What went wrong?

Question

I just took my first GMAT today and unfortunately am one of those bringing back horrible news. Compared to my practice tests, I completely bombed the GMAT due to my poor score on the verbal section. I did amazingly well on the IR and earned a perfect 8, my highest score. I also did quite well, by my standards, on the quant and received a 47, just one point lower than my highest practice test score. However, I got destroyed on the verbal for some reason; I received a 31 when I have been consistently scoring 38-40 on practice tests. My verbal percentile was actually lower than my quant percentile which completely baffles me.

During the exam, I thought that the sentence correction questions were incredibly difficult, about the same difficulty as the most difficult practice questions I had done (which in my opinion are the MGMAT questions) or even slightly more difficult. I felt pretty comfortable on the cr and reading comprehension during the exam and am guessing that I missed no more than 6-7 questions in those two sections combined. What confuses me even more is that I thought I had been doing very well on the sc practice questions. Just a little more than a week ago I finished the remaining sc questions, the ones towards the back of the 2017 og book that are supposed to be the most difficult, and correctly answered 29-30 of the last 32 questions. With that being said, I am wondering if anyone has any idea as to why the sc on the test seemed to be so much more difficult for me granted that I have found success on some of the most difficult questions in practice.

lebron23Goat · Answer

do you have the ESR? i found that after taking my test, the ESR was really useful.

gmatnoobie1 · Answer

I do not, didn't know such a thing existed. How long does it take to receive an ESR after purchasing it? My next scheduled exam is in 20 days or so.

lebron23Goat · Answer

after you buy it, its immediately available. just type in the code, which you can buy 2 days after the test, and you can download right away

gmatnoobie1 · Answer

Thank you for sharing this with me. ESR looks pretty useful so I definitely will purchase it.

lebron23Goat · Answer

yea i like to think of ESR as the black box when a plane crashes. it will definitively show you what areas you struggled in, the difficulty levels of the questions you missed, and also the timing. when it comes out for you (48 hrs max, could be earlier), you can post it here and i can analyze it for you if you want.

KarishmaB · Answer

Yes, that's right. The ESR will help you figure out what actually went wrong. You might think that SC killed you but that may not have been the case at all. Once you know exactly where you messed up, it will be easier to plan the retake properly.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi gmatnoobie1,

The Enhanced Score Report doesn't offer a lot of information, but the data in an ESR can usually point out a couple of areas that you would need to work on to improve your scores. If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

With a V31, you would have lost significant points in 2 of the 3 major Verbal categories (SC, RC and CR), so this score result cannot be linked back solely to your performance in SC. 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. If you can answer a few questions, then we should be able to figure this out:

When you took your CATs:
1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT each time (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 when you plan to take your Official GMAT?
4) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, skip sections, take longer breaks, etc.)? 
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once? Had you seen any of the questions BEFORE?

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

gmatnoobie1 · Answer

I just used my ESR code and have discovered that my percentile for the SC and RC were low. What I also discovered from the ESR is that I performed very poorly on the first 10 questions but had relatively high accuracy on all of the questions after that. This is quite surprising considering the fact that I thought all of the questions got considerably more difficult later on. I am still not entirely sure what to make of the results. My guess is that I must have missed a ton of questions in a row at the beginning which caused the test to give me lower level questions, making it difficult for me to ever "catch back up" to my actual level. Any thoughts?

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi gmatnoobie1,

I'd need to see the full ESR before I could offer any analysis. If you could post it here, then I'll be happy to take a look (or you can PM it to me directly if you'd rather keep it private).

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

gmatnoobie1 · Answer

Just sent you a PM Rich. Thank you!

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