My 1st GMAT 640(V25 Q50 IR7)

Hi NiharikaR,

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 the data in your ESR, I'd like to know a bit more about how you took your CATs:

1) On what date did you take each of your CATs?
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)?

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

Here are the answers to ur q:
1. I took 6 Manhattan tests, 4 Veritas and, 4 Gmat prep tests over a period of 2 months. I dont remember the dates.
2. Yes I took the entire CAT in one go but never did AWA and very few times did IR. Anyways, my selection order is Verbal-Quants-IR-AWA so verbal must not get affected in anyway.
3. All of them taken at home in proper atmosphere with no disturbance at all
4. Most of them was taken at the same time
5.Nothing as such
6. All the questions during the mocks were new to me as I never saw them before

Hey ! First of all congrats for the Q50 !

I had a look at your ESR and it seems that your timing is a bit unusual. You spend a lot of time on SC and not enough on RC.
I can tell from personal experience that applying SC strategy and knowing the the Gmat SC rules down cold helped me improve my timing and my accuracy became really really high.

So maybe if you practice SC strategy (make sure you consistently do the POE and you don't read all the answer choices over and over again) and you learn the essential rules (you need to be flawless) you'll be able to save time that you can re-inject into RC. If you have more time on RC you'll be able to understand the passage better, and answer faster and better.

I'm not a professional but I had a similar situation to yours, and applying these tactics helped me to become A LOT better on verbal !

Good luck with your preparation !

Hi mehak2509,

Since this thread is focused on NiharikaR's situation and questions, I suggest that you start a new thread of your own (so the focus of that thread can stay focused on YOUR situation - and we avoid the confusion that might come from two people seeking different advice(s) in the same thread). I'll be happy to answer your questions and analyze your situation - and you can always feel free to contact me directly (thru a PM) if you like.

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

NiharikaR - Have you written to the e-GMAT team seeking inputs regarding your Verbal performance? You have mentioned your scores in mocks.. can you also state the same in your verbal ability quizzes.

Also, can you share you e-GMAT id in a PM so that we can look at the data in your account and provide insights?

-Rajat

Hi Niharika! From your ESR, SC distinctly emerges as an area of concern. Was this a consistent issue during your mocks as well?

If yes, thought I would mention that our sentence correction book Sentence Correction Nirvana is perhaps the only book that offers a score improvement guarantee, and is especially designed for non-native speakers.

After reading the book twice (yes! it's an academic book, and so must be read twice in all seriousness, to reinforce the concepts), you will start looking forward to solving SC questions!

The book is available on Flipkart and Amazon.in. You might want to refer to these sites, to also read testimonials of how readers have benefited.

See here how Mohit, who scored 750 on GMAT, vouches for our book.

If you want to sample a chapter before deciding to go ahead with our book, please PM me your mail-id (along with the chapter that you would like to sample) and I will be happy to send that chapter to you by mail. In addition, the entire Grammar section of the book is also available for free preview at pothi.

Hi,

I saw from your ESR file that your performance isn't consistent during the test. You answered even easy questions incorrectly. Inconsistency will hurt your overall score much. Also, your SC score ranking is the lowest, so it's probably that you answered SC questions wrong.

I think that SC is your weakness since you took 1m43s per SC question. Focusing on SC section may be the effective key to improve your score then.

Since you said that you have taken some mock tests from GMATPrep, Veritas and Manhattan, how did you take them? Did you take those tests too often? Did you see repeated questions? Please let us know so other experts could help you.