640 to 610 3years of failure

Question

I want to write my heart out.
In 2018, I gave my first Gmat prep, without any preparation and got 640; I have seen many posts and the famous E-Gmat statement that X hours on our course will give you Y results. 
I opted for E-Gmat. It must have worked for people. 
Nonetheless, In my case. I prepared for 2 months and ended up getting 640 again after getting 680 in GMATprep2-

Year 2019. This time I was bit serious. took E-GMAT verbal again. prepared for 2 months, completed most of the questions in scholaranium and scored 640 yet again. This time In heat of desperation I gave exam after 2 weeks and got 640 again.

Year 2020:- This time my Gmat prep was 720(Q50 V38). Club tests were also showing 720(Q51 V38), Egmat 5th Mock test was 720(Q50 V38). These all are between aug 15 - aug 28 of 2020. In EGmat test 1,2,3,4 my verbal was V33,V33,V34,V36 respectively. and quant I believe in Club tests.

Today, I gave my actual GMAT and scored 610. What a shame. Q49 and V25. 
I dont know where to bury my face. I wasted time on SC and RC ended up with 16question 16 minutes.

YOU PLAN EVERYTHING, THE TIMING. THE STRATEGY. EVERYTHING.

yet everything that can fall apart will fall apart.

As soon as I came back I gave a Club test for verbal. I got V31. V25 is such a bad score . I feel broken.

Trust me, I could crack GATE with an AIR 7. GATE, supposedly one of the toughest exams in India. and GMAT, I think I have filled myself with very bad way of preparing and not able to come out of it. I dont know what to do and how to get out of this.

Harsh2111s · Answer

No good happens after you are exhausted. Looking at your mock scores and panic situation at test centre, I believe you should give one more attempt within 15 days. You are ready, just be confident

Thelionking1234 · Answer

Sorry to hear this, at the same time I can feel the same what you are feeling right now. I took my GMAT on 27th of August and scored 690. It was my first attempt. I am not boasting about my self, I am just trying to motivate you. Time management - Heart of getting good score I think you failed to manage time on the test day, and that definitely penalized you 60-70 points (7-10 points on verbal). So here I am sharing time management strategy which I have followed and successfully executed it on test as well. I recommend you to take manhattan mocks, practice this strategy on at least 6-7 mocks so it enters in your subconscious. https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... nt-part-3/ Understand GMAT Algorithm Importance of first 3 quarters to score 40. Importance of first 2 quarters to score 35. etc. There is no way to escape from first 2 quarters, you have to ensure you get most of the questions correct in first 2 quarters because this will decide difficulty level of 3rd quarter and it should be hard to get good score. You can search post by Bunuel regarding What if scenarios of GMATPrep software analysis (refer latest one). Let me know if you don't find it I will help you..

TheUltimateWinner · Answer

MASTEROFMYSEA 
Can you share the split (quant vs verbal) for those highlighted score so that people can give you some insights?

Thomas18r · Answer

Sentence correction is a very difficult subsection. The test not only requires you to learn a lot of rules, but then at times it uses those rules against you. Do you read English language books often?

MASTEROFMYSEA · Answer

No, I used to. Not anymore. 
My SC accuracy has been decent in practice tests though

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MASTEROFMYSEA,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day did not 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) What type of study routine did you follow in 2020? How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far over the course of ALL of your studies besides the course that you mentioned?
3) In 2020, 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:
4) What is your overall goal score?
5) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

If you took this recent attempt at a Test Center, then you might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report for this attempt. 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). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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

MASTEROFMYSEA · Answer

Studies:
1) What type of study routine did you follow in 2020? How many hours did you typically study each week?

This year I started my preparation in April and I started with Egmat course and followed their approach. Afterall there are 100s of people who gave +ve reviews.So i think the issue is with me and not the prep course. April may june my preparation was 2 hours a day some days i couldnt prepare because of work. However in august. I did on avg 6 hours of practice everyday. completed the Egmat scholaranium and it was promising as my accuracy was 81% in SC, 80% in CR and 75% in RC. My mock tests were all taken in month of august, and they were consistent with my accuracy.

2) What study materials have you used so far over the course of ALL of your studies besides the course that you mentioned?
I used official guide 2018,2013. Manhattan CR and SC(only read once). then i completely followed Egmat. Completed Aristotle SC and 100 Questions.

3) In 2020, 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)?
Each of my Mock was taken with a gap of 4-7 days starting from 
12th July: Q44 V33
Aug 3rd : Q46 V32
Aug 6th: Q50 V34
Aug 13th: Q46 V36
Aug 17: Q48 V38
The above results from Egmat

On 19th Aug GMAT Prep 1: V39 Q50

This gave me the confidence needed and I took the final test on 29th Aug.

The only inconsistent results i got were from GMAT club verbal tests. on 18th V25 in morning, I was devastated and took the test again V21. 
I gave a day break and took Gmat club verbal test again on 21st and got V38. and i felt confident, as this was similar to my prep score aswell.

After 21 I did not take any mock test. I practiced offical questions and gave test on 29th.
In between

Goals:
4) What is your overall goal score?
I intended to get Q50 V38 with 720. Did not want anything more than what my mocks were giving

5) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?
I miss my round 1 chances now. I will go for round 2 now. ISB.

freedom128 · Answer

Well, the course you took is indeed famous... for its marketing hype.

Why don't you start practicing OG2021 questions? OG series are the best gmat preparation resource.

I did my verbal priep as following chronology:

1) no verbal prep, real score 620 (v25) 
2) after finishing e gmat course in 3 months, real score 580 (v24)
3) after finishing verbal scholaranium minus RC the following 6 monthhs, real score 680 (v34)
4) after doing all og2021 verbal questions the following 5 months, real score 720 (v40)

You can observe in your experience to what limit the course increases your gmat score and to what limit OG improve your score.

Posted from my mobile device   
   Posted from my mobile device

Toffelfabriken · Answer

Judging from your consistently high mock test scores (assuming those mocks were taken under realistic exam conditions), it sounds to me like you have the fundamentals down pretty well, which is good.

Could you elaborate on what your strategy is when it comes to time management, including what you do to stay on time, how you gauge how much time you have left and what you do if you realize that you're behind on time? Also, how do you set up and use your scratch paper?

MASTEROFMYSEA · Answer

Hi,
I dont have any timing strategy, I have been usually able to complete and SC question <90sec avg. and CR less than 120 Sec. RC about 7 minutes for short and 9 for long passage.

During the test however. In the beginning, I started slow. took time to eliminate the close options. my focus levels were not the same. Passage killed my time aswell. when i saw the clock it showed 16 mins for 16 questions.

thats was the end of the chapter. 
such situation never occurred during mocks.

any help is much appreciated .

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi MASTEROFMYSEA,

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

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

Toffelfabriken · Answer

These things happen sometimes. It's not uncommon for people to underperform during the actual exam. Timing can definitely mess up your score and from the sound of it, this is what happened to you. Since the GMAT overall is very tight on time, you need to have a strategy worked out in advance for gauging how well you're doing and how to recover when you're a bit short on time.

The link posted above by  Thelionking1234  has some useful stuff. Some people like setting up the scratch paper such that at the end of each page, you should have a predetermined number of minutes left, which you can then cross-check against the timer. Others, like myself, prefer just having a simple calculation method (look at how many questions there are left and multiply by two. If that number is lower than the number of minutes remaining, you're fine) and checking after every 2-3 questions. Ultimately, you'll want to have this stuff worked out before taking the exam, so you don't have to think about it.

When it comes to recovering, you need to be prepared to skip a few questions. That's fine though. It is much better score-wise to skip a few questions, than to have to rush through many questions. The idea is that when you realize you're behind on time, you wait until you find a question you're fairly certain you've got the right answer to. Then you immediately guess on next question. This way, you save 2 minutes and will hopefully not get multiple wrong answers in a row (which would penalize you more than two more spread out wrong answers would).

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

You nailed it. Something about the way you have been preparing for verbal has not worked.

Likely, your perceptions of what GMAT verbal tests and how to answer the questions are somehow inaccurate.

You may wonder then how it could be that you scored much higher on GMAT Prep tests in verbal than you scored on the actual GMAT, and at least part of the answer is probably that some of the resources that you used to prepare for verbal prepared you for the GMAT Prep tests, possibly by using questions that are copies of the questions on the GMAT Prep tests, but didn't prepare you for the actual GMAT.

So, you took the actual GMAT and were shocked and dismayed by your experience with the verbal section and by your verbal score.

Just so you are aware, many many people have had the same experience, because they learn methods of answering verbal questions that don't really work but do OK on verbal on GMAT Prep tests because they have seen copies of the questions already.

The good news is that, by preparing differently, you can score much higher on GMAT verbal than you have.

To prepare differently, you need to learn some more effective ways of answering GMAT verbal questions, and you need to do a lot of untimed practice and careful analysis of choice after choice of question after question.

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