Scored 720 in official mocks, 680+ in MGMAT and Veritas CATs

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT.

The good news is that you scored really well on quant, right? That said, I understand that you are not satisfied with your verbal score, so the question we need to ask is why you scored so high on your practice exams but lower on the real GMAT.

Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than you did on the actual GMAT. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation, particularly for verbal, probably needs to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant and verbal courses.

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:

how to score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?

Hi gmatwitcher,

As far as quant is concerned, getting a 49/50 depends more on the test day. I believe that you have the capability of scoring a Q50 on a good day. But verbal seems to be a major concern. V31 indicates that you are probably struggling with not one module but two modules. That can be CR or SC other than RC, the one you mentioned. So, it's important to identify your weak areas first and then work on them.

The path ahead:

As your main concern is RC, I suggest you to identify at which step you are faltering in. There are multiple stages in the process of solving an RC question.

• Reading the passage in an inferential manner
• Summarizing each para
• Deriving the main point
• Understanding the question stem
• Looking for the relevant portion in the passage
• Eliminating incorrect answer choices on solid grounds and choosing the right one (Most important)

As you see, eliminating the incorrect answer choices forms the final and the most important step in the process. The test makers frame close answer choices by using similar words. So, if you do not use the right strategies, you will most likely end up getting stuck between two answer choices.

How to learn the right methods?

The best way to learn the right methods and strategies is by analyzing the detailed solutions. By analyzing I mean, go through the step by step solution, compare your approach with the right one, identify at which step you faltered and nullify the gaps. This way you will be able to learn the right method in an effective way.



So, I would suggest you to choose a resource which would help you identify your weak areas and work on them. If you are open to suggestion, I would suggest you to check out the Verbal module of GMATWhiz. It rightly focuses on teaching the methodology. If you wish to have a detailed discussion about your weak areas and how to improve them, you can get in touch with me using the below link.