Is actual GMAT verbal way harder?

Hi,
Sorry about your score. One thing I have learnt about this exam, no matter how much you know or study, you still need one basic quality with every question you come across. That quality is patience, without it you will still miss a lot of questions you should have gotten right. Another thing, may be you have not figured out what you lack, I suggest you dig deep to understand what you have been missing and that also comes with patience. Someone above told you to analyze each question whether right or wrong to see what it's really made of. That will also take your patience. All the best.

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Hi abc555,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. The good news is that you scored really well on quant, right? That said, I understand that you are not satisfied with your verbal score, so the question we need to ask is why you scored so high on your practice exams but lower on the real 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 V31. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance (on your 3 GMATs). However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day, meaning 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.

To hit your score goal, your preparation probably needs to be more complete, particularly for verbal. In other words, 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, as I’m guessing you experienced, 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 at identifying traps 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.

You also may find it helpful to read this article about The Surprising Factor that is the Key to Hitting Your GMAT Score Goal: Grit.

I realize that you are frustrated, but don’t give up, my friend!!

Hi abc555,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day did not go as well as hoped. Your prior 670/Q49 is a strong score tough, so it could be enough to get you into your first-choice School. As such, a retest might not be necessary. Depending on the Schools that you plan to apply to, you would likely find it beneficial to speak with an Admissions Expert about your overall profile. There's a Forum full of those Experts here:

https://gmatclub.com/forum/ask-admissio ... tants-124/

GMAC has publicly stated that the Official Score that you earn on Test Day is within +/- 30 points of actual ability. Your 3 Official Scores show that you essentially performed the same each time (about 650 +/- a few points). You handle certain aspects of the GMAT consistently well, but you also make certain consistent mistakes. As such, regardless of how you've performed on your CATs, you've 'responded' to Test Day in the same general ways. By extension, rushing back in to retest in 16 days would likely NOT be a good idea - it's likely that you would score at this same general level.

All of that having been said, you're actually closer to a 700+ than you probably realize, but you're likely developed some 'bad habits' that are keeping you from scoring higher. Before we discuss any of those possible issues though, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) How long did you study before each of your 3 Official GMATs?
2) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
3) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

You might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report. While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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