Help needed to improve GMAT really disappointed in my recent attempt.

Hi crackgmat2,

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 600. 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.

The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

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 my article with more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT helpful.

If you’d like more specific advice on how to improve your quant and verbal skills, feel free to reach back out. Good luck!

Thanks for the advice Sachin.

Thanks Rich,
Here are the responses to your questions:
Studies:
1) How many hours do you typically study each week? 3 hours weekdays and between 6-7 hours weekends( 3-3 or 3.5-3.5 sessions spaced out morning and evening)
2) What study materials have you used over the course of all of your studies? OG/e-gmat and Manhattan prep books
3) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)? I took the exams on wednesday of past 4 weeks as my exam was on wednesday at the same time

Goals:
4) What is your overall goal score? 700 not looking to score super high as 740 or 760 just want a decent score to compliment the effort as I have put alot of effort into studying for GMAT
5) What Schools are you planning to apply to? Carnegie Mellon, USC Marshall and Cornell


Please advice, thanks!

Also,
Thanks Scott for some insights.

Hi crackgmat2,

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

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