Request for ESR Analysis – GMAT 690 (Q47, V38)

Question

Hi Experts EMPOWERgmatRichC egmat ScottTargetTestPrep TheEconomistGMAT GMATWhizTeam AndrewN AjiteshArun

Thank you for your help beforehand. I took my first GMAT attempt on 11/16 and got a score of 690 (Q47/V38). I am disappointed since I dedicated quite a bit of time into GMAT Prep and seek guidance. My target score is 720+ (ideally > or = 740, but I want to be realistic given my exam). I plan to take the exam again in 5 weeks (end of December) and can dedicate at least 6 hours/day for this attempt. I don’t plan to apply to business school this season (in 2-3 years), but I want to get the GMAT out of the way to focus on my job search and other areas of my candidacy.

Study resource:
Classroom
PowerScore CR Bible
GMATPrep Mock 1,3,4,6
GMAT Club Tests
SC Grail + SC Manhattan
RC Veritas

My prep experience:
I have been preparing for the GMAT for ~4 months, typically average 6 hours/day since I am currently not working full-time. I took a class for 2 months to refresh my foundations and currently work with some tutors to hone up my weaknesses. I also did mock exams in GMATPrep and GMATClub and maintained an error log to solve questions in OG.

My exam exp:
_ Got into time crunch toward the end of both Quant and Verbal sections – I kept track of the time and knew that I was short on time toward the end, but I was overconfident and thought I would be able to solve the 3-5 questions toward the end in 2-3 mins, which did not happen so I had to take blind guesses.
_ Verbal: I thought RC was in line with my preparation in terms of difficulty. I was surprised on CR since it seemed to be more difficult than what I practiced (I also did not focus on CRs in the last 2-3 weeks outside of doing mock exams, so that may be the reason why). SC was my weakness and I had to do 50-50 on 2-3 questions.
_ Quant: I was on top of my time in the beginning, but there are 2-3 questions in the middle that caught me off guard with the wordings, and I ended up spending 4-5 mins on each of those. I was determined to finish them since they felt like 700+ questions and I wanted to aim for Q50/Q51. I understood that it was a mistake as the blind guesses at the end likely pulled my Quant score down.
_ IR: I got a 6, which is a bit below what I aimed for (8), but I also did not study much for it.
_ AWA: I don’t know the score yet, but I think I did OK.

My mock exam record:
_ GMAT Prep 1 Q48V35 07/25/2020 (which is why it is kinda sad that I had the same official score as my assessment four months ago

)
_ GMAT Prep 5 Q44V45 10/11/2020
_ GMAT Prep 3 Q49V38 10/18/2020
_ GMAT Prep 4 Q51V36 11/8/2020
_GMATClub Quant: Q31-Q48, GMATClub Verbal: V29 – V35, they vary a lot

My questions/ask for feedback:
_ I know one of my shortcomings was not spending enough time to review the error log. I typically tried to redo the problem right away after I got it wrong, but the problems added up and I did not go over through all of them before the exam. Would you guys recommend me to review the error log more regularly before my next attempt?
_ My verbal has been stagnant (V34-V39), and it seems I can’t get to V40 even with lots of practice. Do you guys suggest more practices on the weaknesses according to ESR (by finishing the OG) or any other resources/practice strategies I should consider? My weakness seems to be SC, but I think I cannot afford to overlook the other two based on my exam experience.
_ For Quant, my weaknesses are Inequalities, Absolute Values, Coordinate Geometry, Combination and Permutation, but I also struggled with 700+ questions (either not knowing how to answer or taking 3+ mins to answer them). I wonder if the solution will be more practice with time constraints and willing to drop the quant questions that took more than 2 mins?

I would love to hear any other recommendations/advice. I am not happy but I hope the next exam will have a better turnout and I plan to put more focus and effort in my prep. Thank you so much for your help!

) _ GMAT Prep 5 Q44V45 10/11/2020 _ GMAT Prep 3 Q49V38 10/18/2020 _ GMAT Prep 4 Q51V36 11/8/2020 _GMATClub Quant: Q31-Q48, GMATClub Verbal: V29 – V35, they vary a lot My questions/ask for feedback: _ I know one of my shortcomings was not spending enough time to review the error log. I typically tried to redo the problem right away after I got it wrong, but the problems added up and I did not go over through all of them before the exam. Would you guys recommend me to review the error log more regularly before my next attempt? _ My verbal has been stagnant (V34-V39), and it seems I can’t get to V40 even with lots of practice. Do you guys suggest more practices on the weaknesses according to ESR (by finishing the OG) or any other resources/practice strategies I should consider? My weakness seems to be SC, but I think I cannot afford to overlook the other two based on my exam experience. _ For Quant, my weaknesses are Inequalities, Absolute Values, Coordinate Geometry, Combination and Permutation, but I also struggled with 700+ questions (either not knowing how to answer or taking 3+ mins to answer them). I wonder if the solution will be more practice with time constraints and willing to drop the quant questions that took more than 2 mins? I would love to hear any other recommendations/advice. I am not happy but I hope the next exam will have a better turnout and I plan to put more focus and effort in my prep. Thank you so much for your help!

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  nhatanh811 . I am honored that you would seek my advice on these matters. You got close this time, but your timing, particularly in Verbal, will need to be addressed before you can make inroads on your target score. First off, you have invested in some fine resources, so I would not recommend anything additional in that department. There is no silver bullet to any section anyway; even the best resources are only as good as the person who knows how to utilize them. You will likely need to reread parts of different guides and see how the rules and suggestions are brought to bear in practice questions. My observations and suggestions are the following:

VERBAL  :

RC —Surprisingly, you performed better on inference questions than on those with answers rooted directly in the text. As such, you should review questions you have missed and practice matching keywords between the passage and each answer choice. Watch for common traps such as overreaching language (e.g., cannot, must, always, never), vague or non-committal language (e.g., some), or reversals (the opposite of what the question is asking for, as in the wrong point of view on an issue). Do NOT look to justify the correct answer in review. Rather, you should aim to disprove the incorrect answers. If you can appreciate how a valid answer might veer off into invalid territory by adding an unwarranted word or two, then you will set yourself up for success in the future. As for timing, 2 minutes per question, on average, is fine.

CR —Well, your ESR shows that you aced Analysis/Critique questions while you floundered on Construction/Plan questions, so that gives you some insight into what you need to emphasize in your studies. It also appears as though CR was hampering you, in terms of timing. If you are going to sacrifice 40 seconds or so per CR question, on average, then you will have to balance that out somehow. Perhaps SC is the ticket, but if you are becoming more error-prone on SC questions just to make up time, then both areas will suffer. That CR Bible should come in handy for review.

SC —Go over those rules and conventions again, and do not be afraid to detach from the main sentence and jump straight into the answer choices once you  know  something in the original sentence is incorrect. Sometimes grouping  incorrect  answer choices and looking for differences between or among them can shed light on similar issues in more promising answer choices. For instance, yesterday during a session with a student, I noticed a 3/2 split at the head of the answer choices, and I preferred the 3; however, I examined the two less likely candidates to eliminate the worse of those two options. Guess what? A key split on subject-verb agreement popped up at the end of the underlined portion, and it allowed me to eliminate two of the three answer choices within the cluster that I had deemed more likely to be correct. Now, I was left with a 50/50 between a more likely and a less likely answer, and I spotted further issues in the latter, making my decision on this Hard question an easy one in the end. The process took under a minute. Remember, SC is not about what sounds the best, nor about expressing the ideas in the best possible way. Rather, SC involves sifting through five potential lines and knowing which ones to discard  for some grammatical or semantic reason , picking the best answer from those provided. Again, you will have to go back and spend some time reviewing past questions you have missed.

On the whole, you should be looking to get your accuracy on Medium questions up to 85 percent or greater. That should take care of any problems with the Verbal portion of the test. Turn that V45 in Practice Test 5 from an anomaly into the new norm.

QUANT  :

You seem to have omitted your Quant resources, unless the courses you have taken have focused on it, at least in part. My advice would be not to assume that you will hit a 50-51, since you have done so just once in practice. To shore up any conceptual gaps, check out either the  All You Need for Quant  thread or the  Ultimate GMAT Quantitative Megathread . If you address your fundamental weaknesses topic by topic and practice high-quality questions to test your newfound knowledge (both the OG and the in-house Quant questions suffice to that end), then your timing will likely decrease in general. Sure, there might still be occasional questions that take too long, but you can mitigate your losses by cutting off such questions and getting on with the next challenge. Set a time target per cluster of questions: 5 in 10 minutes, 10 in 20 minutes, and so on, and if you fall behind in the middle somewhere (questions 11-25), allow yourself to make an educated guess once every few questions until you are back on track. If they are upper-level questions, getting a few wrong here or there will not affect your score as much as missing a string of questions at the end of the test. Your ESR tells me that you did indeed rush at the end. You will also have to practice DS questions more to come up with a viable method for solving them. I think that is about all I can extract from the Quant end of the ESR.

INTEGRATED REASONING  :

Do not worry about it. A 6 is fine. (5 is really the cutoff between a noncompetitive score and an acceptable one, even at top-tier programs. The IR section just never gained traction.)

So there you have it. Again, I would emphasize review more on the Verbal side, understanding how incorrect answers are crafted, while on the Quant side, I would suggest studying more theory and practicing new questions.

I hope that helps. Thank you for thinking to ask me about how to improve your score. Good luck.

- Andrew

GMATWhizTeam · Answer

Hi nhatanh811,

Sorry to hear that you could not get your desired score on GMAT. But I'm happy that you are open to seeking suggestions and open to working on your weak areas. This will definitely help you improve your score. It's just that you have to understand what went wrong and make sure that you don't repeat the same in the actual test.

Having said that, I see that you are not using the right methodology to solve a few questions. It seems that you are comfortable doing a certain set of questions but when it comes to questions which you are not comfortable with, you falter. One thing you have to focus is, there is a certain methodology you have to follow for each module on Verbal.

Sentence Correction: 
SC questions test your ability to convey the right meaning without any ambiguity. So, if you have approached them from a grammar stand-point, then I recommend you to stop doing that and approach them from a meaning stand-point. You might have often come across answer choices which are grammatically correct and convey a logical meaning but are indeed incorrect. So, it's important to  understand the intended meaning of the original sentence, identify the errors if any and then eliminate answer choices  which are either grammatically incorrect or do not convey a intended meaning.

Critical reasoning: 
Coming to CR, you have to follow certain steps while solving CR questions.
  Read the argument 
 Identify the premise and the conclusion 
 Read the question stem 
 Identify the missing link (Pre-think the assumption) 
 Eliminate answer choices which are irrelevant or out of scope

Identifying the conclusion helps you understand the scope of the argument, which in turn helps you to eliminate answer choices which fall out of scope. And to develop the ability to pre-think, you need to  understand the framework on which most CR questions  are based. Once you identify the framework, there are certain guidelines using which you can come up with the missing link.

Reading comprehension: 
There are certain reading strategies which you have to follow to effectively read the passage. You need to make sure that you read the passage in an inferential manner so that you understand the intention of writing the passage. Having said that, just the reading strategies won't help you solve RC questions. You need to use the  right strategies to eliminate answer choices  which are very closely worded. For example, you might have come across a few answer choices which have words such as  evaluate, establish  etc. So, in order to eliminate the incorrect answer choices, you need to understand what these words exactly mean and then eliminate.

Quant: 
GMAT quant tests only specific types of questions from each topic. So, if you know those questions types and how to solve those using the right methodology, then you can score well on GMAT quant. So, I would suggest you to not ignore any topics you are struggling with. Instead,  
 focus on learning the right methodology,  
 get to know the question types and then  
 practice a few questions to solidify the learning.

What should be the next step? 
Honestly, to suggest you anything specific, I would need a little more information because I ask a lot of questions to understand the student's approach. So,  it would be better if you can tell me your approach you followed for each of the question types so that I can suggest you which areas to work on . I understand that it would be difficult for you to write it here. So, a better way could to connect over a zoom conference call and discuss the same. That way, we can solve a few questions together, a process that helps me identify the flaw in your approach if any. Once I understand that, I can suggest you a solid study plan for the next couple of weeks.

So, if you wish to connect over a call, you can use the below link to schedule one.

Click here to schedule a call

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi Nhat,

I've sent you a PM with some notes and additional questions. 
 
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi nhatanh811,

First off, great start with 690! Regarding your first question, while not fully reviewing your error log prior to your GMAT could have had a negative impact on your GMAT score, I would not say that is the reason why you did not hit your score goal.

Regarding how to move forward, I think a mix of more learning and practice will certainly help you improve your GMAT quant and verbal skills. More specifically, you need to go through GMAT quant and verbal 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. For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see, types that you would rather not see, and types that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you had to know to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

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

You also may find my article with more information regarding  how to score a 700+ on the GMAT  helpful.

Feel free to reach out with any further questions.

nhatanh811 · Answer

Thank you to all the experts for your valuable guidance! I will work more on the timing/pacing in each question to improve my comprehension speed, spend time to do question drills to work on my weaknesses and review my knowledge gaps (and not neglect CR like my last attempt), and hopefully will have a better score next time!

Request for ESR Analysis – GMAT 690 (Q47, V38)

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