GMAT ESR Review Request

Question

All,

I am posting the ESRs of my 3 attempts, yes I have been trying for a while to be part of the 700+ club. Request experts to please review and let me know your thoughts. My next attempt is in mid-August...

My score on the verbal section has been quite consistent but bad and I feel I am stuck at 33/35 levels. Sectional performance on the verbal section has also fluctuated quite a bit. Will appreciate any pointers before my next attempt..TIA..

I have always performed well on the GMAT prep Cats and in the 4 fresh attempts (purchased additional two from mba.com), in exam like conditions, have never scored below 720. In retakes, have touched scores of ~760 as well. However, during the actual GMAT I have always felt that SC is is much harder or covulated with no direct 3/2 splits or extremely close meaning based questions.

For Verbal studies, I have reviewed and practiced quite extensively. List of materials used is below:

1) Aristotle SC / MGMAT SC
2) All SC question Banks posted on GMAT club - 80% accuracy
3) Powerscore CR and MGMAT CR
4) All CR question banks posted on GMAT club - 80% accuracy
5) MGMAT Mocks - 6. Average 670 (Quant -45 / Verbal - 35)
6) GMAT Prep Mocks - 4 fresh, 4 retakes

HiLine · Answer

Here are my takeaways from your reports:

First of all, you had a great strategy for Quant and correctly answered all questions in the first 2 quarters - that's amazing! The superb performance in the first half of the Quant section is primarily responsible for your Q49. Now in the second half of the section when you got into the high difficulty level territory, you missed over half of the questions. It is obvious that you were also pressed for time, so I don't blame your math skills. In order to improve your Quant score, if you care at all, you should perhaps increase your efficiency so as to reduce the amount of time spent on each easy question. Note that I said efficiency, not speed. Never sacrifice accuracy. Ever!

In reviewing your time distribution for Quant, I've noticed that you spent about as long on each correctly answered question as on each incorrectly answered one. This suggests that you could not quite separate difficult questions from easy ones, and that you likely answered wrong questions that you did not find difficult. You need to focus on accuracy more and try to limit careless mistakes.

Otherwise, your Quant performance is well balanced. You'll need to improve across the board if you'd like to reach a perfect score on the Quant section.

Now when it comes to Verbal, which is the section you'll want to improve on the most, the situation is quite complex. It isn't clear which sub-section is your weakest. Your score progressions in Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Sentence Correction are 16-37-25, 37-33-51, and 39-34-29 respectively. Whereas your weakest section in the first attempt is obviously CR, CR became your strongest section in the second attempt. While your performance and improvement in RC were remarkable, these came at the expense of weakened performances in the other sub-sections. I have two possible explanations for the wild fluctuations in each sub-section. Either you were given relatively easy questions in one sub-section and more difficult questions in the others, or you focused almost exclusively on one sub-section for each round of studying.

Either way, your Verbal performance has been inconsistent as you have already acknowledged, and from your notes I'm guessing that you may have relied too heavily on rules and tricks and been inflexible with new question styles and formats. In order to improve consistency, you'll need to learn the fundamentals of logical reasoning and grammar. Once you master these skills, it will not matter much whether you deal with easy or hard questions on your real test. Familiarity with questions is a double-edged sword. You can crack the 600's by getting used to all types of questions that have shown up on official GMAT administrations, but in order to break the 700's, you'll need to improve your thinking capacity.

Some people may point out that you ran out of time at the end of your Verbal section, but I would argue that the final quarter is not really important, as evident in the difficulty level of questions changing little between the 2 final quarters. By the time you reach the final quarter, your score will have already been more or less determined. What you need to learn to do is to answer correctly more difficult questions-most questions you got right fall in the Medium range and most questions you got wrong are of above-Medium difficulty.

It sounds like you have hit a plateau in your studying. If someone has tried so hard and so long for so little gain, I recommend that the person hire a tutor that can teach you how to think. A few hours with a quality tutor will do you wonders and can be a real game changer.

Hope this helps.

HSGMAT16 · Answer

HiLine,

Just superb analysis, even after spending a lot of time with my ESRs I still could not decipher them the way you did...Many thanks for that...

Coming to Quant, I completely agree with your analysis and conceptually I don't think I need to learn concepts / tricks further but just focus on avoiding silly mistakes. I attribute these silly mistake partly to my carefree attitude towards Quant and this is something I have been working on.

Your analysis of my Verbal section is just mind blowing...I have followed a book heavy / online courses approach and the results have been quite moderate. In terms of my efforts, I have dedicated almost 50% of my study time to SC, ~30% to CR, 15% to RC and remaining 5% to Quant.

While practicing I generally don't face too many issues in any of the Verbal sections, however during the real exam, I have always felt that SC is much more convoluted, CR is manageable - in my second attempt I had spent a disproportionate time on CR practice.

I have not yet found a good verbal tutor in my location and the chances to find one before my next attempt are slim...You mentioned that I should work on  "fundamentals of logical reasoning and grammar" , can you suggest what is the best way to do so, especially in SC? I have started analysis of all practice questions and maintaining an error log but feel this is still not suffice..Can you guide me to some specific things / points I should try to work on before my next attempt..

Thanks once again - your inputs are quite valuable and I highly appreciate your time & gesture...

HiLine · Answer

You are welcome! If you can't find a good Verbal tutor in your area, you can either try finding one online, or get a friend to help you. I'm sure you know someone that has scored high on the Verbal section of the GMAT? I myself have helped a couple of my friends with the GMAT - I don't charge them enough ...

MBAPrepCoach · Answer

Hello  HiLine  and  HSGMAT16

First of all,  HiLine , if you start a business analyzing score reports I will be your first customer. Amazing.

However, if there is some room for debate here, I vehemently disagree with the perception that studying English is the most efficient path to acing SC. I feel it adds unnecessary complexity to this. My method is about POE and focusing on the differences in the answer choices. It works AMAZINGLY well, and I've been teaching for 16 years. I generally can help people get a 3-4 point increase in 8 hours, just from SC if that is the area of difficulty.

I have worked almost exclusively with ESL speakers (Indian software engineers) within the confines of 8 grammar rules, a list of idioms and that is it.

However - I will say that often, students willfully ignore the nuances of a particular strategy. For example, if they see a verb with ED they want to make them all match, even if these two or three actions take place at different points in time, or do not share a common subject. So I think it's about skillfully applying a strategy.

I used to run the GMAT service at the MBA Exchange and hiring English majors was a fatal mistake.

Anyways, my 2 cents.  HSGMAT16  would love to help you, I work on Skype using screenshare with online materials. My clients love it. Its very similar to the test.

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

There actually are not that many real grammar rules. Note that many GMAT grammar "rules" actually come from people's observation of the official GMAT questions that have been released rather than being anything official.

Learning how the grammar rules are applied is a different matter. Sometimes having someone to walk you through a few examples and answer any question you have is the most effective way of learning this.

HiLine · Answer

Of course you can disagree with me, but on what here? I don't think I ever said the OP needed to study English - I'm pretty sure the OP is a native speaker or otherwise fluent in the English language.

MBAPrepCoach · Answer

Hello  HiLine , I'm referring to the part where you mentioned that, " In order to improve consistency, you'll need to learn the fundamentals of logical reasoning and grammar. "
When I say learn English I meant mastering grammar fundamentals as the means to improve verbal. Not necessarily ESL courses.

HiLine · Answer

To clarify, what did you mean when you said grammar fundamentals?

saru171990 · Answer

Hi As per the below ESR report can i conclude that, 2 wrong answers were made (one in second section and one in last section)?
Isn't it too punitive?

Can somebody help here?

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

You indeed got 2 answers wrong, and the score is in range. Check the second post in this thread out: hiline-gmat-algorithm-studies-223122.html

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