Need guidance, scored 590 Q47 V25 in second attempt Target score 700.

Hi gmat108,

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 590. 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?

Hi gmat108,

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:

1) On what dates did you take your 2 Official GMATs and how did you score on your 1st attempt?
2) How long did you study before each attempt? Over the last 3 months, how many hours did you typically study each week?
3) On what dates (or approximate dates) did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

If you took your 2nd GMAT at a Test Center, 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

Hi Arpit,

Based on the information that you've provided so far, you certainly appear to have been improving over the last 3 months. Your self-assessment of your Test Day performance doesn't quite match-up with the data in your ESR though; it appears that you 'rushed' through the 'first half' of the Quant section AND the 'first quarter' of the Verbal section - so there were likely other factors impacting your performance on Test Day besides a couple of Quant questions that you had to reread.

I've sent you a PM with an analysis of your ESR and some additional questions.

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

Hey gmat 108,

Given your preparation and the number of Mock tests that you have taken from elsewhere , we feel that for starters you should take mock tests from MBA. com itself . Since you only took the first 2 , take the remaining 4. Focus more on strategy rather than blindly trying to answer the questions. Smartly decide which question to solve and which to let go. Keep a track of your time and try to let go off the questions that you feel are troubling you. Learn to Skip. After you take the test, do in-depth analyses of the test - Understand the pattern of your mistakes - check whether they are conceptual mistakes or just silly mistakes - Create a log sheet to record everything. Subsequently work on the concepts and build an approach to avoid silly mistakes. Practice more and more questions from the official guides and MBA. com.

Hope that helps you.

I understand. Given that anxiety seems to be an issue, here is a helpful article that you can check out:

How to Eliminate GMAT Test-Day Anxiety

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

Thank you Punit for your suggestions and analysis, I will attempt the methodology of giving the mocks in coming 20 days and analyzing them with best of my abilities.
Thank you.

I think that you should break your tests into SC-RC-CR to see where should you improve!

Hi,

You have already gone through some great resources. I recommend all Butler competition questions for verbal as they are good: https://gmatclub.com/forum/rc-butler-20 ... l#p2691034

Best wishes!

Hello Rich,
1. I have taken my first official gmat on 30th of December 2019 with a score of 570.
The second attempt was on 8th of March 2021 with a score of 590 Q47 V25.

2. For my first attempt, I studied for about 3 months ( self preparation) with about 1-2 hours on weekdays and 5-6 hours on weekends.
For my second attempt I studied for about 4-5 hours each day( with 30-35 hours a week for last three months).
3. Below are the mocks I have taken:
Official Gmat Mock1 (Retake) Back in November 2020 with a score of 620 Q49 V25
Manhattan Mock1 10th of Feb with score of 630 Q45 V32.
Veritas free mock 620 Q48 V27
Kaplan Mock 1 20th of Feb with 660 Q48 V33.
Gmat club mock 25th of Feb 680 Q49 V34.

4. I'm planning to apply for the MIM/ Msc in Finance programs at WHU, ESMT and Mannheim (all these schools have deadline on June 2021)
I'm unable to attach ESR report here due to some restrictions, I've sent it to you in your email address.
Please suggest a study plan to go through in next 20-25 days according to ESR report.


Thank you.

Hello Scott,
During the official test I was bit too anxious and was not able to concentrate on first few questions in quant and had to read the questions 2-3 times just to get to know, what question is asking. In the start I surely overspent the time, which I had to compensate in the later questions in quants.
For the Verbal part same thing happened again, I was not able to focus on the questions, but somehow managed to finish the verbal part with skipping one entire passage that seemed too difficult to comprehend.
I guess there are few weak sections in verbal which I need to go over again and hopefully I won't be this anxious next time.

Thank you.

Thank you Club members and moderators for your time and valuable suggestions.
I hope next time time I'll be able to apply things more efficiently and come back with a score to write about positively.

Dear Needing Guidance aka GMAT108,

My colleagues have introduced important aspects for you to improve your performance and study. These also should not be overlooked if you want to earn your top score.

1) Anxiety is not going to go away unless you do something about it. You can read further thoughts about this in a recent Forbes article about my take on this [url]bit.ly/mindsetforbes[/url] There are a lot of great tips on how to improve your score in this article, so there might be some gems to act on. The fact that the first few questions were uncomfortable for you are a sure sign for me that you need to work on your mindset. You will need skills to go INTO the test calm and confident as well as some techniques in case panic or mind fog hits you DURING the test itself.

Priming your mindset is as important as content mastery, test-taking strategy, and time management.

2) Back to anxiety. Most companies will give advice for low-grade anxiety - - exposure, growth mindset, meditation, breathing, hydrating - - I do too - - they're all GREAT and work wonders. However, they typically won't help the student manifest their best selves on test day unless you have a lot of time to devote and invest in these practices before the test. Sometimes, months.

I've worked with students the weekend before their exams and by teaching them a few holistic mindful tools, helped them score 100 - 230 points higher than their previous tests.

To do this we need to move beyond critical faculty of the mind - - the part of you that is skeptical, unsure, even cynical of what you're capable of past any self limiting beliefs -- and into your unconscious mind where the whole of you works in cahoots with yourself. Implementing hypnosis, guided visualization, EFT, Neuro-lingusitic programming and other modalities doesn't provide the content mastery, but they DO get you into the optimal headspace to perform your best, and...tests don't only measure what you know, they measure how well you take tests. We offer free consults to discuss this, sign up here: https://calendly.com/directortpny/test-prep-strategy-consultation. Prior, fill out an intake here: https://tinyurl.com/ctpintake which delves into your anxiety and goals.

3) Speed. How fast are you reading and what is your comprehension reading at that speed. If you're reading less than 300 words per minute you need to pick up the pace. You can check out your reading speed, here. https://citytestprep.com/tests/index.html

4) For math and verbal improvement: learn what your weak areas are, then learn, practice, and practice some more. ALSO, be sure you understand WHY your correct answers were right. If it's luck, then you need to learn this as well, not coast on the fact you answered correctly this time. Always see if there are patterns in 'how' you're answering questions incorrectly.

Then for each of the Verbal areas:

Sentence Correction - Assess whether you're a native "formal" American English speaker (or non-native...) who is able to answer correctly by instinct or by following rules. How has that served you and do you need to change that up?

Reading Comprehension - Increasing speed and improving comprehension helps on these questions as well as buy you time for the rest of the verbal section. Isolate if you're getting types of questions wrong, how you're getting them wrong, and what makes the right answer, 'correct.'

Arguments - Make sure you understand the parts of the argument and how they function together. As with the other two question types, isolate if you have patterns in how you answer things wrong. And know why you get them right, as well.

And for math:

You're currently at:

90% in 500-600 level questions - - get this up to 100% or close to it
70% accuracy in 600-650 level question - - again - - you need to increase this - - figure out what score you want and then what this percentage has to be. I'd guess you'd want this to be closer to 90%
50-55% accuracy in 650-700 level questions - And this has to go way up if you want 700+ score. And to get a 700, you need to repeatedly be scoring at least 730 for some wiggle room.

And you MUST do this with as many official tests and materials you can - - you have a few more on mba.com, and I didn't read if you used the OG or the old paper tests. Get busy!

While no one has said this straight up - - you're going to improve the most by working with test experts rather than going at this alone. You've been doing this for a year - - and at this point, you'll get the most ROI but bringing in the support that will beeline you to the success you seek.