Depressed after scoring 520 in a Mock !

Hi 25ankits,

I think if you have the time and the patience to reschedule your GMAT and give yourself an extra month to study, that would be a good idea.

Have you been timing yourself while doing practice questions already, or was this mock exam your first experience working through the questions with a time constraint? The test is so long that stamina is a real issue for lots of people. So if you can take a few more mocks between now and the test, it would help just to get used to what it feels like to have to keep working with only brief breaks, etc. Lots of people do poorly on their first mocks for this reason; it's okay! You can also try using the GMAT timer questions on here to gauge how long it takes you to answer each question type. You should be shooting for about two minutes a question, ideally a little bit less for sentence correction.

The good news about grammar/Sentence Correction is it’s one of the most teachable parts of the test. Maybe you can’t learn the entirety of “grammar” in a month, but you can learn enough to increase your score dramatically. You can find lists of commonly tested idioms here or elsewhere and just memorize them. (things like what prepositions certain verbs take). There are certain types of phrasing that, even if they might be technically grammatically correct, the GMAT just doesn’t like. Including nominalization (using a noun form of a word when you could an active verb instead). Learning some of those can also help you quickly eliminate a few answers even if you’re not sure what the right answer is. I’m not familiar with E-GMAT’s course; maybe you already have advice on topics like these?

Reading speed takes longer to improve, and there’s really no quick and easy way to do it. Doing “extra” reading beyond just practice reading comprehension passages themselves can help - academic reading like what is tested on the GMAT - articles from The Economist, The Atlantic, Scientific American, etc. It might be helpful to take a passage from an article from one of those places and take your time working through it really slowly to understand now just what the argument is saying but how it’s structured. Take a physically printed out version of an article, find and underline the main topic sentence of each paragraph. If there isn’t one obvious topic sentence, then write down a sentence of your own that describes the main idea of that paragraph. Then go through again and just read the topic sentence or main idea sentence for each paragraph. See if you can see a logical structure to the way the argument has been organized. How does each paragraph contribute to the overall argument the author is trying to make? Obviously, you don’t have time to read this way on the GMAT exam itself, But doing this exercise, and for multiple different essays, can help you improve at seeing those argumentative structures more quickly. I think some of the test prep companies do recommend doing some abbreviated version of this process on the test itself, to make your own outline or “road map” of the passage, so that when you get to a question asking about a specific word or sub argument in the text, your road map tells you exactly what part of the text it’s in so you can find the answer to your question more quickly.

Again, I’m not familiar with the E-GMAT course, but you say you weren’t able to apply their approach because it took you too long - without knowing what that approach is, I’d still advice practicing with their recommended approach on some questions without worrying about the amount of time it takes you temporarily. A lot of times, when you’re learning a new method, yes, it will make you slower instead of quicker initially, but once you have enough practice and have an instinct for it, it will make you faster in the long run. You need to trust yourself enough to let that happen. And then, yes, it’s true, that even though every test prep company and every person who has advice about the “best” approach to specific problem types, not all approaches will work for all people, depending on your learning style/what works for you. But you need to find that out for yourself the hard way by trying the approach enough to see if it gets you to the right answer, even if it does so slowly at first.

-V.