Underwhelming and unbalanced 630

Hi everyone,

after only reading - and finding this forum incredibly helpful - until this point, I have decided to sign up and ask for your advice following my GMAT exam on last Friday. I scored Q37 and V40, reaching only 32nd percentile on Quant, but 90th percentile on Verbal. I'm a little suprised that there are so "few" points difference in score, but so much more difference in terms of percentiles. Since I am contemplating a retake, I have essentially two major questions where I would appreciate your help:

- Would you recommend to retake in my position?
- How can I get better at my weaknesses (Quant, rather obvious)?

I will try to answer a few of the questions I have seen other people being asked in order to give you more details about how it went for me.

1) How long did you study for each of your Official GMATs?

I started by getting the OG after Christmas and going through the review sections one by one. I didn’t have a feeling for the extent of the GMAT back then. At first, I was under the belief that it would be sufficient just to practice OG questions… a bit later, I then got the Manhattan Prep Strategy Guides and started working through them one by one, usually in the evenings after work, sometimes from around 8pm – 10pm, sometimes from 9pm – 10pm. I tried to prepare for at least one hour per day, except for weekends where I tried to take more time. In mid-February, I had one week off where I studied more intensively, gaining pace at working through the SGs. With the SGs, I usually did the included quizzes as well as the referenced OG problem sets (didn’t mix these up at this point.) I only found out much later about the MPREP online question banks. After working through the Strategy Guides, I did some of the MPREP online question banks for the Quant section, plus started doing mixed sets using the Wiley Online Question Bank.

Coming back to topic – short tl;dr:
Intense studying in February, March and April, until April 24th, approx. 1h daily in the evenings after work. Approx. 2h per day on the weekends. Probably, effective studying time is slightly lower. But this is a rough indication, somewhere between my goal and the actual time I devoted.

2) What study materials have you used so far?

As already mentioned above, I used

- 2019 GMAC OG (and CATs) - I didn't manage to look into the additional volumes (Quant and Verbal Review)
- Wiley Online Question Bank
- Manhatten Prep Foundations of Math: went through these to see whether I had any existential gaps. Figured I still knew most of the concepts, and didn't do a lot of the drills because of that.
- Manhattan Prep Strategy Guides (and CATs)
- GMAT Navigator. I used it to track the OG problem sets from the MPrep Strategy Guides. When doing mixed sets later, I switched to the Wiley Online Question Bank.
- GMAT Club Forums for looking up problems

Perhaps, it wasn't the smartest choice to first use GMAT navigator and later switch to Wiley, since I had stats at different places.


3) How have you scored on EACH of your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)? Did you take any of these recent CATs more than once?

I guess this is the most interesting part. My CATs were quite varied - you could probably say inconsistent. I took two MPrep CATs and one mba.com CAT.

1st CAT: March, 17th: 600, Q39, V34. This was the 1st Manhattan Prep CAT I did.
At this time, I had studied covered most of the Quant-related Strategy Guides, but only a part of the Verbal Strategy Guides. Therefore, I was quite ok with the result, considering I hadn't studied some of the subjects yet at all.

2nd CAT: April, 16th: 740, Q46, V47. This was the 1st and only mba.com CAT I did. It left me with a "funny" feeling - I did this one right after a full day of work, from around 5pm until around 8pm. The result to me almost seemed "to good to be true" and I was really kind of in a "flow".

3rd CAT: April, 22nd: 650, Q42, V37. This was the 2nd Manhatten Prep CAT I did, less than a week before the actual thing. Looking back, it was probably a bit too late, but I had some difficulties to take it any earlier due to work and family matters... it was Easter at the time. This one felt more realistic to me than the mba.com one I did before. I decided to take the MPrep CAT for my last practice exam before the GMAT, since I had read about the more difficult quant section and also to try another test again after scoring 740 in the mba.com one.

I did review these CATs, but didn't do any of them more than once. I found it cumbersome to review the mba.com practice exam, because there were no explanations and you couldn't even jump back to the previous question during review. This is probably all available if you pay for it...

GMAT: April, 26th: 630, Q37 and V40.

Quant: it started off ok, then i took slightly too long for several questions, probably adding up a few seconds at each. Not so much one invididual question causing the trouble, but rather the multitude of them. I was as able to do the "math", but probably missed a few shortcuts here and there. Got a bit stressed, smearing with the pen because I'm left-handed. Really annoying if you can't read your notes from when you started the problem. Probably lost track of timing in between.
I don’t even remember one particularly, overwhelmingly difficult question, but got too stressed with the entirety of it.
Ended up with approx. 10 more questions to go and a bit more than 10 minutes left -> had to rush it. Second to last question guessed without looking, then I was even too late to guess final question (I didn't figure the GMAT software would be so sluggish and Windows 98 style).

Verbal was then relaxing in comparison, perhaps even too much. Got distracted in between, thinking about whether I performed poorly on Quant Section. Note to self: worth to inverse order next time?
Timing worked pretty well on verbal even though I didn’t put much attention too it – probably Verbal is just more of a strength for me.

Next up, IR hit me harder than expected. There were only two questions before it went all multi-tab, the question type I’d have liked to avoid the most. Guessed through the first three questions hoping to skip them, only to discover there were even more – a lot more. First, there was one with some kind of experiment on two Sisters (Sister A and Sister B), with conflicting statements and an examination of hypotheses to which statement other people would agree more.. second big IR hitter was something about ratios of wages and living cost in Sweden for rural and urban residents in the 1890s – 1920s. A bit better than the one with the two sisters, but quite tricky too.
I kind of felt a certain fatigue at the point of IR, idk why. Just didn’t seem to have the energy anymore after Verbal, even though I had some snacks in the breaks and used the time completely. The essay then went pretty well again.

tl;dr - I felt like I messed up in Quant section, bringing my score under the level I achieved in the practice exams. I know I am stronger in Verbal than in Quant, but it felt like I lost a lot of the confidence during I had built up before in the Quant section. Timing was certainly a large factor for my Quant score, as well as IR probably.

4) When are you planning to apply to Business School?

My initial goal was to hit 650 because it would take me above the treshold of 600 most of the business schools I'm looking at are requiring. While I am currently still in my full-time job, I planned to apply for a few programmes this spring, meaning until end of May. Having scored 630 now, I'm still above the treshold, even though I didn't reach my personal objective. Considering the 16-day "ban", the amount of time needed for preparation and the duration of the GMAT mailing, I won't be able to retake for the applications until end of May. However, other programmes I found appealing closed too early for me and will open back up for applications in approx. September.

5) Conclusion

Summing it up, I had mixed CATs and then performed not as well as I had hoped for - I had at least hoped for a 650. I kind of have the gut feeling that "I have it in me". I know that I can and will apply with the 630 I received now, but first, it is not the result I had hoped for, and second it is also rather imbalanced. Therefore, I am considering a retake, putting more focus on Quant, immersing more in the "shortcut" approaches and gaining confidence.

What do you think? Would you recommend to give it another go? Personally, I am inclined to do so, because I like the "challenge" it poses. However, I'd probably have to put in a good amount of work.

What would you suggest to me as to improve my Quant confidence? It's probably about practice, practice and practice - and reviewing even more and more carefully than I did before.

Any advice is appreciated! Looking forward to your opinions.

Best Regards