GMAT experience and strategy

Question

I am preparing for GMAT exam since Apr'20 and did good in GMAT Official Tests (I took 4 tests). This month, I took the GMAT exam and was shocked to see a score of 530 (V19, Q47). Surprisingly, my score in the 4 Official tests which I took was 630, 620, 650, and 680 with a minimum score of V27 and Q47. So, I am not able to understand what went wrong in the exam. I requested the ESR and noticed that I did terrible in all the 3 verbal sections, worst was the CR. I also realized that may be the stress and panic caught my brain during the exam. For your information, I completed the full exam of verbal & quant.
So, I am requesting for the expert's advice.
For the preparation, I am using PowerScore for CR, Manhattan Prep and egmat course for everything else and am thinking to retake the exam in 2-3 weeks. Is it a good strategy? I don't want to screw the gmat this time and need all the help/advice which I can get to get a desirable score.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi jeetu30,

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. 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:

Studies:
1) How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?

Goals:
3) What is your overall goal score?
4) 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. Before you can include attachments with your posts/PMs, you need to have at least 5 posts in the forums (right now, you have just 1 post). If you would rather not go through those extra steps right now, you can feel free to email me your PM directly (at [email protected]).

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

jeetu30 · Answer

Hi EMPOWERgmatRichC,

The response to the questions raised are as follow:

Studies:
1) How many hours did you typically study each week? --> 20hrs/week. I am doing self-study by going through the ManhattanPrep & following the course of egmat. 
2) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)? --> 1st test I took in March and scored 680 (V34, Q47) followed by another in May with 650 (V28, Q49). I took the other 2 tests in June and scored 630 (V27, Q47) and 620 (V24, Q49). So, basically with time, my performance deteriorated.

Goals:
3) What is your overall goal score? --> I am targeting 700 +/- 20.
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to? --> I am thinking to apply in the 1st round which starts in sept for some colleges. I am a mid-career professional (10yrs experience) and will apply to colleges which offer specialized curriculum for professionals like MSx in Stanford, 1yr MBA in Cornell, NY, etc.

Gmatsaiyan · Answer

You can follow this study plan:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-study-p ... ml?fl=menu
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-self-pr ... tml?f=menu

Courses that can help with your prep:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-co ... ml?fl=menu

Best books for Quants:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-ma ... ml?fl=menu
Best books for Verbal:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-ve ... ml?fl=menu

Best Gmat practice tests:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/all-gmat-pra ... tml?fl=men

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi jeetu30,

I've sent you a PM with some additional questions.

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

GMATWhizTeam · Answer

Hi Jeetu,

First of all, so sorry to hear about how things went with your GMAT. But don’t get disappointed. In my journey, I have helped many students identify what’s stopping them from a getting a good score and improve their score. To give you a brief introduction, I’m a GMAT Strategy Consultant and I like to analyse stats. I’ve been in this industry for more than 8 years now, so, hopefully, helping you shouldn’t be a big problem.

Looking at your scores on mock and the actual test, I can only think of two possibilities for the difference. Ideally you should be able to reflect the mock score on the test day but this case seems pretty ironic. Anyway, the two possibilities are:

One reason might be the nervousness on the test day. It is quite common to feel nervous on the test day and if that is the reason, then I guess you are good to for a retake because your mock scores are pretty consistent. This time make sure you take the test with a relaxed mind. 
 The other reason might be you are not likely following a specific approach for all the tests. If your approach is not consistent, then I think there is some work to do.

Your quant score is pretty decent. Verbal seems to be the major concern. Before suggesting you what to do next, I would require answers to a few questions.

Did you follow a specific approach to solve verbal questions? 
 Did the approach remain same or did it change with every test?

Answers to these questions will help me guide you in a better way. The reason I’m asking these questions is because GMAT test makers set a lot of traps and often confuse students by using similar words. You need to have a strong conceptual knowledge and use the right strategies to solve verbal questions. If you do not use the right methodology, there are high chances that you might end up being confused between two choices.

What do I mean by the right methodology? 
To give you an example about using the right methodology to solve Verbal questions, let me explain it using CR module. What is the general strategy that beginners or students who don’t use a methodical approach follow to solve questions?

They read the argument or the stimulus 
 They read the question stem 
 They jump into the answer choices and check each of them if it answers the question stem.

If you follow this approach, you are most likely to get stuck between two or more answer choices.Now let me tell you how a student who uses methodical approach will solve the same CR question. The student
  reads the argument or the stimulus 
 identifies the premises, conclusion, intermediate conclusion if any 
 reads the question stem 
 starts pre-thinking the missing link or the assumption (the most important step) 
 starts eliminating the answer choices which do not match the pre-thought assumption

It is the right methodology on which you have to focus on. Having said that, I suggest you to book a slot only after knowing the exact reason behind your struggle. As you have an  ESR, I can help you in analyzing it . This should ideally give us a few more insights on what actually went wrong. So, if you want me to help you in analyzing your ESR,  I would suggest we do that using a zoom conference call . Because in this way, we can analyze the ESR properly and quickly narrow down things.  You can schedule a free consultation call using the below link .

Click here to schedule a call

jeetu30 · Answer

Hello GMATWhizTeam

Thank you for the email. I have sent you a private message.

RetaketheGMAT · Answer

When there's a gap between practice performance and actual test performance, often it's the result of a less than 'resilient' in-test process. What do I mean by that? The pressure in the test is incomparable to during practice tests. Just like an athlete has to have a more perfect stance or follow-through during game conditions than in practice, the same goes for a test -taker during the actual GMAT.

There are lots of small things and some big things that can really help to bridge that gap. Practicing being very precise in the first stage of answering any question (so you leave nothing the question stem and answers have to offer you behind). Using strong visualization of the problem -- getting it out of the confusing word format they give it to you in -- so you can get your head wrapped around the question and get to the answer faster.

Those are both things that can help to bridge that gap. I've seen it work for hundreds of test takers.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. The good news is that you scored really well on quant, right? That said, I understand that you are not satisfied with your verbal score, so the question we need to ask is why you scored so high on your practice exams but lower on the real GMAT.

Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V27. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT, particularly in verbal. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation probably needs to be more complete, particularly for verbal, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.

The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best verbal courses .

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:

How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?

If you’d like more specific advice on how to improve your verbal skills, feel free to reach back out. Good luck!

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