No ! What ?

[mist3rh]

Shocking defeat is what i'd term it !

I don't consider myself 800 league but I never thought I was 610 either (Q48 V27). Ridiculously shameful performance on the verbal section. The GMAT test centre had the worst keyboards and I felt quite uncomfortable. Neverthless managed to scribble some AWA rant. Took a break to get a little breather and later found out I was 30 seconds over my scheduled time. Started under stress and carried on to complete the quant within time following straight on to verbal. Thinking I had performed badly on quant, I perhaps found myself a little lost while going through verbal. I wouldn't say verbal was difficult but perhaps my score tells me why the subsequent questions i got appeared easier. I don't know where I went wrong and what went wrong but I am truly disappointed as I had hoped for around 700 and perhaps a good performance on verbal would have got me there.

I am not sure how I could dissect this unexpected drop in performance as we have no way to figure out the underlying deficiencies. I am not a scholar but I certainly am not V27 level either, not usually anyway.

The deadlines for most schools are coming up shortly and I am in a dilemma how to best approach this situation. I had hoped for a good score to mask my dismissal GPA. I do have work experience to support my claim although everybody gunning for an MBA does so I am just disappointed with myself.

Could someone be a lamp to me and help me dig a way out of this all to make it before the deadlines?

Do schools (10th -30th ranked) consider AWA (which I hope went well) as a cover for low verbal? Do they consider conditional admissions or perhaps allow a chance to improve on GMAT post-admission? (although I guess the later consideration is a no-brainer anyway).

All guidance is much appreciated !
Thanks guys

[timur.ivannikov]

Hey there,

I think you have the potential to do much better on the verbal GMAT but of course it requires studying and practice. You could just study the verbal guide a little and try taking the test again but it may not work. Unfortunately, you may need to apply again next year if you want to reach the 10th to 30th ranked schools, especially 10th - 20th. I think they all value verbal scores much higher than AWA's unless AWA's score is below 4.

Taking practice exams on the GMAT website may help you idenitfy your weak areas. Just looking at your message, apart from a few sentence fragments and perhaps slight tense errors, your English is very good. So, some unfamiliarity with sentence correction or critical reasoning topics could have been your undoing.

T

[mist3rh]

Thanks for the feedback Timur ! I got the AWA score earlier today and its a 6.0 (big relief indeed !). One of the schools I was interested in has recommended re-taking GMAT and that an improved score could increase my chances of being admitted with some aid.

So I am going to make another effort and try to aim for a respectable score.

I've started planning for a verbal strategy, beginning with CR. I have practiced problems from 3 sources -OG & Kaplan & Manhattan.
What I've observed is that although I am able to narrow the options to two (95% of the times the correct option is one of the two), I am only getting around 40% accuracy from amongst those two options.

With SC, I really don't know where to begin. Ive heard much about Manhattan SC but I don't quite understand the best approach to use the book. I just can't seem to get used to the literary jargon -dangling modifiers, past perfect, gerunds etc.

Any suggestions ?
Thanks

[timur.ivannikov]

Good job on the 6.0 :). As far as CR and SC, I can give you a couple of tips but in general the only thing that worked for me was going through the guides several times. What I mean by going through is reading and competing all the excercises and then following up with the real GMAT questions from the official guide.

For critical reasoning, you really have to recognize the question type almost immediately and then organize your thoughts accordingly. Manhattan GMAT guide offers a "T-diagram" for organizing thoughts and it works well. The fact that you can eliminate down to two choices means that you're almost there. The final step is to study your mistakes and guesses carefully and to understand exactly why one of the answer choices is correct while the other is not. Are you making assumptions that are not supported by the argument's statement? What are the exact differences between the two choices? Can you summarize the differences in one sentence?

For sentence correction, find out what types of questions you're getting wrong and for those types of questions learn the official grammar concepts in the relevant sections of the Manhattan SC guide. If after reading a SC guide section you're still confused, I would recommend "googling" a particular concept for more examples or getting an American English grammar book. Since you're a good writer, you should be able to have an example for each definition - i.e. when I used past perfect I wrote such and such, when I used a simple gerund I wrote that, and so on.... Just roll with the official names and have an example handy from your own writing until you don't need to recall the example to recognize a concept.

Hope this helps, and once again, for me there was no substitute for working through the guides several times!

[mist3rh]

Thanks Timur -that should help. I just happened to have come across your debrief. Wow !! Excellent performance -that'd be a dream come true for me if I ever were reached a comparable score haha !

What material did you use to practice? I hear OG is not quite at a level that could push you over 700 and that Manhattan is overly complex to be completed within the set time frame.

Will post back the progress along the way.

Cheers

[timur.ivannikov]

Thanks, good luck on your future tests!

I used the Official GMAT Guide (12th edition) and the 8 Manhattan GMAT guides (4th edition). The OG was necessary for me because it has actual GMAT questions. Some of the Manhattan GMAT guides were more helpful than others but all the verbal ones were definitely useful given my math background. The 6 practice online exams were also very useful, providing new questions and wrong/correct answer explanations.

The guides are not complex; they are very extensive and break everything down. I feel that the quant guides can be used as math textbooks in middle school/highschool. Of course the school would be done early then for anyone who is interested in learning, but that's a topic for another conversation.