LOST AND SADDENED ~ GMAT 660 FROM MOCK 760

Question

Hi experts! 
First of all, I want to say thank you to this community, I have never really posted but been referring to GMAT Club for all my preparation, dilemma, burnout, and experiences inputs. 
As evident from the title, I took the in person GMAT yesterday and scored a disappointing 660 (Q47,V35), which is an absolute shocker because my mock scores have consistently been in the 730 or plus range.

MOCK SCORE BREAKDOWN :
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 1 - 710 (Q50, V35) - 18th October (I started majorly focusing my studies on Verbal after this attempt).
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 2 - 730 (Q49, V40) - 1st November
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 3 - 730 (Q50, V39) - 15th November
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 4 - 740 (Q51, V39) - 23rd November (Weird about this one because I didn't get any Quant question wrong but still got all questions in the Medium difficulty level).
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 5 - 760 (Q50, V42) - 24th November
GMAT OFFICIAL - MOCK 6 - 780 (Q51, V47) - 25th November (Got many repeat questions)

Given my mock scores, I was very well expecting a 720+ score on my GMAT and felt pretty confident on test date, so not sure if nerves played a part in the drop but I could feel while I took the exam that I wasn't doing well. I also found the exam to be particularly difficult than the mocks, both in verbal and quant sections. Maybe the mocks set my expectations in terms of difficulty level of questions too low, and I didn't prepare too many hard questions?

Mostly still in disbelief from yesterday. Maybe my learning has too many gaps the mocks didn't bring out? I am going to be taking the exam again, but not really where where to begin my preparations from this time. I don't think it was just a bad day, as too many questions on both sections had me struggling, and definitely there is something I am missing on my part.

Either way, can someone please help me navigate through my experience? I studied mostly from OGs, Verbal review, and quant review, as I thought sticking to official material would be the best. If it provides any insights, I am a Fashion Communication Design graduate, so didn't really study any maths or reasoning at the UG level.

Thank you!!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi pragyasharma01,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day didn't go as well as planned. When these types of score drops occur, the two likely "causes" involve either something that was unrealistic during practice or something that was surprising (or not accounted for) on Test Day. Before we discuss any of those potential 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 have you studied? How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far?

Goals:
3) What is your overall goal score?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

If you took your GMAT at a Test Facility, then 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

prateekchugh · Answer

Hi  pragyasharma01

First, don't be sad and second it happens sometimes because of the anxiety and the environment. You have a good knowledge and you scored very well in the mocks. I would say that you should wait for a week or two then again give the exam. You will surely succeed next time.

Don't worry.

pragyasharma01 · Answer

Hi Rich, thank you for getting back to me!

1) I have studied about 3.5 months, and spent around 3-4 hours every day studying. 
2) I mostly used official material, including a couple of OGs, Quant review, and verbal review, along wit official problem set 1. 
3) My overall goal is 720-750.
4) I am planning to apply to mostly European Schools, my top two are HEC and LBS. I am particularly disappointed about this score because I planned to apply in the 4th/9th round by Jan 1st, but now I am definitely going to miss that deadline, and hurt my chances of admit only because I am applying in later rounds.

One thing that I would like to mention here is most mocks had particularly very easy questions, even when I wasn't getting many wrong. At one point I scored a V51 and didn't get any question wrong, but still did not get even one truly hard question on the mock.

I have gotten my ESR yes but am unable to post it here since I don't have enough posts. Maybe I can PM it to you?

Thank you sooo much for all your help!
Pragya

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi pragyasharma01,

I've sent you a PM with some additional notes and questions.

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

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your 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 660. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible 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.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, 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 in this way 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.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses .

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:

how to score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?

Good luck!

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