scoring 700 but getting initial questions wrong

Question

hi,

I've scheduled my gmat for 12th aug. My scores in the gmat mocks are:

1. Gmat prep1: 700 (q47, v40)
2. Gmat prep2: 710 (q49, v38)

However, I got 5 out of the first 10 wrong in both quant and verbal on both the tests. not being able to answer the supposedly simpler ones is stressing me out and am looking for help on how i can improve and also if its a common occurrence. I would also appreciate any tips on how to try to improve my score to to a 730-740 given the limited time available.

Thanks for all the help in advance.

OptimusPrepJanielle · Answer

Hi rushd25,

The simpler questions can be easy to miss if you are reading too quickly or making careless mistakes. They shouldn't take a lot of time but if you're spending a drastically short amount of time per question in comparison to the others you may be overthinking or moving too fast. Spend an extra second making sure you've read and understood the question. If it's quant, double check your math to make sure you haven't made any careless errors.

Find out why you've missed questions when you look over your mock tests. Train yourself to justify why answer choices are incorrect. Doing so might allow you to pick up on some of the GMAT question traps and avoid them in subsequent mock tests and on test day. Top level scorers have not only mastered the GMAT concepts but also achieved a thorough understanding of the exam itself.

Good luck!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi rushd25,

Your CAT scores are quite strong, so you're in a great position to perform well on Test Day. I have a few questions about how you took these CATs:

1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)?
2) Did you take them at home?
3) Did you take them at the same time of day as your Official GMAT?
4) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, listen to music, etc.)? 
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once?

Many Test Takers make little mistakes during their practice. Silly mistakes are often the product of not taking enough notes - so the solution to your problem is to take more notes, label your work, do NOTHING 'in your head', etc. While this will require just a little more time and effort on your part, fixing this issue will almost certainly have an immediate impact on your scores.

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

DmitryFarberMPrep · Answer

It's normal to get quite a few questions wrong, even at the beginning. You can't be at all sure that those initial questions are easy. Do they seem easy when you look back at them? Can you see what led you to miss them?

It's hard to improve on a Q49, but your verbal has plenty of room for growth. What aspects of the verbal section do you find the most difficult?

For CR/RC, the biggest thing you can do is to get better at predicting the answer up front. Don't dive into the answer choices until you have a clear sense of what you're looking for. ("Okay, I want to undermine the economist's prediction. What is that prediction? What support does the economist provide? Where is there a hole in the argument, and what kind of new information would expose that hole?")

SC relies a great deal on rules and a great deal on specific phrases and structures in written English. It's hard to cram in all the rules in a short time, and the phrases/structures can be the work of a lifetime. So over 3 weeks, it helps to find a few good focus points. For me, the most natural ones would be sentence structure and meaning. To focus on sentence structure, look at the simplified core of the sentence minus all the adjectives, modifiers, and descriptive phrases. What is the subject and what is the verb for that subject? Is that subject acting on something else?

Example: After adopting a healthier diet, Tom has found that the intense pain from his numerous chronic ailments have diminished substantially and that he falls blissfully asleep almost immediately upon climbing into bed.

After adopting a healthier diet,  Tom has found that the  intense  pain  from his numerous chronic ailments  have diminished  substantially  and that he falls  blissfully  asleep  almost immediately upon climbing into bed.

The parts not in bold are non-essential modifying portions of the sentence. While some of them contribute quite a bit of meaning (the sentence loses a great deal without that initial modifier about diet), they don't directly impact the structure of the core, which now reads as follows:

Tom has found that the pain have diminished and that he falls asleep.

Clearly, this is missing quite a bit of content, but in this form, it's easier to spot the subject-verb error: our sentence should read "the pain  has  diminished." Once we've narrowed our choices down to those that fix this error, we can step back and look at other issues such as modifiers and meaning.

It's easy to get stuck just looking at grammar, but it can really help to think about what the sentence seems to be trying to say in then compare that to what it's actually saying. When you look at SC that way, you can find many choices that work grammatically but just don't make sense logically. That's something you can get in the habit of looking at over the next few weeks, and it can make a real difference on the test!

I hope this helps.

scoring 700 but getting initial questions wrong

Prep Toolkit

Top 5 GMAT Debrief Videos

615 to 715 in 15 Days (Ria's Strategies)

More than Quant/Verbal Abilities: Speed vs. Accuracy

745 with Only Self-Prep and GMAT Club

From 555 to 765: 210-point Improvement

Perfect 805 Score Debrief by Julia

My Rewards