Help with ESR

Hello Rich,
I refer to my score as decent because for the schools I am planning to apply to that it what the score is: decent. For 700+ scorers there is an average 8 point increase (source: Manhattan Review - GMAT retaking) but I have reasons to believe that I will be on the right tail of this distribution, hopefully. Anyways, on to your questions.

Studies:
1) I have studied on and off since January, however I have really put the pedal to the metal since the 29th of September, when I booked my exam for the 4th of November. In this period of 35 days I have studied for 110 hours approximately. Now for this new exam that I booked on the 11th of November ( for the 9th of December) I have allocated another 100 hours, making the hours per week 28.
2) My used materials are: all the MGMAT books, the GMAT Club Math book, GMAT Advanced questions, GMAT additional 404 questions. I tend to stick to official questions only since I read that this is the most beneficial for the exam, if you do enough of them you start to understand the logic of the test writers.
3) The CATS I have mostly take are from Veritas (earlier on) and later on focused only on official, so here it goes:

GMATPrep Exam 1 - Jul 16 2019 - 620 Q44 V31
GMATPrep Exam 2 - Sep 22 2019 - 610 Q47 V27
GMATPrep Exam 1 (Retake) - Sep 28 2019 - 630 Q46 V31
Veritas Exam 1 - Sep 29 2019 - 670 Q48 V34 (From there on I started to efficiently use timing strategies)
Veritas Exam 2 - Oct 05 2019 - 670 Q46 V36
GMATPrep Exam 2 (Retake) - Oct 05 2019 - 750 Q50 V41
Veritas Exam 3 - Oct 06 2019 - 670 Q47 V35
GMATPrep Exam 1 (Retake #2) - Oct 09 2019 - 720 Q48 V41
Veritas Exam 4 - Oct 12 2019 - 710 Q50 V37
GMATPrep Exam 2 (Retake #2) - Oct 15 2019 - 740 Q50 V40
GMATPrep Exam 3 - Oct 23 2019 - 670 Q48 V34 (Felt anxious here IDK why)
GMATPrep Exam 4 - Oct 31 2019 - 690 Q49 V34

Real GMAT Exam - Nov 04 2019 - 710 Q48 V39


Goals:

4) I am planning to apply to schools by the end of December/beginning of January.
5) I would like to do a Masters in Business Analytics or Financial Engineering. Some schools that I am looking at are MIT, Columbia, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Duke. I would like to increase my score to 750 in order to be able to possibly ask for financial aid, since the tuition costs in all of these schools are rather high. Further at MIT (my #1 choice) the average GMAT (converted from GRE) is 740, so it is good to be above that average in order to have an advantage over the other applicants.

I have sent my ESR by email. Let me know if you can derive some useful tips for me from this information. I would really appreciate it.

Best regards,
Ev

Statistically this is true, however he did not completely disregard retakes. As I mentioned in my comment 700+ GMAT scorers who retake the exam see the least improvement in their score, however an 8 point average increase does happen (at least from what ManhattanReview found).

Hi Evgeny,

I've emailed you an analysis of your ESR along with some additional notes.

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

Hi ferrero57,

You seem to have taken 'offense' to what is ultimately a statistical piece of information, but I want to assure you that my intent was not to upset anyone. That data is actually fairly consistent going back decades: MOST Test-takers won't score 700+ (and the 700 Score has almost always been right around the 90th percentile, year-after-year).

There are a variety of reasons for why that happens. As you pointed out, some people just have too much test anxiety and that's why they don't perform better. That type of issue is NOT a judgment of their character - and it does not imply anything about how they might function as a businessperson. One of the reasons why the Business School application involves multiple 'pieces' besides the GMAT (including Work Experience, Undergraduate Grades, Letters of Rec, etc.) is because Business School Admissions Officers understand that not everyone is an amazing Standardized-Test-Taker.

I'm not sure why you would infer anything about most GMATers being written off as 'idiots', especially since I never used anything resembling that language in this post (nor have I ever in over 15,000+ posts on this website). The point was ultimately that a 710 is an OUTSTANDING Score - and having that perspective is important.

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

Hi evgenyaleks,

FIrst off 710 is a great start! Regarding how to improve, although I am unable to see your ESR, here is some general advice you can follow to improve in both quant and verbal. Since you already have a pretty high GMAT score, to improve your score further, you need to go through GMAT quant and verbal 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. For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see, types that you would rather not see, and types that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you had to know to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

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

Feel free to reach out with any further questions.

Good luck!

Hello Rich,
Thank you very much for your response, I have replied there.

Best,
Evgeny

Hello Scott,
Thank you for the thorough reply. From what you have said I can deduce that my main tactic now would be just practice, practice and practice (and error log). I was planning more on practice, practice and Ron Purewal videos. Do you reckon that the aforementioned videos are helpful for a 710 scorer to get 750? Or would that time that I spend watching said videos be more useful if I were to solve problems?
Let me know, thank you!

Best regards,
Evgeny

ScottTargetTestPrep

Actually now I have 5 posts so I have edited my original post with my ESR.