rupanandy wrote:
I appeared for my GMAT about 10 days back and I scored 640 ( Q-49, V-27). The mocks that I was giving at home in actual test conditions( with essay, IR , two eight min breaks, did not drink or eat except for breaks) always gave me a score between 680-730 (Q-45-49 and V- 37-41). I was taking
MGMAT and GMAT prep test for my mock tests. Gmat prep was giving me 710, 730 for questions I had never seen before.
On the test day I was calm composed did not panic at all, took all the breaks, had good snacks, did not feel tired physically or mentally. During the test I felt that my Quant did not go very well. However when I took verbal I felt it is going fine, I was a little more cautious.
For past 10 days I am trying to analyze what went wrong and I have not been able make out what went wrong, that my score went below even my worst expected(680)
I am planning to take GMAT again in 2 months however for that I need to know what went wrong and till now I am unable to make out what made my score go that bad.
Can anyone help me in analyzing and making improvements for my second attempt?
First of all you should acknowledge the good news--you did great on quant and actually managed to tie your highest score! That's great!
You obviously need to focus in on verbal and figure out what types of questions are hardest for you--SC, CR, or RC. My guess is that you'll want to focus in on CR since it's relevant to RC, so it's more bang for your buck. Learn tricks to unravel CR questions by recognizing what kind they are. The thing with SC is that you can trust your ear through the 500-600 and 600-700 questions, but the 700+ questions are designed to have best answers, not necessarily perfect answers. In particular, things sound ok when they're actually wrong. You might find you're great with parallelism but terrible with modifiers. If those categories are meaningless to you, you should read more about them as they tend to be the main problems. I say ignore idioms since you can't memorize everything and your English seems fluent enough that you'll know most of them.
It's hard to say exactly what went wrong, but I'm guessing you missed a couple early on that were moderately difficult and then just kept getting questions wrong later, thus never getting you to the harder questions.