GMAT Strategy | Should I reappear?

Hi Aydv97,

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

The good news is that you scored really well on quant, right? That said, I understand that you are not satisfied with your verbal score, so the question we need to ask is why you scored so high on your practice exams but lower on the real 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 V27. 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.

Regarding your question, I think you should be fine if you take the test relatively soon but you may want to give yourself a little more time than just two weeks.

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?

Good luck!

Many thanks for your kind response EMPOWERgmatRichC

To answer your questions,
1) I would typically study for about 3-4 hours on a weekday and 5-6 hours over the weekends, with concentrated efforts over the last two to three weeks in the run-up to the test
2) I started by studying Sentence correction using the Manhattan SC guide and the Aristotle book as well and did all of the official material; reading up on the solutions given by experts on the forum and understanding why one option has been selected over the other. I never really read any books for CR. Once I had an understanding of what the question types are, I started solving the official material and the accuracy was satisfactory. Similarly for RC, I was fairly good at understanding passages and getting factual and inference based questions mostly right during my practice. Besides the above-mentioned sources, I haven't referred to any other prep material.
3) My goal scores would be in the range of 730 to 740
4) Mainly planning to apply to the ISB (Round 2)and a 730-40 is an advisable score for my profile

It seems that the ESR hasn't been generated yet but I am very grateful to you for the guidance, Thank you

Thank you so much for your kind response, ScottTargetTestPrep, and for linking me to other relevant articles

Yes, I had attempted the tests under realistic conditions and I feel I did put in the effort to understand the logic behind accepting/rejecting a given option for a lot of questions. I think I do need to be able to better differentiate between the trap answer choices and the correct ones. It is likely that I was unable to understand correctly what a given CR prompt asked for on the actual test or just fell for the trap choices a lot of times. Can't be sure.

Thanks again for your valuable guidance,
Best Regards

Hi Aydv97,

I've sent you a PM with some additional notes and questions.

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