HD54321's GMAT journal...

Question

So I'll be honest with my scores and I'd appreciate any input from you guys.

I'm not the best at math and I'm relatively happy that I'm trending up. However, I'm disgusted with my downward trend in verbal.

First Time:
Math: 34 (43%)
Verbal: 36 (80%)
Total: 590 (67%)

Second Time:
Math: 38 (56%)
Verbal: 34 (71%)
Total: 600 (70%)

Third Time:
Math: 41
Verbal 33
Total: 610

AWA scores have been 5 every time (I wish it mattered).

WTF is going on here???? I have no clue where I'm going wrong and I'm getting upset. I KNOW I could get a >40 on my verbal, but these scores don't make any sense. Going into the exam, I always thought Verbal was my strongest skill, but my test scores don't reflect that.

Prior to my third attempt, my test prep scores varied and the highest I achieved was 700 on a MGMAT prep. Next highest was 670 on a Kaplan exam.

I'm planning to take the exam again in a month, any strategies you'd recommend? Appreciate any input. Thanks guys!

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  EDIT: I've updated this into a journal like Startup Addict. I like the idea of posting my testing scores here. Feel free to comment at any time.

kryzak · Answer

Hrm... are you freezing up during the test? If you can get 700 on MGMAT and 670 on Kaplan (the online test or the class test?), you shouldn't get 610 on your GMAT. What were your GMATPrep test scores? Did you take those at all?

What was your hit rate with all the different sections with OG11 and Quant/Verbal Review? Did you do OG11 at all? We need a bit more information before we can help you out.

zakk · Answer

what areas are you feeling are lacking when you get to the big show? is there a specific type of question? is CR throwing you? 

I have made more improvements by looking hard at what I missed and guessed on in practice CAT's. all my 'study time' was being used to only do questions then glance at the answers. fully understand what your are missing and why you are missing it as well.

hd54321 · Answer

Thanks for the reply. Wasn't sure how much info to put into the OP.

First take: Haphazard studying using OG and a variety of test prep books. Had a timing issue on math and verbal. I had 6-7 minutes left on verbal and had to guess the last 5 questions on math. 

Second take: MGMAT Course. Followed the syllabus and completed most of the coursework. I completed all thee OG books and felt I was ready. However, I had a big timing issue with Verbal and had to quickly guess the last 6 questions. Math timing was good. I attributed the verbal timing issue to my poor verbal score.

Third take: I changed things up. Went to a different test center, different time (I liked the test center but will go back to the morning session for my 4th take). I luckily had about a month off work and studied consistently for at least 4 hours/day. I took a bunch of exams and my scores varied from 620 - 700. The last 2 weeks I spent 95% of my time on the SC1000 and CR1000 sets. I knew that verbal was going to make the biggest difference in my score so I heavily focused on it. Not sure about hit rates, but I was happy enough and comfortable enough to take the exam. Timing was perfect for both portions. I used a timing grid for math and an answer key for verbal.

I don't believe in the GMATPrep exams anymore. Why? Because I've taken them at least 3 times for prior exams and after going through OG11, you can recognize quite a few questions thus biasing the results.

I'm just astonished at my verbal scores. They don't make sense. I felt like I was hitting them when I was taking the exam this last time and thought I'd get >40. When my score popped up I was disgusted.

I know I messed up on verbal. So what I'm really looking for is a 3 or 4-week study plan/strategy. I'm going to go back and re-read the MGMAT Sentence Correction guide. I may read up on some CR material. and keep doing consistent practice sets. I'd like to run through the OG material again as well.

Regarding math for this last time, I took about 5 of the GMATClub Challenge sets. Obviously I'm not super strong on math and my scores were always in the 50% range 

Let me know if you guys need more data. Appreciate any help and tips. Thanks!

hd54321 · Answer

Damn, I WISH we could get detailed score reports from Pearson/GMAC. MGMAT is VERY good with breaking down your scores. Any other testing services you guys recommend? I heard someone say VERITAS had good exams.

Please let me know, thanks again.

anonymousegmat · Answer

I think Veritas' exams suck. Their algorithm is lame, and veritas use sproblems they either bought or stole from the OG's... so i don't recommend. I don't think you can purchase them without joining the course anyway. They give you an ARCO CD-ROM, which I thought was pretty good. My ARCO CAT scores were 690, 710, and 720... very close to my 720 and 730 in powerprep and my 730 in gmatprep. (all taken within a month of each other) they also give you 800score tests, which were good practice but weird.

trahul4 · Answer

Try out Manhattan CATs. I think they are the next best after GMATPrep.

kryzak · Answer

that's a tough nut to crack. Here's what I would do:

1. Use the MGMAT CAT report thing and figure out which sections you're weakest in. They break it down into the % of misses in each section, in each difficulty level, and things like that. 

2. Sounds like your math is weak, so I would learn the CONCEPTS instead of just doing questions. Doing questions is good if you know the concepts but get tricked by how GMAT asks the questions, but if you're consistently scoring in the low 40's for math, you need to learn how to do the algebra, arithmetic, geometry, number properties, probability, and so forth. Best way to do that? Review the Manhattan math books, the Veritas math books, do flash cards on how to factor (X^2 - 1) or how to find whether 42 is divisible by 3. Any way to get your math foundation up to speed. Then worry about the tricks that GMAT throws at you.

3. For verbal, you need to know which sections you're weakest in. Sounds like SC and CR. Well, look at your MGMAT CATS or your GMATPrep tests. how many of each types are you missing? Why did you miss them? Did you miss them because you misread the question or did you completely not understand the problem? You gotta dig deep down into the reasons behind your mistakes before you can build back up to a full understanding. 

Other than that, I don't know what else to say. You did all the problems, you took courses, and you took many tests, but something is going wrong because your scores aren't changing. I'm guessing that it's because your math foundations need to be built and there's a specific reason you're missing your verbal. If you can find that reason, and if you can really LEARN the math, you should see a dramatic score increase. 

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

hd54321 · Answer

Thx for the advice! I think you're right about the math concepts bit. I never really focused on it too much and assumed low 40's would be good IF I could score mid-high 40's on verbal. That would at least pull me into the high 600's range.

skaballet · Answer

Have you considered a tutor? If you can afford it you might want to try that. I took the MGMAT course and scored 640 and now I am using a tutor to try to get my score to 700. He is helping me to really focus on my weak areas (math) and go over the problems. When I recently took a practice test I saw my score from one of the areas we worked on go up a lot. Something to think about.....

misterJJ2u · Answer

From personal experience, you may be memorizing the questions on your practice exams so that you already know the answer w/o any critical thinking. When the real thing comes up, you have new questions and must try to reason the answers.

Best practice: new material, new questions, all subjects. As you go through each question, star or highlight those you have a hard time with. Once you're done, look back to see what you missed. Even those that you got right but were highlighted, bring those questions to the forums and discuss approaches to eliminate choices, etc.

After a while, you'll start to recognize the same tricks over and over. THen, when you see new material, you'll know what the trick is and be able to work through the problem.

This has worked wonders for me in SC and DS.

STill working on RC but Rhyme is helping me with that!

hd54321 · Answer

Ok, so I'm meeting with a tutor for the first time on Saturday. I'm going to take an exam beforehand so we could review my results.

I have a few options:
Kaplan
MGMAT
and Princeton Review

Tutor is ex-PR instructor. He suggested either Kaplan or PR CAT. Any suggestions? Any other general suggestions for my tutoring sessions?

StartupAddict · Answer

Hi, you need to turn yourself into a GMAT robot :-)

Throw away Barrons, McGrawHill, Manhattan, etc. They're useless. All you need is OG, the 1000 sets and GMATClub :-)

For Quant, here's what you do: Get OG, and do every single DS & PS problem in there. Try to do 50 problems a day, you can get through OG in under 2 weeks. Anyways, the key is, TIME yourself -- I use a stopwatch. Give yourself a max of 2 minutes, if you can't answer it easily in 2 minutes, mark it wrong, and review it later. Each time you get a question wrong, look at why you got it wrong-- Were you just slow? Do you not know the underlying concept? etc... IF you were slow, do a few practise problems with the same concept until you get faster. If you don't know the concept, then learn it! Anyways, the idea is you want to be able to look at ANY OG question, and be able to solve it within 120 seconds flat, without really thinking too hard..... I think that's the key. For Verbal, well, that's a *complain*. For me I just 'get' CR, so I never study that..... same with RC. SC though, I just do a hell of a lot of practise. I would just recommend going through about 200 CR's, that's a good amount, and trying to understand how the GMAT test writers are trying to trick you..... once you learn how to think like them, you'll know what tricks to watch out for. RC is just practise, practise and more practise. Honestly now when I do a CAT, by the time I get to verbal, I can't make ANY sense of the passages -- but subconsciously I remember things.. it's weird. Like I can read a passage, have it not make any sense, then read the question, and be like boom that's the answer...... I think you just need to do a lot of long, complicated passages to get the hang of it. For SC, same thing as in Quant, time yourself each time, giving yourself a max of 2 minutes. You should know the idioms, the things to watch out for, etc. I think if you can do SC1000 or OG with 85%+ right you're set for SC. If you do 200-250 CR, 50 passages, and about 1000-1500 SC's, I think you can easily get a 45 verbal. And if you do 500 DS & 500 PS, you can easily get a 48+ score I think this is an easier approach then bothering with all those stupid books. Their explanations are terrible.... read the explanations from OG, and pay particular attention to how the test writers DISMISS incorrect answers... put yourself in their shoes. Learn how to think like they do. It gets much easier then! Let us know how your progress goes. Also you wrote GMAT 3 times?? How far apart? I think you should have done a lot better, did you not study in between? Well, if you did, it didn't help! You should give what I said a try, that's what I did and I'm scoring mid to high 7's now, and I started off in the 500's

hd54321 · Answer

THANK YOU!!! I really appreciate your advice. I think my studying has been haphazard (i.e., no study plan, etc.) for my last three attempts. I feel like I know the material (according to my test scores I don't), but I'm just not able to execute.

In any case, as you suggested, I am pretty much dropping the books and focusing on my weaknesses. I'm excited about meeting with the tutor on Saturday. I feel like I just need someone there who can be a guiding hand. Some people need their hand held through some processes - I guess I'm one of those.

Thanks again for the advice, please feel free to comment as I add more test data/progress to this thread. People like you, gmatclub success stories, are inspirations to the rest of us.

Cheers!

singh_amit19 · Answer

Hi there, Just got a little suggestion for you, undoutedly you are a 700+ material i don't see any problems with you EXCEPT missing on structured preparation.........pick up OG & GMATprep (ONLY).......do OG diligently and take GMATPrep scores seriously, even if some questions show up on GMATPrep CATs from OG........TRUST ME it gives you the most appropriate reflection of your stance on GMAT....i am telling you this basis the experience (tried & tested) on my firends, they used the same strategy (OG+GMATprep) and all scored 700+...........so just get back to basics (OG+GMATPrep) STOP using ROCKET science...it is not so complicated the way you are interpreting it!!! :wink:

Cheers!!!

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