Scored c.100 lower than practice exams, tips for retake?

Question

Hi guys,

I am typically a self do-er, but I am at a loss and would highly appreciate some advice from some experts.

After studying for most of the year, while juggling fulltime work (aiming for c.700ish), I sat the GMAT and scored a very, very disappointing 580 (Q42, V28). I could hardly believe it. The worst part is that I was feeling confident and performing well on practice exams and questions. Maybe some further context about myself, I am not from the US so my education did not involve standardised tests like these before. However, I am historically strong in exams (such as CFA etc). I also work in finance in a highly numerical and verbal intensive job.

Practice tests (I did not sit a massive amount of them, potentially my downfall) 
- 620 (Q43, V32) MGMAT CAT - almost 6 months ago closer to the start of my study
- 650 (Q46, V33) MGMAT CAT - 3 months ago
Did not resit a practice exam for a good 3 months
- 690 (Q49, V35) GMAT official practice exam - a week before my exam. I also felt I made a couple of dumb errors and could've done better,

Details about my prep 
My study was pretty dedicated, particularly in the last few months, studying both days on the weekends and a couple of hours each night. 
- 2 months of TTP course (which I found very good for my fundamentals). While I didn't attempt  every  problem set, I was pretty much meeting all target accuracy for each every easy, medium and hard topics. MY understanding I thought was good, although not perfect.
- MGMAT books
- Pretty much completed every OG2020 question
- Additional Verbal / quant review questions
- GMAT club problems
- GMATNinja youtube videos

In the week leading up to my exam, I was feeling confident. Scoring a 690 on the official practice test, doing sets of 10 questions from the verbal/quant verbals and achieving 70/80/90% accuracy for medium and hard questions per the official guide questions ...

I intend to resit but struggling to find out where to begin as I am unsure if my disappointing performance is from:
- Fatigue (I work in a very demanding job in finance, doing 60-70hours weeks in the months leading up to my exam)
- Pure dumb lucky (or lack of..). I often was able to hone in on issues, but spent a good amount of questions debating between two options. I also found this exam much harder than all other practice exams taken
- Some fundamental flaws?
- Bad technique (I did have some trouble with pens)
- Nerves (No meltdown.... I did find myself rereading passages however)
- Bad timing, skipped 2 verbal questions near the end as I ran out of time

Last piece of relevant information from my ESR
- My accuracy was 70/80% during the first 2 sections, but capitulated to 60% and 40% during Q3 and 4 respectively - assume this is relatively normal given the adaptive nature?
- Q (quarters correct) 71%, 86% 57%, 43%
- V (quarters correct) 62%, 71%, 57%, 38%

- 60-80% RC questions correct, yet 47th percentile for RC?????
- Very varied performance on quant for some topics (33% geo vs 88% value order factors)

From this, I think my main problem is time, I did spend maybe half my prep without timers. Getting faster on 'easier' questions and learning to skip questions at the right time (I only skipped 2 in verbal at the end as I ran out of time) seem essential.

Thanks for reading. I am happy to provide further info if relevant, but I appreciate the advice in advance.

gabrieledalex · Answer

Hi Jaybeetee,
I am not an expert but I try to share my opinion since I went through something similar (i.e. performing very well in my mocks and scoring bad in the real exam).

What I realized is that, in both sections, it is far more import to have a nearly perfect accuracy on the medium level questions than being a good performer of hard questions. I used to study and exercise a lot on hard Quant questions such as hard overlapping sets, strange geometry, hard probability but I was still keeping doing silly mistakes on medium questions. The mistakes I am talking about, for example, are the ones where they ask you the value of "X" in Data Sufficiency and you forget to consider that "X" could be equal to 0, a fraction, negative (if not stated differently in the question).

If you are accurate in the medium questions you can also make mistakes in the hard ones and still scoring a 47-49 range.

Same in the verbal section.

Regarding the trend that your ESR shows:
- Q (quarters correct) 71%, 86% 57%, 43%
- V (quarters correct) 62%, 71%, 57%, 38%

...in both sections you performed better in the second quarter of questions than in the first (Q. 86% vs 71% - V. 71% vs 62%) and this fact means that you were not performing with good accuracy on the first 8/9 questions and, then, the softwere provided you with easiest questions. I think you should have tried to perform better in the 1st quarter even if this would have caused a worse performance on the following quarters.

To sum up, I think that you should focus on the accuracy of easy question.

I cannot post links but please search "how to improve your quant from q44 to q50 gmatclub" on google. There is a post of bb that is amazing and I believe it is perfect for your situation.

If you can, buy gmatclub tests: the questions are very hard but stress a lot your ability to avoid silly the mistakes that I mentioned before.

I leave word to the experts

Good luck,
Gabriele

Good luck, Gabriele

jaybeetee · Answer

I really appreciate your response Gabriele and honestly think you diagnosed my situation quite well. I have found bb's post so will consider this closely.

I am coming to the (controversial) realisation that the first 10 questions really do have a disproportionate impact sadly. Looking back at my 690 mock, I performed strongly in the first half of the exam. I found the first few questions in my exam stumping me a bit, focring me to make some executive calls. In hindset, it seems like spending that extra 30secs on questions upfront vs the backend is time better spent.

Thanks again.

globaldesi · Answer

First few questions do have a significant impact.

I tried a couple of mocks and everywhere if first half went wrong then the entire graph slows down.

Just a small tip, before you retake, do take lots of mocks . timed practice is very different from mocks. Mocks give you a different pressure and helps you manage your time pressure

gabrieledalex · Answer

Hey Jaybeetee,
Keep in mind that while it is true that the first questions do matter a lot, there will be easy questions on the middle and also last part of the Quant section, even if you are performing very well. This questions test your ability to manage the time during the entire section. 
Therefore, my advice is NOT spending more time on the first questions at the expense of the last ones, rather saving time on questions you find too awkward or difficult (whenever you face them) and never spend more than 3 mins on ANY questions.

You have to be able to take educated guesses when needed.

Again remember not to arrive at the last quarter with a small amount of time because you will find easy questions that are important for your overall score (more important than the toughest ones that you decide to guess).

Best
Gabriele

Posted from my mobile device

IanStewart · Answer

A few things:

- if you could retake the test tomorrow, you'd almost unquestionably get a much better score. It happens quite often that people underperform on their first real test, but usually they perform normally the second time. For one thing, they're more comfortable with the test day experience, and for another, people who underperform are likely victims of especially bad luck, and you're much more likely to have neutral luck than bad luck on any one test. It's really only test takers who suffer from extreme test day anxiety who consistently underperform on real tests, and it doesn't sound like that's a major issue for you;

- you don't need to take an enormous number of diagnostic tests (three can be enough, depending how comfortable you are with pacing strategy), but if you are going to take only a small number, you should only take official tests. They're the only ones that let you realistically practice pacing strategy (since they're the only ones you can trust to be realistically time-consuming), and they're the only ones that produce trustworthy scores. It's hard to know exactly what score you can expect on a normal day right now with only one reliable data point, but I'd think it's likely you're somewhere in the 660-720 range when you perform normally;

- based on your description, I'd bet that fatigue is primarily responsible for your test day score. You really need to be focused and thinking clearly to perform well on the GMAT, and if you're burnt out, that can lead to a significantly worse performance than normal. So if you can find a way to take your next test during a lighter work period (e.g. if you could take two or three days off beforehand and mostly relax) that will potentially make a huge difference;

- it is an unfortunately persistent myth that early questions are more important than later ones. The scoring algorithm, when computing your final score, takes absolutely no account of where questions occurred during your test. What matters is question difficulty. If you get hard questions wrong, that barely matters (if you get, say, a Q51-level question wrong, that really only affects your chances of getting a Q51). If you get easy questions wrong, that matters a lot, because then the algorithm begins to wonder if you're even barely competent.

The test is generally adaptive, but it does not adapt nearly as predictably as many sources claim. You can see very hard questions very early in a test, and you can see easy questions that count late in a test, even when you're doing very well. So you should not become overly concerned if, say, your second question is very hard, and you don't know how to solve it. If it's very hard, it won't hurt you much at all if you get it wrong. It is irrelevant that it's the second question on the test. But it will hurt you a lot if you invest twelve minutes in it trying to get an answer. In general, no matter where you are in the test, you should be sure you get right answers when you know how to solve something (then you're being sure to get good answers to easier problems), and you should be willing to move on fairly quickly if, after a minute's thought, you don't have a path to a solution (usually in that case, spending an extra ten minutes won't help).

Some test takers make very bad pacing adjustments when they put too much stock in the idea that early questions are disproportionately important. They are important only in the sense that they're somewhat more likely to be lower-level problems than are the questions later in the test, if you're a higher level test taker. But early questions are certainly not guaranteed to be lower level. Sometimes (quite often, in fact) they're very hard, and you should not be worried if you can't get some of your early questions right -- that's completely normal, and is what tons of Q50-scoring test takers do.

Overall, I'd be very optimistic you'll get a much higher score next time, though you should try to learn what you can from this experience and address any issues (like fatigue) to ensure your retake goes better. If you have limited time, be sure to focus on official practice tests and official questions, especially if you're practicing Verbal. And if you want to try to raise your Q score through self-study, I've written a set of books specifically for higher-level test takers, so feel free to contact me if you want more information. Good luck!

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

I appreciate you reaching out and sharing your thoughts, and I’d like to help you get on the right track. In order to do so, it would be helpful to see exactly how much progress you made in TTP. Would you be able to post an image of your TTP Analytics page? The image does not need to contain any personal information but be sure that it shows your course progress.

Once I get a clear picture of your course analytics, I can provide some further advice.

Once I get a clear picture of your course analytics, I can provide some further advice.

jaybeetee · Answer

Appreciate the replies and Ian from your reply, it reiterates my need to improve speed and probably more importantly, accuracy of 'easy' questions. The trouble I had was being able to distinguish if this was a 'hard' question early on, or I was missing something and should spend 30-60 more secs. I typically don't have this problem but it does highlight some further work to be done on course fundamentals.

Scott - while I don't have access to the course anymore I can try give you a flavour. I did complete all lessons quite thoroughly, doing at least 2 easy and medium practice sets per topic, and 1 or 2 hard problem sets for each topic (each of the 25-30 topic). For topics where I struggled a bit more like number properties, I did a bit more practice. I did skip quite a lot of the review tests (end of quarter or half tests). I found the course brilliant (however sadly not reflected in my score), my Q50 in my practice, while seems to have been a bit lucky, gave me some good confidence.

Thanks again for the replies. I am feeling better about life and have a better sense of where to focus my time for my second attempt.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi jaybeetee,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day didn't go as well as planned. When these types of score drops occur, the two likely "causes" involve either something that was unrealistic during practice or something that was surprising (or not accounted for) on Test Day. We have to be careful about assuming that your one recent CAT Score is representative of your actual 'ability level' though - as there are a variety of factors that can lead to 'inflated' score results. Before we discuss any of those potential issues though, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) Over the last 2 months, how many hours did you typically study each week?
2) What is your overall goal score?
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). Since you purchased the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you. If you would rather not post it publicly, then you can feel free to PM it directly to me.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Thank you for the information. I'm going to DM you so we can chat in further detail.

Scored c.100 lower than practice exams, tips for retake?

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