Exact same score on 2nd attempt. Final 3rd time?

[WendyY887]

Hello!

Just finished my second attempt at the GMAT and scored a 700 (Q47, V38), which is the exact same breakdown and score as my first attempt 3 weeks ago. In all of my practice exams using the official GMATPrep software, I was scoring V41+. I'm quite frustrated that both my exam day performances have yielded a verbal score of 38.

I always choose Verbal as the first section I do since I feel that it takes the most brain juice. In my first attempt, I felt slightly panicked at the first 3-4 questions since the screen was extremely wide and for some reason it was difficult to adjust to reading across the screen. In my second attempt, I was very comfortable and familiar with the testing environment and did not feel this way at all during the Verbal section.

I felt that confident that I was getting pretty difficult questions during Verbal and thought that I would get a 41+ for sure given my performance. I had a 42, 44, and 42 in my final 3 GMATPrep practice tests.

I'm very likely going to make a third and final attempt and if third time isn't the charm, then I'll just leave it at that. Some questions:

1) When should I schedule the exam? I really don't want to let this GMAT thing bleed into 2018. I'm so done. I've been preparing since April of this year. I feel that I should give myself about a month since I don't think stretching it out any longer is a good idea as I already know and understand the concepts.

2) Where on earth can I get more Verbal practice from official sources? Should I start looking at LSAT questions? I've used all of the GMATPrep tests including Exam Packs 1 and 2, all MGMAT CATs & questions, all GMAC Question Pack 1. Any other official questions?

3) I did not feel any sort of exam anxiety today and also was not overconfident. Any advice on a potential mentality issue would be appreciated.

My target score is 730 or 740.

Thanks!
Wendy

[StaceyKoprince]

First, I know you want a higher score, but congratulations on getting yourself to 700. That's not a small accomplishment!

In order to figure out where to go from here, we have to try to figure out some idea of what's been happening on the exam. Are there any differences at all compared to what you did in practice—time of day you took the practice vs. real thing, etc? How did your quant and IR scores hold up compared to practice—were those about the same? When you took practice tests, did you study earlier in the same day (so maybe you need to do a little warm-up before you go into the official test)? Conversely, did you maybe do too much the morning of or the night before the official test and tire yourself out a bit? Or struggle to sleep the night before? Etc—anything you can think of.

Have you ordered the Enhanced Score Report for either of your official tests? That may help you to figure out what might be going on—one question type that's bringing you down more than the other two or timing issues or something like that. (Note: It's not a guarantee that the ESR will tell us what's going on—the data is pretty high level, so there's a risk that we won't be able to tell much. But since you don't have a sense yourself of what might have happened this might be one possible way to see.)

You can read more about what the ESR includes here:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/2016/07/15/how-to-analyze-the-upgraded-gmat-enhanced-score-report/

If you have, tell me the data for your verbal section(s). You can't paste the graphs here, so just tell me all the data in written form.

You do mention being "so done" (and who can blame you!). It might possibly be a good idea to give yourself a complete week off—just get a little distance from this before you come back to it. If you're in the US, maybe use the Tgiving long weekend as an excuse for a break.

[WendyY887]

First, I know you want a higher score, but congratulations on getting yourself to 700. That's not a small accomplishment!

In order to figure out where to go from here, we have to try to figure out some idea of what's been happening on the exam. Are there any differences at all compared to what you did in practice—time of day you took the practice vs. real thing, etc? How did your quant and IR scores hold up compared to practice—were those about the same? When you took practice tests, did you study earlier in the same day (so maybe you need to do a little warm-up before you go into the official test)? Conversely, did you maybe do too much the morning of or the night before the official test and tire yourself out a bit? Or struggle to sleep the night before? Etc—anything you can think of.

Have you ordered the Enhanced Score Report for either of your official tests? That may help you to figure out what might be going on—one question type that's bringing you down more than the other two or timing issues or something like that. (Note: It's not a guarantee that the ESR will tell us what's going on—the data is pretty high level, so there's a risk that we won't be able to tell much. But since you don't have a sense yourself of what might have happened this might be one possible way to see.)

You can read more about what the ESR includes here:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/2016/07/15/how-to-analyze-the-upgraded-gmat-enhanced-score-report/

If you have, tell me the data for your verbal section(s). You can't paste the graphs here, so just tell me all the data in written form.

You do mention being "so done" (and who can blame you!). It might possibly be a good idea to give yourself a complete week off—just get a little distance from this before you come back to it. If you're in the US, maybe use the Tgiving long weekend as an excuse for a break.

Hi Stacey - thanks for getting back to me!

I've purchased the ESR for both my tests. Since it's only been two days since my last one, the ESR isn't ready yet unfortunately. For my first GMAT attempt though, here is the data:

Overall score: 38 (85th percentile)
CR: 39 (83rd percentile)
RC: 51 (95th percentile)
SC: 33 (66th percentile)

Time management:
Overall: 1:48
CR: 2:01
RC: 2:12
SC: 1:19

Percent correct:
First quarter: 62% correct, 38% incorrect
Second quarter: 86% correct, 14% incorrect
Third quarter: 86% correct, 14% incorrect
Fourth quarter: 75% correct, 25% incorrect

Average difficulty (this is slightly difficult to convert to written form):
First quarter: correct (between low & medium), incorrect (between just above medium)
Second quarter: correct (medium), incorrect (medium)
Third quarter: correct (medium), incorrect (1/3 of the way from medium to high)
Fourth quarter: correct (just above medium), incorrect (between medium & high)

Average time:
First quarter: 1:22
Second quarter: 1:28
Third quater: 2:22
Fourth quarter: 2:01

Important to note that for this first attempt, I started the entire exam off with Verbal and had a feeling of being very overwhelmed at the beginning because the screen was just so BIG. I wasn't used to needing to almost tilt my head to read the entire sentence on the screen, which caused me some panic for the first 3-4 questions. I did not have this problem in my second attempt though and felt very comfortable throughout the entire thing.

For your other questions, I always do my practice exams at the same time as the official exam (12PM for the first one, 2PM for the second one). I definitely did have trouble sleeping the night before the second exam and woke up twice in the middle of the night. I felt fine when I woke up and throughout the day as well, but I'm not sure if that would have an affect. I actually did not study at all on the day before and the day of the exam (I never studied on the day of my practice tests either), and was in a very calm state. I was watching TV, enjoying my breakfast, did a bit of cardio. I have an inkling that the TV was not a good idea...

Finally, both my Quant and IR scores were very much inline with how I performed during my practice exams. Verbal is that odd one out. Is there a possibility that the experimental questions allows for a smaller margin of error especially since it's Verbal?

Thanks for all the insight! I feel okay and do not think that I need a break. I want to finish the exam before the December holidays and am pretty much set on an early/mid-December final attempt date. If I really need to push this out to after Christmas though, I would absolutely do so if it means I can solidify that Verbal score.

Thank you so much again!

[WendyY887]

Hi Stacey,

Just got the ESR for my second attempt and VERY shockingly, it seems that CR brought me down significantly this time around.

My CR score was equivalent to 19 (22nd percentile), RC 38 (80th percentile), and SC 42 (94th percentile). In all of my GMATPrep practice exams and also the two official ones, it seems there's always ONE area that brings me down, but that area NEVER stays consistent. In my first exam it was SC, in one of my practices it was RC, another one it was CR. However, I've never had such a low CR performance before so maybe this is the area I need to focus on.

[StaceyKoprince]

The ESR data is a bit misleading. This is a flaw in the way the reports are produced when someone misses all or almost all of one particular question type.

Basically, here's what happened: You did amazingly well on both SC and RC, which meant you saw really hard CRs, too. Your CR performance wasn't as good (which does indicate some kind of weakness in CR), so it didn't hold up on those really hard questions and you missed most of them.

The report then basically has so little data that it tells you a really low percentile, when really a more accurate statement is "We couldn't fully assess you on CR because you missed most of them, and your ability is somewhere below the level of the CR questions that we gave you."

Best guess: You saw that SC was the weakest of the three on the first test, so you studied SC really hard—yes? And it worked! Yay! But then CR became the relative weakness of the three.

So there's likely work to do on both CR and SC—CR to lift and SC to make sure you can stay at this lofty level. (And you'll want to practice RC periodically to keep your skills high there. But you don't have to do as much there.)

I don't think the data paints a very negative picture, actually (although I'm sure you'd rather just be done with the test now!). It's mostly just the normal up and down of how things can work on this (frustrating!) test. You've cracked SC and you're already great at RC—now you need to crack CR in the same way while keeping your skills up on the other two.

Your test center routine sounds good. You may want to do a little bit of *very* light practice in the half hour before your exam starts (go early and go someplace nearby the testing center and do some super easy practice—the equivalent of stretching a bit before you start to run or play a sport). Get your brain revving before you get in there so that your first section is not your warm-up.

If you have just a bit of interrupted sleep the night before, that's fine—your brain can recover from that. It just really hurts you if you can barely sleep for 2+ nights.

What do you think about all of that?

[WendyY887]

Hi Stacey,

Thanks for the detailed response! It's very helpful. I actually pushed out my next exam to the beginning of January to give myself more time to study and really tighten everything up.

I will definitely look to focus on SC and CR, while maintaining what I have on RC. In terms of resources, are you able to suggest any that I should use? I have exhausted all of the Manhattan CATs ( although I will take 1A this weekend), every Verbal in OG2017, every Verbal in the mba.com Question Pack.

I'm using questions here and there from gmatclub.com, but oftentimes the sources are questionable.

It'd be great to get some additional CR questions in order to continue practicing since CR is one area where if I have already seen the question, it's quite difficult to assess it objectively.

Thank you!
Wendy

[StaceyKoprince]

One of the things you need to do is learn how to learn from these questions—not just how to do new ones.

Go back to problems that you've already done and that you either missed or you narrowed to 2 and maybe got the right answer but it could have gone either way—in other words, ones where you weren't 100% sure.

Articulate two (sets of) things out loud. (You know you really understand something if you can say it out loud. If you're not confident, you'll hear it in your voice.) First:
1) why was the wrong answer so tempting? why did it look like it might be right? (be as explicit as possible; also, now you know this is not a good reason to pick an answer)
2) why was it actually wrong? what specific words indicate that it is wrong and how did I overlook those clues the first time?
3) why did the right answer seem wrong? what made it so tempting to cross off the right answer? why were those things actually okay; what was my error in thinking that they were wrong? (also, now you know that this is not a good reason to eliminate an answer)
4) why was it actually right?

When you feel comfortable with all of that, next articulate out loud the general logic for working through that entire problem, as though you are teaching it to someone else. This other person is bright but got it wrong or is confused about something—so you need to articulate how you know to do a certain thing or how you know a certain answer is a trap or whatever. (If you've got a friend who's game, invite him/her over for pizza and explain to a real, live person sometimes.)

From there, for new questions, you can try the OG Verbal supplemental book (an additional 300 V questions) or even OG2018 (which has about 15% new verbal and quant questions—so only about 120 new total). And you should see new questions on our CATs as well—there are many more in the database than needed for 6 tests. (You will see some repeats though, of course, since the questions you do see are targeted to your scoring level.)

You might find this useful for CR:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2015/12/ ... stion-type

And try this for SC:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... ce-part-1/

And this:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... st-glance/

If you find yourself hitting a wall on all of this, you can get outside support via private tutoring. That's super-expensive, so I don't typically suggest it unless someone asks first, but it might fit your case—especially because V can sometimes seem a bit inscrutable in terms of figuring out how to get yourself to the higher levels.