Hello everyone,
First of all - I would like to thank you all for this wonderful forum. I found a great deal of energy here during my studies and it has helped me incredibly. I also want to talk everyone who takes time to read and respond to my issue here.
I am a European male, pretty successful in terms of professional career (working for one of the biggest IB/MBB). Studied at top 5 universities worldwide in engineering and have a great GPA. On top, I do have an extremely compelling story to tell and have extensive international exposure. In the beginning, i thought i would succeed at GMAT very quickly and get done with it... but this wasn't the case.
I started my preparation in February with 3 weeks off from work (I just don't have time during the weekdays - its basically work and sleep). My first ever GMATprep CAT was 680 with a Q49 without prior studying. So I thought I would focus on verbal and finish it in 3 weeks.
I purchased
e-gmat and followed their verbal method, however, saw very little improvements. Plus timing was a big issue for me in verbal (didn't have time for the last 5 questions and had to guess them many times).
I still wanted to give it a try as I was sometimes hitting 700's in the practice tests and thought a little bit of luck could help me and scored a 580 on the real exam... I was shocked and depressed. I wanted to take it positively (given that I could almost not sleep and the exam was at 8am requiring me to wake up at 6). I thought I needed more time and decided to study 1 hour every day for a while (basically from midnight to 1am or 1am to 2am every day before I went to bed). I was thinking that I could finish it with another week off at the end and take the test. For that purpose, I purchased the Economist gmat package and completed it to 95%. I think it has helped me tremendously to put this in order in my head. My scores ranged from 680 to 740. Towards the end I purchased Kaplan exams and scored an average of 720 in the exams (this was basically 4 months into the studying 1 hour per day and 4-5 hours on Saturday and Sunday).
For the second attempt, I slept good, felt quite good as 2 days before the exam I scored 740 (q50v40) on gmatprep 4. I thought the exam was going great and had a small stupid glitch. The verbal part just wouldn't start because of software issues. The proctor had to restart and I could continue the exam but I ended up losing 3 minutes on the section where the time was just not enough for me. Even though I tried to calm myself I think it had impacted me in a way... End result? 620!!!! I just couldn't make sense of it. I didn't understand and just couldn't comment on the result. I was averaging around 730 at home with scores as high as 770. My lowest score was the first mock I did months ago! (the quant part which I thought was great was the lowest on any mock i did before, so the glitch on verbal wasn't the only responsible for the score...)
I said, OK. Not lucky. I should have been stressed again. I scheduled my 3rd attempt 3 weeks later. Kept studying 1h a day and doing exams on weekends. My mock exams were still around 740 and 730. I reviewed my exams, my notes and kept studying. 3 weeks later... ANOTHER 620... (this time could have been 650 or smth because I could not answer the last 2 questions of quant, i just forgot about the time at the end... So stupid. My ESR says I was around q50 everywhere but got a q48 or smth so the last 2 questions without answer should have penalized me). The verbal was still a catastrophe... In both 620's I got a tremendously long RC passage with very hard questions and RC is my weakest point...
Well, i had no words, couldn't understand anything about the tests I was doing at home... (I used Economist, GMATprep and Kaplan). I had no content gaps. The questions I were doing wrong was either I was falling for the trap or doing a silly mistake or rushing and making a mistake because of that. I said that I would not give up and would give it another try in 2 months. I took around 10 days of vacation to get some rest (the working hours plus this was weighing too much on me) and took around a month of unpaid vacation. Moved into my parent's house so I could study better and have psychological support.
Since, I purchased the new tool of Veritas Prep - Orion and followed it rigorously. I found their exam on the harder side with lots of traps in each question. Scored 690 and 700 in 2 of their tests. Purchased
MGMAT exams and scored 680 690 and 700 (without doing any of their questions) and also found their quant extremely difficult (but have been scoring q48's in them). Now that I finished Orion and did 3MGMAT exam and 2Veritas Prep exam, 2 more economist exam (750, 740), and reattempted 3 GMATprep exams I took 6 months ago (scored 770, 740 and 730 - with 30 to 70 points improvements compared to the first attempt) I don't know what to do anymore... (taking the exam in about a week)
Even though I keep scoring at 700+ I dont know if its indicative of anything at all... After all, I scored 3 times 100pt below my mock exams...
And yes, every exam I did at home was in perfect exam conditions, no additional breaks, no pauses, used the official scratch book with their pen...
I need to apply to schools in September. Time for essays wise - I don't know if a month of time will be enough and what the score will be.
And here I am looking for advice from you guys, peers, and experts on what to do and how to approach this. What to do this last week? How to feel about this? How to approach this situation? One thing I know for sure is I can't keep doing this for a long time...
Thank you so much for your time and looking forward to reading you!