Hi. I am writing this post, seeking help/feedback on my esr. I have written the GMAT 3 times now. The first time my score was 560 (Q-47, V-20), the second time my score was 570(Q-47, V-22), and the third time my score was 540 (Q-43, V-21). I come from a science and engineering background. I am not really concerned about the quant section. I would say that the first two attempts were careless attempts. I wrote the first two exams without doing any preparation for the verbal section and without realizing what it takes to score well in the verbal section. Back then I was careless and I used to think that v30 must be achievable for me. I would say I was stupid then. Honestly, I used to think that how bad it could be. Worst case scenario I will score a v30 at least. I was so dumb, stupid, and careless. After scoring badly in the second attempt I realized the importance of the verbal section and then I became serious about verbal preparation. I signed up for an online course and started preparing for it. Almost 6 months. I neglected my quant prep. On exam day, a few questions took me by surprise. Three questions from co-ordinate geometry back to back (1-with an equation of a parabola, 1-with an equation of a circle, 1- properties of two straight lines, intersection, etc.). I could not recall the formula and I did not want to leave them. So I tried to solve them by force. Took a lot of time. I did not have enough practice for inequalities beforehand. Mainly, I would say the Q 43 was due to a lack of structured practice and poor time management on the exam. I will really appreciate any suggestion on this.
Now coming to the verbal part. I started my preparation and learned some great stuff and realized how poor my English skills were. But with practice and by following the meaning-based approach I improved my sentence correction. Now when I practice questions from the GMAT club my accuracy for sub-600 level questions is above 95%, 600-700 level questions are above 80%, and 700 level questions are above 70%. Most of the mistakes are related to the idiom, absolute phrase, and meaning.
Before my third attempt, I was very nervous. I took the first official mock 10 days before the real exam and I scored 690(Q-48, V-37)(Yes I took this exam once before, but the questions did not seem familiar) (I was confident that my preparation is going well and I am getting ready for the real test). Then I thought of taking some more time to complete my quant prep and RC prep. So I reschedule my exam date by almost a month. Then I took another mock test one day before the exam and scored a disastrous 590(Q-46, V-25). My confidence was shattered. I panicked and then I thought of rescheduling again but that was not possible as I was with in the last 24 hours of the exam. I went to the exam nervous, with very low confidence, and I was scared. Finally, I wrote the exam and ended up with a 540. Now it's impossible for me to let it go because first of all, I want to study in a good business school, and second, this GMAT thing took a lot from my life, and It's now practically impossible for me to focus on anything else. After spending so much time and energy, now I do not want to let it go.
I have posted my three ESRs here along with this post. In the third attempt, the accuracy in the first two sections of verbal is better than the last two exams. I would attribute this improvement to my verbal perp. Yet, I was not able to score any better than on the last two exams. I consulted with one of the tutors from my test prep exam and he pointed towards time management and some consecutive mistakes in the second section. It's true that I did not have time for the last quarter of verbal questions and I clicked randomly. Most importantly, the score estimator of my test prep company says that my verbal score should be somewhere between 31-33.
I would like to receive some feedback. I would like to know what am I doing wrong and how can I improve it? I find it most difficult to answer cr questions. When I practice CR questions from the GMAT club my accuracy for sub 600 level questions is about 93% and I am able to solve those questions within 1 minute and 40-50 seconds. But when I move to the more difficult question my accuracy gets down. For 600-700 level CR questions from the GMAT club, my accuracy is about 77% and for 700 level questions, the accuracy is about 42%. This is what hunts me the most. It's like a bad dream and every time I do a CR question wrong my confidence goes down. I would like to note here that When I take around 3.5 minutes to 4 minutes my CR accuracy improves to around 70% for the 700 level questions but, I know we do not have the luxury of that much time in the real exam. In the difficult questions, I always have problem understanding the reasoning, or I do not read the question stem properly/or I get a slightly different meaning than the intended one.
Can anyone please suggest how can I overcome all these problems? Which resource shall I follow? I even try to solve a lot of LSAT problems. Is my bad performance caused solely by poor time management? What are the ramifications of marking 8-9 questions randomly at the end? I did this because I misinterpreted a video by someone. In that video, it was said that if you do the first 27 questions correctly then if you do not have time then randomly click and you will have a good score. And this was the case in my first mock in which I scored 690. In that, I solved the first 25 or 26 and then randomly clicked the rest and ended up with a V37. So I thought this was the perfect strategy to score well in verbal. So in the real exam, I was prepared from the beginning to focus really well on the first 3 quarters of the exam. But clearly, this did not work. Here I do not want to blame anyone. As I said maybe I misinterpreted. Maybe if you do all first 27 questions correctly then it is less likely that your score will fall drastically even if you randomly click the rest.
Also, how do I interpret the performance over time pie charts? Do they simply say the average time taken per section? When I tried to sum the total time from two ESRs, the total time was different for two different users. But we only have 65 minutes and the sums were not 65 minutes. (I converted to seconds and summed all the seconds)
Please see a screenshot of my GMAT club
error log. Also, I am attaching the verbal ESR of my last three attempts. Please help.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post and for your suggestions.
Regards
UUBA
Attachments
File comment: Last three ESRs and GMAT club error log
pdfjoiner.pdf [742.76 KiB]
Downloaded 48 times