ScottTargetTestPrep wrote:
Hi mufasa96,
I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT.
Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V30. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation, particularly for verbal, probably needs to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.
For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.
In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal 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 the following articles:
how to score a 700+ on the GMATWhy Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?Hi Scott,
Thanks for your response.
As mentioned in the post, I prepared with
Manhattan Prep's online course (10 lessons of core curriculum), used MPrep's strategy guides for revising content and doing questions from the
OG. I took 5 practice CATs (found MPrep's harder than the official mocks).
For Verbal in particular, I found that an important weakness for me is reading for purpose and structure - I struggle retaining information and catching the main point of GMAT RC passages unless I read slowly, take detailed notes or read through parts of a passage more than once. That, in turn, takes up too much time and it becomes a question of time vs. accuracy, one of which is compromised. Therefore for RC I must improve my reading & retention skills, to better understand the point and structure of passages after a first, effective read.
Any tips on how to improve & practice reading and understanding skills are much appreciated.Developing the above skill would also help me capitalize a greater accuracy and efficiency on CR (to read and understand arguments clearly and faster). Then on CR, the point you mention on analyzing questions and answer choices deeply becomes the differentiator to improve performance. May I ask what you explain what you mean by
Quote:
"doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them"
?
It would be great if you could provide an example to illustrate how to do this exactly to get the most useful takeaways.On SC, the large majority of my mistakes come from 2 root causes: 1. I can't find a legitimate issue to eliminate ALL the choices, and end up using my ear to choose the best answer or 2. I notice a specific issue with the sentence (e.g. parallelism, structure, modifiers...) but I am not sure which answer choice best fixes the issue. Again,
any advice on how to address both issue above is greatly appreciated (i.e. how to effectively learn the application of grammar rules for meaning in GMAT SC, and which are the most important/common traps of SC questions by topic).
Many thanks in advance for the support,
Pedro
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28 Sep 2020, 01:57
