Should I Retake GMAT Thread - Retaking GMAT Strategies

Most MBA aspirants have this classic dilemma: Whether to retake GMAT to improve the score or focus on school application. For me, this decision depends on two factors-

(i) Your previous scores in GMAC official mock tests. If you have scored more in mock tests consistently, you should definitely consider retaking the test.

(ii) Average GMAT score of the school that you are applying to and the applicant pool that you belong to. As an Indian male candidate, I always wanted to have a GMAT score of +20 above the average GMAT score that my target school had. This strictly was based on the limited sample set of current students and alums of most of the schools from my particular geography.

To read more about how to plan your re-test, read-
https://aidmit.com/index.php/2019/01/12/ ... t-4-weeks/

Hi everyone,

I've just taken the GMAT yesterday and got a score of 690. Here's the breakdown:
Q - 47 (61 percentile)
V - 37 (82 percentile)
IR - 6 (70 percentile)

I can't decide if I should retake the GMAT again. I feel that I can do better, but at the same time, what if my GMATPrep scores were inflated and 690 is where I truly stand. Would it be worth the effort (and money) to do a retest and try to improve by 20-30 points

A little background: I'm a female from Singapore, with a major in Accounting. I've 4+ years of work experience in both external and internal audit. I'm planning to apply for the NUS/Peking University MBA programmes this year.

My GMATPrep scores were:
GMATPrep1: 710 (Q49, V38, IR3)
GMATPrep2: 690 (Q47, V38, IR8)
GMATPrep3: 720 (Q49, V40, IR7)
GMATPrep4: 710 (Q50, V35, IR3)
GMATPrep5: 670 (Q48, V34, IR7)
GMATPrep6: 740 (Q49, V42, IR8)

Would appreciate any of your comments!
Thank you!

Hi,
I just gave my first attempt at GMAT today and scored a 720 ( Q49 V40 IR 8 ).
Considering my mock scores, I am a bit disappointed.
GMAT prep 1 : 740 ( couple of seen questions)
GMAT prep 2 : 740 (q50 v40)
GMAT prep 3 : 730 (q50 v40)
GMAT prep 4 : 700 (q50 v35)
GMAT prep 5 : 720 (q50 v37) 2 days before the exam
GMAT prep 6 : 760 (q51 v42) a day before exam

I am targeting Masters in data science/analytics courses from top B schools : NUS, McCombs ( Texas Austin) , UBC sauder, ESADE.

My profile :
3 years of good experience in analytics ( statistical modeling in Insurance domain)
6 months internship in a CRM based operations startup.
Have some corporate awards and recognitions
3-4 online certification courses on Coursera, edx

Questions : given my profile, target schools and my GMAT prep mock scores, should I retake GMAT and aim for a 740? I believe I can improve my quant from q49 to q50, keeping my verbal at v40.

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Sorry I don’t know masters enough. I would look at the average scores and add extra 20-30 points if you are a party of an over represented demographics. You don’t want to be below that number.

I know that for the business school for the top 20, and being part of Indian IT group, one would actually want to be above 740 and preferably 760

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Everyone's goal should be to maximize their GMAT score. That's a personal thing -- are you hitting the maximum performance that you're capable of?

A few thoughts:

1) The GMAT is only objective measure of MBA applicants. That gives the GMAT it's own weight in your application. GPAs are still subject to varying standards across countries, states and universities so they are viewed with a measure of doubt.

2) You should only. retake if you can answer the WHY? question -- why did you fall short on your previous attempt(s)?

Rehashing the same prep plan as before without a detailed diagnostic of where you fell short is a waste of time. You need a new prep plan with new tools to target specific shortcomings that you've identified as reasons for your previous lower than target scores.

How do find your key shortcomings? A good approach is to pay a lot of attention to your process during questions and noting where you fell down (in quant for example : capture, visualization, setups or execution). This is what GMAT performance coaches are really good at.

-

Hi,
I took gmat on 16th july and scored 680(V33,Q49,IR5)
I am targeting INSEAD, NUS,HEC and ISB hyderabad.
So, my first question is should i retake gmat?
And 2nd, for doing so what all should i follow.
I have exhauted my egmat verbal and OG material. Kindly give some insights on how to move forward from here. I want to apply in R1.

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Hi everyone,

I gave GMAT on 12th September and got 730 (Q51 , V38, IR6, AWA 5).Being an Indian male, I know that I am expected to have 750+ for top 10 B-schools. I am not a typical Indian IT Male. I do have the B.tech degree but in "Physical Sciences" and I am working as a scientist/Engineer at ISRO. Should I retake the GMAT ? I want to get into top 10 B-schools. (not necessarily M7)

Background:
I had 10 days to prepare and from GMATPrep tests I knew that my weak point was Sentence correction. I still can't solve majority of verbal question in 1.5 minutes with good accuracy (70-75% ). My mock scores were as following

GMATPrep 1 : 680 (Q50, V32) (Just wanted to finish verbal in time, so I skipped difficult SC after giving 2 mins.)

GMATPrep 2 : 650 (Q49 V30) (After studying MGMAT SC for 2 days I tried hard in SC and ended up with 15 question in last 10-12 mins on my test. So, I had to guess last 6-8 questions on verbal.8-10 wrong SC out of all incorrect answers (usually 15-16).)

GMATPrep 3 : 660 (Q50 V28) (again after 2 days I faced the same issue as 2nd test. I also realised that I was taking Quant very lightly and doing some silly mistakes.)

GMATPrep 4 : 730 (Q51 V37) (after 4 days after 3rd test and 2 days before the GMAT. I again tried finishing verbal in time and this time I was okay in SC (6-7 incorrect instead of usual 8-10) and I attended Quant very seriously this time (but didn't study for it though.))


In SC, I tend to know all the concepts but can't apply all at once. It just takes more time for me (usually 2-3 min). Is there any way I can improve SC performance? Do I have to retake the GMAT ? (I have only 15 days to prepare.)

Hi all,

The question:
I am considering taking the test 5 days from now, 10 days from now, or hold off until later if I need to really dig down into fundamentals. Please let me know your guidance in terms of how to approach, what to use, and what the appropriate timeframe would be. Thank you so so much in advance!

The situation:
1) I studied the past ~6 weeks and just received a 720 (Q47 V42) on October 5th.
2) I am on leave from work for the next 11 days with social commitments planned (I'm moving away), meaning I have a combo of half-days, full-days, and partial-days (e.g. studying an hour or so) in terms of time.
3) I am moving across the world to start a new job in 11 days, so jet lag + all the new stuff that comes with such a move might be an impediment.

What I've used so far, in order:
1) Cheat sheet I made from the Manhattan GMAT books last year (I studied for a bit and quit)
2) OG
3) OG Quant (all) and Verbal (half)
4) Official GMAT Practice Test 1-6
5) Flipped through MGMAT once in a while for topics I felt uneasy about at the start - I had read cover to cover last year

My methodology to date:
--- Did all questions in OG ---
GMAC Test 1 - 600something on 9/12/2019. This was taken on a plane after I had gone through OG.
--- Studied on and off. I was on vacation. ---
GMAC Test 2 - 750 (V44, Q49) on 9/18/2019. This was taken in an airport lounge at 6am.
--- Studied error log from Tests 1 and 2, did all of OG Quant ---
--- From this point on, I did a week of test-review-test-review until Test Day ---
GMAC Test 3 - 710 (V35, Q50) on 9/26/2019
GMAC Test 4 - 750 (V44, Q48) on 9/27/2019
GMAC Test 5 - 730 (V42, Q48) on 10/1/2019
GMAC Test 6 - 760 (V47, Q49) on 10/6/2019

I recently attempted my GMAT exam and scored 590 with Q49 and V22.

This is a very shocking score for me because on my veritas mocks I constantly got 660-690 ( 6 mocks ) with sometimes even getting Q51.

My official mba.com practice test score was also in the range 640-690 with Q51 in some tests.

I am not giving up and reattempting GMAT but I would much appreciate some suggestions of how I can do it right this time.

Thank you, guys.

bb Thanks for this valuable thread.

I have my 2nd attempt scheduled in 21 days . I clearly followed a wrong approach while preparing for my 1st attempt . I did not religiously completed the OG even once and complicated things by focusing on external questions banks and not the official ones. Now i have strictly completed the Verbal Review 2020, Quant Review 2020 and the OG 2020 QUESTION BY QUESTIONS with satisfactory accuracy.

In my first attempt, i had purchased the 4 additional prep tests and exhausted all of them.

Now can you please recommend me how do i proceed? After the OG and the official tests exhausted, what should i pursue in the next 21 days>? Should i purchase mocks? If yes, then which one?

I really will appreciate if you can offer your 2 cents to guide me. My target score is 670-690 . In the first attempt i scored a 620 with Verbal 37 and Q 34. (Could not complete the Q section - missed 2 questions). My ESR shows 77% SC accuracy, 88% CR accuracy and 16% RC (clearly an area i am really focusing on right now) .Similarly with Quant, i have found my weak points and worked on the basics.

I now need to decide which questions to pursue and which tests to purchase

Regards
Sambhav

Hi all, I just took the GMAT today and got a 660. I know I can improve this score but won't be able to do so and still do applications for 2020 Intake. My targets are Top 20. (Mainly 13-20). Being a ORM, I know the odds are fairly low but is there a reason to not apply and hope that they find my story compelling? Worst case scenario I retake the GMAT and apply for 2021 Intake right?

Perfectly said. Thanks for the insight

Hi Everyone,

I am an Indian Engineer Female. I gave the GMAT exam yesterday and scored 720. (Q47 and V42). Is my score unbalanced? Will I be able to get into a consulting course at a top MBA B-school (at least within the top 50) with this quant score? I don't know if my GPA is relevant but I got an overall 7.53 out of 10. Should I retake the exam to improve my quant score? Any insight would be really helpful.

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Congratulations on joining the 700 Club!

I wouldn't call that a fundamentally unbalanced score -- we could debate whether it's harder to get a 47Q or a 42V, and there really isn't an unambiguous answer. Both of those scores are pretty strong. And obviously, your odds of admission to a top-50 program will obviously depend on a whole lot of things besides just the GMAT score. If you have a strong profile in other ways, then a 720 puts you in the conversation at plenty of top-50 MBA programs. If you have a weak profile, that's a whole other story.

So I would think of it this way: do you think you could reasonably improve your score further without making yourself totally miserable? If so, go do it! There's no doubt that even 20 extra points would help if you can get them. If you think you've basically maxed out your abilities, then the return on investment from further studying might be low.

I hope this helps a bit! And there are lots of smart people kicking around the MBA section of the forum if you need advice on that side of things.

Good luck with everything!

Thanks GMATNinja. As always, your advice is golden!

Hi everyone,

I am an indian non-IT engineer male. I took GMAT around 2 weeks back and scored 680 (Q-49,V-33). I am not satisfied with my score and would like to improve on it. For the first attempt I did my preparations from OG and took help from Gmatclub wherever possible. However I am undecided between which route to take for my 2nd attempt, either some coaching or repeat the self study mantra. What should be the deciding factor to get out of this dilemma? Any insight would be really helpful.

Thanks

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