Requesting Evaluation of my ESR

Hello, Sachinpri. I do find myself wondering what went into those thorough reviews of OG questions, since your Verbal performance does not reflect such time spent. If you are reviewing correct answers or, worse, memorizing what makes the answer to a given question correct, then you are missing the point of review. You want to think of the task as your opportunity to be a Verbal question mechanic: you get to take apart an entire question, piece by piece, answer choice by answer choice, and then put everything back together. Just as a mechanic has to clean and inspect each part before reinstalling it, you should be taking the time to comprehend just how a given answer choice operates within the question frame and the information provided in the passage before moving on. Otherwise, you will have lost a valuable chance to set yourself up for success the next time you see a question that may not look the same, but will follow a similar line of logic. To be fair, you missed just two CR questions, so I would ignore the sub-section ranking. However, I would not ignore the average difficulty of the questions, and you seemed to consistently miss low-medium-level questions. At no point did your correct and incorrect dots/segments criss-cross, so the exam seems to have found your ability level pretty well. My guess is that you probably spent a lot of time with Hard questions, when what you should have been doing is devoting time and effort to Easy and Medium questions. Make mistakes there, and you will not reach into the mid-700s, I can assure you. Your accuracy on Easy questions should be at least 80 percent, but 90 can make a world of difference; on Medium, you should be at 75 percent or greater. Until you can reach these benchmarks and consistently meet or exceed them in your practice sets, you have no business worrying about Hard questions. So, yes, I do think it hurt that you missed half the counted questions in the first quarter of the Verbal section, but once you dug that hole for yourself, you did not demonstrate that you should not have been there. SC grammar stands out, since grammatical conventions are the nuts and bolts of the sub-section. You may have to spend more time learning the boring stuff: how to identify subjects and predicates, modifiers, and subject-verb agreement. It appears as though you missed nine counted questions: 4, 1, 1, and 3 by quarter. But you were not missing the right types of questions to walk away with at least a mid-30s score.

By contrast, you appear to have missed the same number of questions in Quant, but they were the right types of questions: 1, 3, 3, and 2 by quarter, all Medium/High by average difficulty. It makes a big difference. (I know of another test-taker who recently reported earning a 50 with just two missed questions, but one of those two was on a dead-average-level question.) I think it is interesting that in the latter half of the section, when you started working faster, probably with an eye on the clock, your accuracy did not really suffer. The best thing you can probably do is to learn to trust your approach to questions, not to attempt to check over everything and make sure you have it just right. In short, I think your Quant is in a pretty decent spot. I am not sure what happened with Counting/Sets/Series on the day. Only you know whether this is consistent with your performance on practice sets or whether you tend to do well on these questions maybe nine times out of ten. If you need to brush up on theory, you need look no further than the Announcements section of the Quantitative main page. However, I suspect that your 49 is readily repeatable, and that with a bit of extra work, you should get to a 50.

Do not read too much into your mock results or your official exam result, and do not put undue pressure on yourself to repeat the results of those high-scoring mocks. Take the time to review those mocks again, without an eye on justifying the correct answer. If you missed a Quant question, for instance, see if you can work out the problem on the spot. If you cannot, or if it takes you a while, look up the problem in the forum and see whether IanStewart or Bunuel has posted a more efficient way of working through that problem. This is what I mean by review. It is not good enough to know how to find an answer to one particular problem if you cannot generalize what you have learned to other problems.

Perhaps you have a few ideas now that may prove helpful to you. Thank you for thinking to ask for my feedback, and thank you for sharing your ESR.

- Andrew