMAT CAT's and never got lower than 710 on my GMAT Preps. But both resources are excellent for tracking performance.

Posted from my mobile device

devashish · Answer

I am not sure if I am Incorrect, but I felt that the GMAT Club Quant tests and MGMAT Quant, though on the tougher side, are highly representative of the Quant that I encountered on the GMAT Prep test.

The OG in fact seems to be thoroughly unrepresentative of the Quant.

mattapraveen · Answer

I was having the same problem till a couple of weeks back, but off I am touching the 700 mark on GMAT prep. Never could do better than 680 on MGMAT.

What I could decipher from GMAT prep is that,in V, we need to get less than 10 Q's wrong to score anything around high 30's. Like 39 or 38. Anything above that, GMAT prep penalizes very badly, with the verbal dropping down to less than 35.

In Q, I found out that the more hard questions we get right, though we get some easy ones wrong, we get a good score of 48-49. Once I got only 9 questions wrong, in two tests, in Q and got 49 on GMAT prep and the other time I got some 13 Q's wrong, but still ended up getting 49 in Q.

What I analyzed was that, in the third case, though I got some easy ones wrong,silly mistakes; I got some toughies right, some combination's and probability and a couple of co-ordinate q's right.

So my personal suggestion, high accuracy in Verbal and getting hard q's right in Q will take you past 700 on GMAT prep.

I am still to give my GMAT, so I am not yet THE guy to give suggestions, but still, my personal experience.

devashish · Answer

Hi Praveen,

Good Observations, now that you mention it even I feel that you are right about the Verbal section -- Getting under 10 wrong to get a decent ~40 Verbal. Regarding math, I still get 14-16 wrong and I guess I am doing something majorly wrong which I am unable to pin point !

shaselai · Answer

first off i wouldnt really say 3 cats = "plateau" or whatever.... it is only 3 tests! did you check your mistakes and use error logs to see how to fix them? Also DONT try to correlate between # wrongs vs score. First of all you wont know the number wrongs on test and 2nd it is dependent on difficulty of the question you got wrong so in theory 1 easy wrong is worth a lot more than 3 very difficulty wrong...

piyushagarwal · Answer

Great..wanted to kick-off a similar post myself.

Have my GMAT next week, took Gmat Prep & MGMAT and I am in the same position. Stuck around 650.
As per my observation for verbal, my maximum mistakes were in SC(more than 70%) and best was RC. For Verbal, the penalty is very high for incorrect answers but yes as someone pointed out, getting an easy one incorrect is worse than getting 3 difficult ones incorrect.

One more thing I noticed was that, the lesser consecutive questions you get incorrect the better your score is i.e. if you get 2-3 or more consecutive Qs incorrect, your score will fall drastically. Though obviously one cannot know if they make a mistake, this is something that everyone should keep in mind. If you answered a question with a doubt make sure you get the next one correct.

My exam is scheduled for next Tuesday and I need to improve on Quant & SC. Some of my friends who recently took GMAT said that the quant in actual GMAT is tougher compared to GMAT Prep which makes it even more important to work on my quant skills.

Experts help - SOS!

devashish · Answer

I am not sure if this might be of interest to anybody, but after a couple more CATs I managed a 690 and 720 on MGMAT. I am not sure what this means, but I like the range.

whiplash2411 · Answer

I agree with shaselai in saying it's not really a plateau or anything.

1. The number of questions you get wrong is no indication of anything. I got 8 questions wrong on my GMAT Prep and still got a 50 in Q; 6 wrong in verbal gave me a 47. 
2. The difficulty levels matter. It's harder to gauge question difficulty in verbal more so than in Quant.

I highly recommend going through your weaknesses after taking another practice CAT and then working on them methodically.

KarishmaB · Answer

For SC, go through the explanations of not just the questions you answer incorrectly but also those you answer correctly. Make sure you know the logic which led you to mark it as the answer so that you can duplicate it in the exams. Also, there is a finite list of concepts GMAT questions you on (e.g. Subject Verb agreement, Modifiers, Pronoun errors etc). If you are exposed to all of them time and again, you should fare much better in the exam. CR and RC sections are much more objective and if you chalk out the strategy you are going to follow and stick to it, you should be able to do well in them.

OG Quant is simpler than what you will encounter in actual GMAT (considering a score of above 600). Even GMAT prep test quant is somewhat simpler than the actual GMAT quant though it still is a fair representation. I would expect a score of +-40 of what I get in GMAT prep test.

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GMAT plateau at 660 ... WHY ?

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