Scored 440 overall in timed test.Need suggestions to improve score

Hi C3bisht,

I’m sorry to hear about your struggles with the GMAT, but I’m happy that you reached out.

Although you have already been studying for two months, you may need as many as 300+ total study hours to achieve your GMAT score goal. I realize that you are frustrated with your recent 440 score; however, given that you have only been able to study for around 80 to 120 hours, you probably just need to put in some significant study time between now and your December test date to see a sizeable increase in your GMAT score. Don’t give up!

With regard to your accuracy on practice questions versus your accuracy on your GMAT prep exam, it’s quite possible that you saw a drop in accuracy because of how you were studying and practicing.

When studying for the GMAT, you must remember that the test is so challenging in part because you are presented with only 37 quant questions and 41 verbal questions on any given GMAT, yet those questions come from a huge topic pool. For instance, when presented with GMAT Sentence Correction questions, you are not just being tested on the basics of grammar; rather, you are expected to apply logic to the rules on misplaced modifiers, subject-verb agreement, idioms, parallelism, and more. Similarly, on quant, when presented with Geometry questions, for example, you are not just being tested on the basics of Geometry, such as the area of a square or triangle; rather, you are expected to reason analytically on questions involving inscribed shapes, shaded regions, similar triangles, arc length, and more. With so much to learn, you want to strive for linear and targeted learning. In other words, you want to master one topic prior to moving to the next. Have you been able to study in this way?

For example, if you are learning about Percents, you want to earn as much as possible about Percents: percent less than, percent greater than, variable percents, and percent change. Then it will help to do numerous practice problems on Percents (50 or more). After completing the problems, do a thorough analysis of those you incorrectly answered and fix any issues needing more attention. Once those issues have been addressed, move on to the next quant topic. Ideally, you want to follow a similar process for the verbal topics: Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension.

Furthermore, after learning about each topic, you don’t just want to casually practice a few questions from that topic. You want to engage in deliberate practice.

If you are unable to achieve focused learning and timed practice, you might consider using some additional resources.

Also, I wrote a detailed article that explains some more steps that you can follow to help achieve your GMAT score goal..

Once you get on the right track, I’m confident that you can achieve your score goal. If you have any further questions, I welcome you to reach out to me directly. Let’s do this!!