Hello, Prashasti. Pardon the delay in my response. I have been busy over the past two days. To address your concerns, yes, I would consider preparing for and retaking the exam. That low Verbal score may come back to bite you, since there are, unfortunately, many candidates who share your ethnic origin who also happen to earn high Quant scores. Earning a Verbal score more in line with those from your practice tests might increase your prospects of admission, depending on where you hope to apply. The only way you can be sure of where you faltered on the last exam is by ordering your ESR. It will provide you with data on your accuracy by question type, as well as your timing across different question types and within each quarter of the exam. Beyond this, I find the ESR to be less useful for analysis. The sub-categories for Verbal are pretty much meaningless, much less pertinent than their Quant counterparts (even though those are not perfect either, taking a blunt approach when a more focused one would allow the test-taker to know what to study). If you do decide to order your ESR, you can post it in a dedicated forum and request help in analyzing it. I do not feel as if the ESR is absolutely necessary, though. If you want to save a little money, you can just as easily look back over your performance across those mock tests, in addition to problems you may have completed on the side through Wiley or mba.com, to track patterns in accuracy across RC, CR, and SC questions. To get to the bottom of what is causing you to score lower, you will have to be honest with yourself and track which types of questions you have missed in each category and, just as important, why you think you missed them. Did you rush? Take a blind pick? Misread a question or get lost in the language of a passage? It may help, for instance, to consider the following:
RC: Detail questions ("According to the passage...") versus inference questions ("The passage suggests...")
CR: Assumptions, boldface questions, completing a passage, evaluating a plan, strengthening/weakening
SC: Meaning versus grammar
Again, what is causing you trouble? You will want to go back and make note of the types of questions you tend to miss in order to improve your approach to those sorts of questions. This really ties into a central idea that to progress, you have to take the time to understand what makes the incorrect answers incorrect. Too many people focus on the correct answer only, thinking that they will get a similar question right the next time because they know what to look for. That is a good way to set yourself up to make the same mistake over and over. Learn about the common types of incorrect answers, on the other hand, and you will be much less likely to fall into similar traps when presented with another question within that family of questions.
In terms of resources, I am a huge proponent of self-study. If you can get to where you want to be on your own, you will find it quite gratifying, and you can save a lot of money. You will need to spend a lot of time reviewing past mistakes, but then, get your hands on official questions. Whether you need a Verbal Review, a question pack through mba.com, or a search on this site for questions tagged "official" or "
OG," you will need to practice new
official questions. If you like books, you can purchase or borrow (perhaps from a library) dedicated
Manhattan Prep guides or those by other companies. For example, the
PowerScore CR Bible is highly regarded as a study aid for that portion of the test. One plus is that practicing CR will help you improve in RC. You can also watch free YouTube videos by
GMATNinja,
RonPurewal,
fiftyoneverbal, or others if you like to learn that way. And of course, you ought to consider going through some of your
e-GMAT course again. Sometimes you see things a little differently the second time around. Finally, if you cannot seem to make enough headway on your own, you might consider bouncing ideas off a friend who scored higher or even hiring a qualified professional.
One word of caution. I would like to disabuse you of the notion that putting in more and more time or working through more and more questions will automatically make you a better test-taker. If there were such a linear relationship, then I can assure you, more people would simply put in the time and earn higher scores. You have to make the time you do spend count. Bone up on theory, then practice, but not too much. Give anyone enough questions, and that person will start to slip up. But work on a few at a time, and you can really hone your technique and build confidence all the while.
I hope that helps. If you have further questions, feel free to post them.
- Andrew
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