Another Low GMAT Score 600 - 44Q 29V

[jasonjrager]

Hi,

I think the GMAC may have changed their verbal section. I have been reading about a lot of recent test-takers having issues with the verbal. Please note that I practiced my exam in "real conditions" - full 4.5 hours, no breaks, etc. etc.


MGMAT 1 29-Oct V36 Q42
MGMAT 2 7-Nov V33 Q45
MGMAT 3 12-Nov V37 Q44
MGMAT 4 20-Nov V38 Q47
MGMAT 5 5-Dec V34 Q43
MGMAT 6 7-Dec V35 Q46


Today I took the GMAT and got: 600 - 44Q 29V. My jaw almost hit the floor when I saw my score. I still can't believe it.

I was expecting around a 44Q(hoping for better) as that's the average of my quant scores - but my verbal was *way* off. I will admit that I had some serious timing issues with the verbal and I had to rush through the last 10 problems. However, I want to say that the sentence corrections were MUCH more difficult than I had been expecting/had seen on the MGMAT tests. I think this may be where I spent a lot more of my time as I was forced to rush at least 3-4 CRs.

Please also note that I studied OG10, OG11, and OG12 and OG12's Verbal Review - and completed all of the associated questions with each numerous times. I have also used many other resources for prep. I guess the only good thing I have going for me is that I haven't yet taken the mba.com "Official" practice tests.

So my question is, what do I do now? I'm taking the exam again Jan 4th or 5th. I just purchased PowerScore's SC Bible and the CR Bible - I will study those and do all the questions associated. Sorry to put a competitor's books on here but I've already gone through the MGMAT verbal books (I read the SC guide at least 3 times). Should I just reset the MGMAT and take tests 2x per week leading up to my retake?

Finally, my weakest area on MGMAT was RC - although I felt fine with it on the GMAT.. maybe that's because I was doing poorly. I've tried the MGMAT RC guide and I have yet to show much improvement. Can you recommend any other resources for RC improvement?

Thanks in advance!

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry you had a disappointing experience on the test.

I will admit that I had some serious timing issues with the verbal and I had to rush through the last 10 problems.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean by "rush"? How much time did you have, did you have to make any random guesses (and if so, how many), did you have to make any educated guesses (meaning you had enough time to eliminate some answers, but then had to guess), etc?

Your verbal score represented about a 15-20 percentile point drop. Depending upon how severe your timing issues were, that could easily have been caused by getting the vast majority of those final questions wrong. I'm also wondering at what point you started to try to shave some time off of some problems and catch back up. Most of the time, it's the case that that behavior begins well before the point at which you have "serious timing issues" at the very end of the section. What I typically see on practice tests with this pattern is an additional number of questions wrong before the final 10 that were "careless mistake" answers - things that the student knew how to do, but s/he was working a bit more quickly than usual and therefore made more careless mistakes. That, of course, brings your score down even more.

One possibility is that you were actually doing really well and being offered super-hard questions (and so struggled / felt they were a lot harder / didn't recognize them), and then got sucked in, messed up the timing, and caused the downfall in the end. This pattern will generally result in a lower score than if the student "lets go" when the super-hard ones appear and continues to work steadily through the rest of the test.

Another possibility is that some of those questions might have been experimentals. Although we can never tell for sure, if anything seems very "off," there's a better-than-normal chance that the problem is an experimental question - so, if you were getting sucked into spending extra time on a few experimental questions, that would have done absolutely nothing positive for your score. You would only have had the downside that comes from rushing / running out of time.

By the way, don't apologize for mentioning a competitor's product - that's totally fine! You can mention anything that you have done or plan to do.

Should I just reset the MGMAT and take tests 2x per week leading up to my retake?

CAT exams are really good for (a) figuring out where you're scoring right now, (b) practicing stamina, and (c) analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. Beyond that, the actual act of just taking the exam is NOT so useful for improving. It's what you do with the test results / between tests that helps you to improve.

Do you think you had a stamina issue? Or was the issue really more about timing? If it's more about timing, then you need to fix that problem so that it doesn't happen again on the next test - and taking lots of CATs is not the best way to do that. First, you actually do have to fix the problem itself. Then, you can use CATs (and other practice sets) to practice and solidify.

Let me know the answers to all of my questions and we'll figure out what to do.

[jasonjrager]

Stacey,

Thank you for your in-depth response.

Around question 13, I looked at the clock and realized that I had about 44 minutes left - Thus, I needed to speed up. So I tried to speed up a little and randomly guessed on one RC that was a LONG boldface question(spent less than 20 seconds on it).

To be honest, I think I spent a really long time on the first RC and my CR performance was slower than usual because I was "over-diagramming" in both instances.

When I was on question 26-29, I realized I had 15 minutes left and I knew I had one RC passage left - not good. At this point however, I had found the test very challenging, although 2 of the RC passages were about business and I had just finished a science RC.

I understand what you're saying about the CAT. I think I will only take it twice over the next 3 weeks. However, how would you recommend I improve my timing?

Right now, I am practicing RCs daily and I am really going to focus on not reading the stem first in CR as well as do some other things to speed up performance in that area. I score very high in RC, I just feel I was too slow on the actual GMAT. Please let me know if you have any thoughts on how else to improve speed/timing.

Yes I do believe stamina was an issue, however ALL of my MGMATs were taken under full test conditions (no pauses, breaks, etc.) also, I did the two essays for all of the tests except for my first MGMAT CAT. My reason for questioning my stamina is that I felt as if I let the test "roll over me" in the Verbal. For some reason, I had lost my aggressiveness and I was not "attacking" the exam and the questions. Thus, I felt as if the material had changed from the MGMAT and that the SCs and CRs were *much* harder.

In conclusion, I feel my biggest issue was with timing(I had issues with timing on the CATs for Verbal in the past). How do you recommend I improve my speed? Also, please note that I use a stopwatch and I try to do every CR in less than 2 minutes, every SC in under 90 seconds, and every RC in under 2 minutes each. If I fail to do the question in the allotted time, I mark it and review it again.

Thanks so much!

Jason

[StaceyKoprince]

Hi, I'm sorry that I'm only getting to this now. I've been on vacation since the 15th.

In order to improve timing, we need to figure out where / why you were losing time. I like that you hold yourself to your timing standards and review if you don't meet them. Do you ask yourself why, very precisely, you couldn't do this problem in the given amount of time? What slowed you down? Was it something acceptable? (The entire sentence is underlined and it's long and it only slowed me down by an extra 15 seconds.) Or not acceptable? (I kept going back and forth between the final two choices.)

On RC, lost timing could be from the read-through or while answering the various kinds of questions.

If it's on the read-through, part of the issue is that you were likely trying to understand more than you needed to. If you think this was the issue, after you've tried a new passage, go back and take a look at your notes and what you knew of the passage before you started to answer questions. At that point, you should know:

1) the main idea / overall point
2) the overall point of each paragraph
3) the general kind of info contained in each paragraph

You should be able to answer any "main idea" questions without having to go back to the passage. You should NOT, however, be able to answer any specific questions without going back to the passage - if you can, you spent too much time on the read-through. On specific questions, your notes / read-through should allow you to quickly identify which paragraph to examine. That's it.

If you think the timing problem had more to do with the questions, was it all questions or only certain kinds? Maybe you were fine with main idea, but really slowed down on inference? Or maybe you narrowed to 2 on all questions pretty quickly, but then agonized over that last choice?

If you can identify a particular type that slowed you down, you'll need to hone your skills for that type. What am I supposed to do on an inference question? What do right answers tend to look like on these question types? What do wrong / trap answers tend to look like? Etc.

If you think you were agonizing too long over the last choice, then you need to cut that off sooner. Personally, once I've narrowed to 2, I look at each choice ONCE more. Then I choose. From experience, I've learned that going back and forth after that doesn't actually increase the odds that I'll get it right anyway.

For CR, it's very important to identify a few things right away:
1) what kind of question is it? (read the question stem to find out)
2) if applicable, what's the conclusion?
3) what are the major turning points or weak areas in the argument?

And then, of course, you need to know what you're supposed to do for questions of that type, etc. What I typed above for RC questions also applies here to CR questions.

If you felt you weren't attacking the exam as usual, then nerves and fatigue may have been factors. The stress of the "official test" situation can kick up the mental fatigue, and that knocks down your aggressiveness. Knowing what to expect next time can help, but you're also probably going to need a few "mental mantras": things to tell yourself to keep up your confidence and really attack the test. Don't forget energy food / drink on the breaks; that can really help.