How should I prepare for re-take GMAT given my situation?

Hi Griffin.

Sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results seem to show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V31. All the same, since it does not appear that nerves or stress negatively affected your test-day performance, it’s likely 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 questions of 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, as you experienced, you will be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you had answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes going well beyond learning patterns and tricks to 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.

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

Good luck!