1st Exam (670 Q47 V35) - Re-take in 6 weeks

Hey..Kuja .Please check MBA.COM

It seems GMAT recently passed out a circular where they will give in depth ESR now.Likw specifically which chapters you goyf wrong mostly.Geometry etc..

Hi kuja,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help.

The good news is that 670 is not a bad starting point. That said, as I’m sure you’re aware, you will need to put in a lot of effort and time to improve to a 700 GMAT score. While you could see the 30-point gain in six weeks, you may need more time to achieve your score goal. So, if you are not achieving your score goal on practice exams, you may consider pushing back your test date.

It's possible to score 670 without fully understanding some topics or refining certain skills. To score 700, your preparation will have to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through GMAT quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process once you pinpoint your weaker areas will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. 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 at least around 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, you would carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you get a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why you got it wrong. 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.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: strengthen and weaken the argument, resolve the paradox, find the conclusion, must be true, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a weaken question, ask yourself why you didn't get it right. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what, if anything, you would have needed to know in order to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

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 and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions 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.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new verbal and quant 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 my article for more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT.

Please reach out with any further questions.

Good luck!

Hi Scott,

Thank you for the detailed reply and the excellent article on how to score 700+ - It's very thorough and many of the points are spot-on.

I must confess that I did not take the exam because I thought I was ready, I was literally dying to know what the real thing is like. I read plenty of stories of people scoring 100 points less vs. the mocks, and I was feeling really anxious and nervous that I might be one of them. I felt much lighter afterwards knowing my exam's and mock's results are nearly identical; I slept and study much better today.

A drop of 100 points is really not normal, but this is the Internet, so posts reporting major differences in scores are more common than "I got a score that was pretty much in line with what I was expecting"

That said, you've hit the nail on the head: getting that first attempt out of the way (and knowing that you have a good score) can really take a lot of the pressure off subsequent attempts.

All the best for the retake!

Hi Kuja,

Sounds like things are headed in the right direction. If you need any further advice regarding your study plan, feel free to reach out to me directly, and I’d be happy to help.

Let’s do this!!