MGMAT Score drop 80 points

Hi Divad,

The scoring algorithm on the Official GMAT is far more complicated than most people realize. Since that algorithm is proprietary, no GMAT company has an exact match for it, thus CAT scores can vary a bit based on the 'biases' involved in their respective designs. The most realistic CATs available are the 6 from GMAC, but the CATs from Kaplan, MGMAT and Veritas are all 'close enough' to the real thing that they will provide you with a relatively realistic score assessment (assuming that you use the CAT correctly). It's possible that you just had a 'bad day' when you took this CAT, but you also noted that you took this last CAT at a different time of day, so it's worth analyzing how you took your CATs:

When you took your CATs:
1) On what dates did you take each of your CATs and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for each)?
2) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT each time (including the Essay and IR sections)?
3) Did you take them at home?
4) Did you take them at the same time of day as when you took your Official GMAT?
5) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, skip sections, take longer breaks, etc.)?
6) Did you ever take a CAT more than once? Had you seen any of the questions BEFORE (re: on a prior CAT, in an online forum or in a practice set)?

Beyond those questions, what application deadline(s) are you currently facing? Do you have the flexibility to push back your Test Date if needed?

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

Thanks for your answer!

I did all of them between 9 and 10 AM every week one test.
I took the entire CAT with test conditions.
I took all of them at home
Only the last CAT was at the same time as the test date
No, I did the cats under test conditions
I reseted the pool so there were sometimes 2-3 Qestions in the CATs i have done before. However, I couldn't remember any answer to the questions.

Hi Divad,

There were some 'red flags' in terms of how you took your CATs, so these CAT results might not be an accurate assessment of your skills. Since you're getting close to your Official Test Date, I strongly recommend that you take a NEW CAT (with questions that you have NOT seen before) and take it in a realistic fashion (take the FULL CAT - with the Essay and IR sections, take it away from your home, at the same time of day as when you'll take the Official GMAT, etc.). Once you have that score, you should report back here and we can discuss how best to proceed.

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

Hi Divad,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. Based on the variation in your practice tests scores and also your comment that you don’t feel you have any “real weaknesses in one specific topic,” it’s evident that you have many quant weaknesses that must be addressed in order to improve your GMAT score. While I believe you CAN improve your GMAT quant skills, doing so may take longer than just 2 weeks. Are you able to take your GMAT at a later date?

In any case, I’m happy to provide some advice on how to improve your GMAT quant skills. Since you see that your quant weaknesses are dispersed among pretty much all of the GMAT quant topics, you need to take a structured approach to your prep that allows you to learn each topic individually, starting with the foundations before moving to more advanced concepts. For example, if you are learning about Number Properties, you should develop as much conceptual knowledge about Number Properties as possible. In other words, your goal will be to completely understand properties of factorials, perfect squares, quadratic patterns, LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, and remainders, to name a few concepts. After carefully reviewing the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions, practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties. 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. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant courses. You also may find it helpful to read this article about how to increase your GMAT quant score.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach back out.

Good luck!

thanks for your advice. I can take the test again but after my first test date my internship at a consulting firm starts and I don't think, that I can study much for the gmat while I work 50-60 hours a week. Therefore I really want to reach my goal of 600 on the first date. In my opinion its definetley possible since I already scored 630 on the MGMAT prep which is considered harder than the actual test (in the attempt with the 630 score there were not one question I had seen before).
I have a friend whose best score was 660 in the MGMAT and scored 690 in the real test.

To be honest I hate the test and just want to have 600. As I mentioned I already got the offer from my dream business school and will never need my gmat score again. As a result 600 is totally fine for me.
With the short time of 2 weeks left in mind. I will now focus on repeating as much quant topics as possible in the MGMAT books. and take 2-4 CATs from the GMAC.

You said I should do 50 questions of the same topic in order to improve, where can I get questions from a specific topic? When I search in gmatclub there are always single and mostly difficult questions. So after each question I have to search for a new one and this does not reflect the test situation on gmat.
I have all 3 OG books and do the questions from the online with "wileygmat" but I don't know how to sort the questions by topic. Is there any possibility?

Thank you so much for the support!

Great question! So most GMAT prep courses allow you to practice questions by topic. To see what is available take a look at the top GMAT quant courses here on GMAT Club.

Feel free to reach out with further questions.

Good luck!