Hello everyone,
As background, I am European, with a finance masters at a top school and with english as my second language (speak total of 3 languages). Therefore my objetice is 700, which I feel would be enough for me to get into INSEAD (the only school I want). I took the GMAT yesterday, and did not go as planned (objective of 700), with a 630 (Q46, V31). ESR report attached.
Sincerely disappointed with quant and verbal, but especially verbal.
By order, the exams taken, at the same time of the exam, in exam conditions:
Official Prep1:700 (Q48,V39)
Kaplan trial test: 680 (Q45,V38)
Official Prep2:670 (Q48,V35)
MGMAT trial test: 660 (Q44,V36)
Regarding my study approach previous to my exam:
-Studied for 5 months, while working full time avg of 12+ hours. This means 2/3h per day (Friday off), and 12/14h of study on weekends. More or less 20-25h of study per week.
-Regarding Quant I studied mostly by doing
OG, and although keep failing +700 probabilities & geometry easily, I think I am on the right track. Studied
MGMAT on Geometry, but will propably have to get back to it as I clearly did not get the message.
- On Verbal, the story is quite different. Did the
OG and
OG Verbal, and got worrisome concerns on Sentence Correction. RC was ok (70-80% of questions right but always over the time limit) and CR good enough (80-90% correct with timer.) Nevertheless decided to step back and go through
MGMAT on each of the sections. Ended up improving significantly on infer questions in CR and improve reading in SC (did not improve quality, but improved timing).
- SC: To be fair, I have always been bad at grammar, mostly due to my laziness/irreverence to learn. Therefore, most concepts that would seem basic were unfamiliar to me in concept (used them in writing in speech without knowing what they were). This means that most of
OG answers before
MGMAT were guesses based on my non-native ear, which got me a right answer 50% of time, regardless of the degree of difficulty. After going through
MGMAT (hard one to go through), I am now more familiar with concepts, but sometimes I end up exactly as I was on the beginning, going with my ear/meaning. I do not spot what are the problems in easy medium questions, maybe because the meaning is typically correct, its just a grammar mistake). Definitively need help as I am not improving.
Regarding the test, I felt the quant was harder than Official Prep (got early questions on combos of remainders with LCM and GCF as well as results of 3 years of simple interest vs compounded), but not dealbreakers (did not do 2 geometry questions at the end due to lack of time). On the verbal side, felt it was of similar difficulty, but did not expect to get such a low score (had to run a little on the last 6 questions, of which 4 were RC). The CR was within expectation, as well as SC unfortunately. The one were I feel I dropped the ball was SC. I also do not understand how on the third set of questions, did not get opportunity to try any difficult questions, based on my score on the second set.
I plan to take the GMAT again in one month, with the same amount of time available as before, focusing on verbal. My plan is:
- Go through another simpler approach to SC. Honestly
MGMAT provided a good foundation (which was inexistent), but is too extensive and did not help me at identifying basic errors.
- Maintain a set of quant questions to do every other day (to maintain sharpness and momentum)
- Go through GMAT club SC & RC questions (from officialprep) using the new approach to try and identify a strategy go improve on sub650 SC questions.
- Purchase 2 additional official prep tests, to practice further.
What do you guys think? Do you have any idead on SC? Really need help as I want to score at least V38.
Thank you,
Daniel
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19 Jun 2020, 08:35
630_ESR.pdf [499.02 KiB] 
