Need help in deciding what to do next with GMAT score 570

Hi EMPOWERgmat Instructor,

First of all, thanks for taking out the time to reply to my query with such a detailed explanation. You have helped in dispersing some of the doubts that I had in my mind earlier. Please find my answer to the three questions that you have asked:

1) How long have you study in total for your 2nd and 3rd attempts? How many hours do you typically study each week?
Between my 2nd and 3rd attempts, I gave the entire seven-set Veritas Prep mock test series a second time. Apart from that, I typically practised a few questions from
my weak points - Probability, Coordinate Geometry, RC, DS.
I have 9-6 weekday work timings so from Monday to Friday, after coming back from work, I would study for maybe one to two hours at most and in that time I would practise a few
questions from here and there, whatever I could get my hands on in the GMAT forum and also some formulas.
Over the weekends, I usually gave a test, one each on Saturday and Sunday and would then thoroughly analyze all the questions, the correct as well as the incorrect ones.

2) What study materials have you used so far?
To prepare for the GMAT, I used the GMAT Official Guides, Veritas Prep free question bank of over 200+ questions (solving questions from that question bank helped me immensely, especially with the Verbal section.) and would also attempt questions in a timed manner posted by members on this forum, especially SC and CR questions.


3) On what 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)?
Below are the dates, total scores and the individual section scores for each of the Veritas Prep seven-set mock test series:
Date Total Score Quants Verbal
June 16 610 43 31
July 7 640 44 34
July 11 670 45 37
July 20 640 44 34
July 21 570 40 29
August 3 570 42 27
August 5 640 44 34

Hi Marty,

Thanks for taking out the time to reply to my query. I have been thinking for the past couple of days and it is my belief as well that I am capable of doing better.
The reason I was fretting about Round I vs Round II is because if I apply to the schools that I mentioned above, I would be applying as an international student. So majority of the schools suggest that as an international applicant, one should apply by Round II to maximize their chances of getting a place as well as to ensure that the studets have all the time for visa application and other formalities.

But now I am thinking what is the point in applying by Round I with a low score if I get rejected outright. Would it not be better if I take some time off and study, get my GMAT score higher and then apply after finishing all the due application process...would that not improve my odds a little bit even though I did not apply by Round I?

As for your questions, please find my answers in detail below:

What have you done so far to prepare for the GMAT?
To prepare for the GMAT, I used the GMAT Official Guides, Veritas Prep free question bank of over 200+ questions (solving questions from that question bank helped me immensely, especially with the Verbal section.) and would also attempt questions in a timed manner posted by members on this forum, especially SC and CR questions. After giving the mock test series, I would take time to thoroughly analyze all the questions, all coorect and incorrect ones.

Would you like some information on how to prepare going forward?
Yes please. I would be extremely grateful

Hi Sarkar93,

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

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

Hi Sarkar93.

I’m glad to see that you plan to retake the GMAT. Regarding your plan, first off, I think you need to adjust HOW you have been studying. Looking at your study routine, I see that you are following a plan that I call “practice first and figure the rest out later.” In other words, you are doing practice problems before understanding the concepts on which those problems are based, and thus you are trying to learn solely from reading solutions to problems. Following such a study plan will lead to disorganized studying and ultimately hold you back from improving your quant and verbal skills. Thus, moving forward, you should follow more of a linear and structured study plan that allows you to individually learn each GMAT quant and verbal topic and then practice each topic until you’ve gained mastery. Let me expand on this idea further.

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. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see, types that you would rather not see, and types that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

Follow a similar routine for verbal. For example, let’s say you start by learning about Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to fully master the individual topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken The Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you learn about each question type, do focused practice, so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you get a weakening question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. Keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to analyze such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the New York Times, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, you likely will have to work on all three of those aspects. Furthermore, the likely reason that your Sentence Correction performance has not improved is that you have not been working on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not really a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning the grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.

This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. Likely, the main reason that Sentence Correction has not "clicked" for you is that you have not put enough work into developing your skill in seeing what is going on in the various versions of the sentence that the answer choices create. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending less than two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.

There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and none of those reasons are that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answers were always the ones that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.

As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey logical meanings. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice until you start to see the differences that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices in a Sentence Correction question, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to take the time to see the differences between answers and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.

To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off, and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did to arrive at that answer and what you could do differently to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could do differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your skills improve, you will want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple Sentence Correction topics.

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 about
How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT and The Phases of Preparing for the GMAT.

Feel free to reach out with any further questions. Good luck!

Scott,

Thanks for taking out the time to respond with such a detailed and lucid explanation. You have covered nearly all aspects of my next phase of GMAT preparation. I am truly indebted to you !
What you have mentioned in your post is correct ! I have been following the bottom-up approach so far for my GMAT preparation.

For Verbal, I would usually practise lots of SC questions, analyze those questions, both correct and wrong answer choices, try to determine the decision points based on which the wrong answer choices were eliminated and then would look for those decision points in future SC questions to try and eliminate the wrong answer choices. Also, while answering SC questions, sometimes I do tend to eliminate options that sound a little bit off or too lengthy.
As for CR and RC, I am usually able to use POE and narrow down to the final two answer choices. But after that, for some questions, I get confused between those two and end up choosing the one that makes the most sense to me (even though it may end up being wrong!).

For Quants, I do need to shore up my knowledge on some topics such as Probability, Geometry, Statistics (Especially SD), Inequality and big DS questions (the thought of the amount of data that I need to go through to solve the question tends to put me off). For probabilty, I have resigned to the assumption that I would never manage to get the hang of it. Hence, whenever I encounter such questions I would just randomly choose an answer choice and move over to the next question without wasting any time.

I'm happy to help. Feel free to reach out with any further questions.