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Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help!

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Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   02 Jun 2015, 00:28
Hi Experts,

I took GMAT in May 2015 and scored 610 (Q49, V25, IR4, AWA6) and obviously I am shocked to see that I could not even score as much as my very first GMATPrep attempt in Verbal!!

My Official Mock Tests scores:
GMATPrep 1 600 (Q40, V32)
GMATPrep 2 660 (Q49, V30)
GMATPrep 1 (Re-take) 710 (Q50, V36)
GMATPrep 2 (Re-take) 710 (Q48, V39)

I bought Veritas Mock Tests and my scores ranged between 630-680. I took 4 of them in real-time conditions, with appropriate breaks, and with AWA and IR. After some time I was quite comfortable with AWA, IR and Quant. They did not give me much trouble. Even when I reviewed my mistakes, I could understand where I was going wrong.

Preparation:
1. Joined a popular online course, studied for 1.5months straight non-stop, did the course problems and immediately practiced with OG questions on that relevant topic.
2. I used to do GMAT Question of the Day almost everyday (it was fun) but mostly only the CR's would baffle me. So, I studied CR in OG Review and OG Verbal again. I went through GMATPrep old paper questions and made sure that I could do them.
3. Generally, for every wrong question, I wrote down the whole question in a word document, wrote down what the question is asking (pre-thinking), why wrong answer is wrong, and why right answer is right. In the end, I had word documents for each SC,CR, and RC.
4. I felt I was having a huge gap in understanding CR, so I went to see Brian (from Veritas) "Blueprint of CR" video, which kind of helped me tackle 600 level questions, but if some statistics or all-some-none is involved I am just lost. And then I used to just mark some answer and move on.

Before the last week of my exam, I was quite confident with the content and timing of all my sections except just CR. So, I practiced all CR's from GMATPrep bank and this way, I knew the in and out of Verbal, or so I believed. Despite all this, when I went to the exam center, Verbal started of with a SC (my strong area) and I felt it was testing me on something which I had never studied. Also, given the fact that I scored 25 proves that GMAT was throwing the easiest of easy questions in the exam. However, with each passing question, I could not even find out what was wrong with option A and for me all options felt correct!!!

RC was okay, and I was able to understand and answer confidently. CR was fine too. I think I panicked in the exam, and started skipping some questions here and there. Somehow in the back of my head, I was mentally calculating how much score drop will I have this time. I had this theory that get 3 wrong in first 10 questions in Verbal, score will be between 30-36. This is ofcourse if I could maintain to get only 5-7wrong in the rest of the section. But as the exam proceeded, I had 0 confidence in marking any single question. It was soo horrible!

Anyway, please can someone help me understand this screwed up Verbal score?! Its the lowest of the lowest score in any mock test so far. I just wish to know where am I lacking, because I do not want to blindly just keep on taking GMAT exam without knowing the cause of the problem.

Thankyou for your time!
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   03 Jun 2015, 04:52
Hi Experts,

Can you please help me on this question?
I am unable to focus where did I go wrong.

Thankyou
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   03 Jun 2015, 21:44
Expert Reply
Patronus wrote:
Hi Experts,

I took GMAT in May 2015 and scored 610 (Q49, V25, IR4, AWA6) and obviously I am shocked to see that I could not even score as much as my very first GMATPrep attempt in Verbal!!

My Official Mock Tests scores:
GMATPrep 1 600 (Q40, V32)
GMATPrep 2 660 (Q49, V30)
GMATPrep 1 (Re-take) 710 (Q50, V36)
GMATPrep 2 (Re-take) 710 (Q48, V39)

I bought Veritas Mock Tests and my scores ranged between 630-680. I took 4 of them in real-time conditions, with appropriate breaks, and with AWA and IR. After some time I was quite comfortable with AWA, IR and Quant. They did not give me much trouble. Even when I reviewed my mistakes, I could understand where I was going wrong.

Preparation:
1. Joined a popular online course, studied for 1.5months straight non-stop, did the course problems and immediately practiced with OG questions on that relevant topic.
2. I used to do GMAT Question of the Day almost everyday (it was fun) but mostly only the CR's would baffle me. So, I studied CR in OG Review and OG Verbal again. I went through GMATPrep old paper questions and made sure that I could do them.
3. Generally, for every wrong question, I wrote down the whole question in a word document, wrote down what the question is asking (pre-thinking), why wrong answer is wrong, and why right answer is right. In the end, I had word documents for each SC,CR, and RC.
4. I felt I was having a huge gap in understanding CR, so I went to see Brian (from Veritas) "Blueprint of CR" video, which kind of helped me tackle 600 level questions, but if some statistics or all-some-none is involved I am just lost. And then I used to just mark some answer and move on.

Before the last week of my exam, I was quite confident with the content and timing of all my sections except just CR. So, I practiced all CR's from GMATPrep bank and this way, I knew the in and out of Verbal, or so I believed. Despite all this, when I went to the exam center, Verbal started of with a SC (my strong area) and I felt it was testing me on something which I had never studied. Also, given the fact that I scored 25 proves that GMAT was throwing the easiest of easy questions in the exam. However, with each passing question, I could not even find out what was wrong with option A and for me all options felt correct!!!

RC was okay, and I was able to understand and answer confidently. CR was fine too. I think I panicked in the exam, and started skipping some questions here and there. Somehow in the back of my head, I was mentally calculating how much score drop will I have this time. I had this theory that get 3 wrong in first 10 questions in Verbal, score will be between 30-36. This is ofcourse if I could maintain to get only 5-7wrong in the rest of the section. But as the exam proceeded, I had 0 confidence in marking any single question. It was soo horrible!

Anyway, please can someone help me understand this screwed up Verbal score?! Its the lowest of the lowest score in any mock test so far. I just wish to know where am I lacking, because I do not want to blindly just keep on taking GMAT exam without knowing the cause of the problem.

Thankyou for your time!


Your Quant score is quite decent so I will not talk about that.

A V25 suggests issues in at least two question types of Verbal. Apparently, you were lost in SC. Did you focus on the decision points? Did you find yourself unable to handle the topics tested at the decision points? For example, were you unable to figure out the tense, unable to make up your mind about the pronoun etc? Did full sentence underlined questions throw you off? Were the sentence structures different in the options such that you needed to focus on the placement of clauses, modifiers which you were unable to do? Did you focus on accuracy of meaning? Think back on your test and try to jot down as many details of trouble areas as possible. Also check out our video on SC if you haven't already seen it: https://www.gmatclub.com/forum/veritas-prep-resource-links-no-longer-available-399979.html#/free-gmat-lesson/
SC is where you will need to save time so you must be efficient at it. Many CR questions take about 2 mins or more but you have less than 2 mins per question in Verbal. So ideally, you should be packing off every SC question in less than 1 min.

What about CR questions? Were you sure of your answers? Have you checked out our write ups on all the different CR question types?
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   03 Jun 2015, 22:32
Hi VeritasPrepKarishma,

Thankyou very much for responding. Please find answers to your questions below:

Did you focus on the decision points?
I did try to, however, most of the questions I got were full of commas, semicolons, etc and I was not sure if either of the fragments were acting as appositive phrase or non-essential modifier. Just for an example, say the question is "ABC, something about ABC, which..., that...." Now in this case I am not sure if placement of "which" and "that" is correctly done.

Did you find yourself unable to handle the topics tested at the decision points? For example, were you unable to figure out the tense, unable to make up your mind about the pronoun etc?
Yes that was really the case. In my mock tests, the decision points would jump to me because of either 3-2 splits, or wrong tense, SV, parallelism, etc. used. However, in the real exam, I could not see a decision point and choices looked more as if they were testing me on meaning because they did not have obvious 3-2 split, etc. It was very confusing to me.

Were the sentence structures different in the options such that you needed to focus on the placement of clauses, modifiers which you were unable to do?
Yes you are right, they focused on either back to back restrictive modifiers, and I could not find out if Modifier 1 needed "that" or "which" or was it Modifier 2 that needed "that" or "which"

Did you focus on accuracy of meaning?
I remember atleast once choice where even though I focused on the meaning, I still could eliminate choices. Apparently, there were 2-3 correct ways of explaining the idea according to me (!!) :(

SC is where you will need to save time so you must be efficient at it. Many CR questions take about 2 mins or more but you have less than 2 mins per question in Verbal. So ideally, you should be packing off every SC question in less than 1 min.
Actually the clock was at 52minutes and I was still on 8th question. That was no relief, as I was not sure if my first 7 answers were even correct. In my mocks, my average SC time was 1:20, CR in 1:50 and RC reading was 4-6minutes and RC questions were 1-1:15minutes. I guess I need to improve my SC timing a bit here.


What about CR questions? Were you sure of your answers?
Yeah, I think CR was ok. However, in the middle of the section I randomly guessed a few questions. They were either CR or SC. So to save time from question 18th - 25th, I would answer one question, guess the next, answer one.. and so on. But I was so running out of time, that even the ones I was answering with time, I was unable to give good amount of time to each CR. To be honest, CR has always been an area where I haven't improved a lot, or atleast my confidence has not improved a lot. I am easily lost with choices involving statistics or percentages. I have practiced a lot from GMATPrep, gmatclub, Veritas Bank, OG - all of which have been supremely useful - but for some reason every new question is new! I know some people who can readily crack CR and see the "gap" and save all the time by NOT reading the other choices, but for me, I have to read and re-read the choices to be sure. This is really time consuming as well. Can you please help how to improve in CR too?

Have you checked out our write ups on all the different CR question types?
Unfortunately not. Can you please provide me the links for this write-ups?

As a side note, I found that I took a lot of time reading RC passages in exam! They were short but very convoluted. Some of the questions and their answer choices were too long for me to understand. I think those were also the places where I consumed time. Do you have any tips to make sense of long choices by shortening it OR how to read passages more quickly?

My strategy in RC has been to read it fully, jot notes down and then eliminate the wrong choices
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   04 Jun 2015, 06:19
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Hi Patronus,

I'm curious to know if you had taken a full-length GMAT, including timed breaks, etc. It's difficult to gauge where you really stand without simulating a test-day environment when taking your practice exams, which might explain the difference between your mock scores and actual score.

We wrote about this recently on our blog as well, which you can check out here: https://bit.ly/1AMceCh

Best,
Rich
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink] New post   04 Jun 2015, 20:30
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Patronus wrote:
Hi VeritasPrepKarishma,

Thankyou very much for responding. Please find answers to your questions below:

Did you focus on the decision points?
I did try to, however, most of the questions I got were full of commas, semicolons, etc and I was not sure if either of the fragments were acting as appositive phrase or non-essential modifier. Just for an example, say the question is "ABC, something about ABC, which..., that...." Now in this case I am not sure if placement of "which" and "that" is correctly done.

Did you find yourself unable to handle the topics tested at the decision points? For example, were you unable to figure out the tense, unable to make up your mind about the pronoun etc?
Yes that was really the case. In my mock tests, the decision points would jump to me because of either 3-2 splits, or wrong tense, SV, parallelism, etc. used. However, in the real exam, I could not see a decision point and choices looked more as if they were testing me on meaning because they did not have obvious 3-2 split, etc. It was very confusing to me.

Were the sentence structures different in the options such that you needed to focus on the placement of clauses, modifiers which you were unable to do?
Yes you are right, they focused on either back to back restrictive modifiers, and I could not find out if Modifier 1 needed "that" or "which" or was it Modifier 2 that needed "that" or "which"

Did you focus on accuracy of meaning?
I remember atleast once choice where even though I focused on the meaning, I still could eliminate choices. Apparently, there were 2-3 correct ways of explaining the idea according to me (!!) :(

SC is where you will need to save time so you must be efficient at it. Many CR questions take about 2 mins or more but you have less than 2 mins per question in Verbal. So ideally, you should be packing off every SC question in less than 1 min.
Actually the clock was at 52minutes and I was still on 8th question. That was no relief, as I was not sure if my first 7 answers were even correct. In my mocks, my average SC time was 1:20, CR in 1:50 and RC reading was 4-6minutes and RC questions were 1-1:15minutes. I guess I need to improve my SC timing a bit here.


What about CR questions? Were you sure of your answers?
Yeah, I think CR was ok. However, in the middle of the section I randomly guessed a few questions. They were either CR or SC. So to save time from question 18th - 25th, I would answer one question, guess the next, answer one.. and so on. But I was so running out of time, that even the ones I was answering with time, I was unable to give good amount of time to each CR. To be honest, CR has always been an area where I haven't improved a lot, or atleast my confidence has not improved a lot. I am easily lost with choices involving statistics or percentages. I have practiced a lot from GMATPrep, gmatclub, Veritas Bank, OG - all of which have been supremely useful - but for some reason every new question is new! I know some people who can readily crack CR and see the "gap" and save all the time by NOT reading the other choices, but for me, I have to read and re-read the choices to be sure. This is really time consuming as well. Can you please help how to improve in CR too?

Have you checked out our write ups on all the different CR question types?
Unfortunately not. Can you please provide me the links for this write-ups?

As a side note, I found that I took a lot of time reading RC passages in exam! They were short but very convoluted. Some of the questions and their answer choices were too long for me to understand. I think those were also the places where I consumed time. Do you have any tips to make sense of long choices by shortening it OR how to read passages more quickly?

My strategy in RC has been to read it fully, jot notes down and then eliminate the wrong choices


"Actually the clock was at 52minutes and I was still on 8th question."

If you actually meant to write this, then this is the root of all problems. You took an average of 6.5 min per question for the first 8 questions. You can never do that - no matter what, you cannot spend more than 3-4 mins on any question (including Quant) until and unless you are at the end of the test with plenty of time left over. I can imagine what would have happened after you saw 52 mins - 8th question. Your mind would have gone into a frenzy. You would have struggled on simple questions because you would have glossed over them without focusing on the key words. You would have wanted to just get to the 'rest of the questions' which means that you would not have paid attention to the question in front of you. Everything would have seemed super confusing - even if the answer was staring at you. Even if it is the first question you get, if you feel lost even after 2 mins, guess and move on. It's much better than faltering on your entire test.

Also, you seem to have really struggled with modifiers and relative clauses. Suggest you to check out a grammar book for these topics.
Search for critical reasoning on our blog and you will find plenty of posts - many by Ron and some by me on CR question types. Go through them.

"In my mocks, my average SC time was 1:20, CR in 1:50 and RC reading was 4-6minutes and RC questions were 1-1:15minutes."

If these are your average timings, you need to increase speed in RC, rest is fine. If you are taking 4-6 mins for reading the passage, you should be able to answer the questions in 30 secs each. So for purpose-tone-scope questions, you shouldn't need to go back to the passage. Only for specific detail or inference questions should you back up once. If you re unable to understand a short super convoluted passage even after a couple of reads - which should ideally take not more than 2-3 mins since the passage is short - take your best guess on the questions and move on. The ones looking for specific details would be simple so those you should get correct. You might also get the purpose. Even if the other 1 or 2 are incorrect, it will not matter in the big scheme of things. With long and easy passages, jotting down the purpose of every paragraph is quite useful.
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Re: Huge gap between GMATPrep Mock and Actual GMAT Verbal Score. Pls help! [#permalink]
04 Jun 2015, 20:30

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