Should I take the GMAT a 3rd time?

[ejdusc]

I just took the official GMAT for a second time and got a 580...Q-40, V-30.

The first time I took it on June 20th, I got a 600...Q-40, V-32.

GMAT Prep 1: 680...Q-44, V-38
GMAT Prep 2: 690...Q-45, V-38

My MGMATs range from 620-710 (took 6) with an average Quant score of 45 and an average Verbal score of 36.

I took the 9 week course and had the post evaluation with an instructor. Based on my meeting with him and the questions I answered, he told me I was in the 680-700 range.

I'm having a hard time with the verbal score on the official exam. As you can see, on the GMAT preps I averaged a 38 and on the MGMAT I got as high as a 42.

Is it worth me taking the test again, or should I accept my score as it is?

Please advise on why you think I am performing so poorly on the actual exam. I am completely baffled on my verbal score. I've taken your advice from the forums and gone over the official guide and truly analyzed the questions and the answers.

Furthermore, my Manhattan post evaluation instructor gave me a timing scheme that I found helpful, so on the second official exam I didn't mess up on time like I did on the first exam.

Thank you your time.

[RonPurewal]

the discrepancy between your practice scores and your official scores is both (a) astonishingly large - ~100 points - and (b) astonishingly consistent - both your practice scores and your official scores haven't varied by more than 20 points. i'm certainly convinced that you should attempt the exam a third time, because those extra hundred points could clearly come in handy when it's time to apply to b-schools. 590 and 690 are worlds apart.

here are a couple of questions for you to ponder:
* is MENTAL FATIGUE an issue?
remember that the verbal section, which appears to be your particular bête noire, is dead last on the exam. have you been doing the essays on your practice tests? IF NOT, then a HUGE part of the discrepancy is almost certainly explained by the mental fatigue attributable to that extra hour. it's not easy to concentrate on the verbal section after you've already been taking the test for 3-4 hours.
if you haven't been doing practice tests with essays, then you need to start doing so, in order to develop the attention span and discipline necessary for the "4th quarter" of the real test.

* have you been drawing CONNECTIONS and TAKEAWAYS from the problems you've studied?
here's what i mean: most students don't study practice-test problems anywhere close to ideally.
specifically, you MUST study problems with an eye to CONNECTIONS AND TAKEAWAYS. whenever you solve a problem, you should never put the problem to bed until you've drawn at least one lesson that can be applied to other problems. so, rather than just asking yourself questions such as "why is choice (a) wrong in this problem?", you should learn to ask yourself questions such as "what signals can i look for, IN GENERAL, that will let me spot such errors in future sentence correction problems?"
same deal with other problem types.

* did you look at the clock too much?
an effective timing plan shouldn't require you to check the clock more than every 10-15 minutes or so. in particular, you should NOT be looking at the times required for you to solve individual problems! instead, your timing plan should involve periodic "checkpoints" at which you compare your current performance to a pre-set timing map. (i presume the "timing plan" of which you wrote is one such timing map.)
if you're checking individual problem times, you will almost certainly waste a good amount of time on the combination of clock checking + time calculations (not to mention additional anxiety).

[Guest]

I need your honest advice. I need to take the GMAT for the third time. My verbal is surprisingly low and I can't explain the reason for it. I studied all MGMAT books and never scored below 93% on the verbal in practice tests. I have assumed that the verbal scoring is very sensitive.

My mental stamina is weakening after two unsuccessful efforts (I scored 680). Is taking the GMAT for the third time viewed negatively by admissions committee?

I appreciate your response.

[RonPurewal]

I need your honest advice. I need to take the GMAT for the third time. My verbal is surprisingly low and I can't explain the reason for it. I studied all MGMAT books and never scored below 93% on the verbal in practice tests. I have assumed that the verbal scoring is very sensitive.

My mental stamina is weakening after two unsuccessful efforts (I scored 680). Is taking the GMAT for the third time viewed negatively by admissions committee?

I appreciate your response.

you mentioned fatigue, so i'll go out on a limb and guess that mental fatigue may be an issue. i'm not talking about mental fatigue from long-term studying, though; i'm talking about mental fatigue from taking a four-hour-and-change-long test.

BIG QUESTION #1: are you used to taking practice tests WITH ESSAYS, all at once? if you're not, then the sheer length of the test is almost certainly to blame for at least some of your woes.
if this is the case, then the advice is obvious: start taking practice tests with the essays, all at once, with breaks only of the same length as those given during the real exam. even if this means you're repeating our practice tests (i.e., you've taken all 6 of them already), it's still worth it. besides, you won't see the same questions a lot of the time anyway.

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BIG QUESTION #2: what's your goal score, and why?
if your goal is 700, then a pair of 680's isn't that bad. if your goal is, say, 750, then that's a different story entirely.
in any case, it's difficult to put your past scores in perspective without at least some knowledge about (a) your score goals and (b) your past efforts on practice tests (including the official GMATPREP tests from mba.com, which i assume you've taken at least once before your 2 official tests).

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in general, no, taking the gmat 3 times isn't that much of a black mark on your record; people do it all the time. if you manage a decent improvement the third time around, especially, it will not be a bad thing at all.
but if you've already taken the test twice, you might want to change up at least something about the way you've been studying. this is probably obvious, but i'll say it anyway: if you keep studying the way you've been studying, you will probably keep getting the results you've been getting.

can you say more specifically where you've been having trouble on verbal? i know you don't get detailed score reports back from the official tests, but you probably have at least some idea where the big problems are.

[Guest]

Thank you for the response, Ron.

I have found your posts to both verbal and math questions very helpful. My verbal score has unpleasantly surprised me. I have scored over 94% on GMAT Prep (I took more than 2 tests) and scored 70% on the real exam.

On both of my actual exams, I have found that the anxiety from the math section carries over the verbal part. I would think that I have not done well on the math part because questions would seem easy, and this would have an overall effect of discouragement, preventing me from having a complete focus on the verbal part.

As far as weak areas in verbal - critical reasoning usually takes me more time as I am a non-native speaker. By using the MGMAT books, I have been able to improve my CR skills.

Ron, in your experience, what would you recommend for a more rigorous strategic practice on CR verbal questions?

[RonPurewal]

On both of my actual exams, I have found that the anxiety from the math section carries over the verbal part. I would think that I have not done well on the math part because questions would seem easy, and this would have an overall effect of discouragement, preventing me from having a complete focus on the verbal part.

one:
DO NOT EVER try to judge the quality / difficulty of problems on the exam. this is pointless, and will only distract you from the important task of actually solving the problems. remember that (a) you really won't be able to detect small differences in problem difficulty, and, much more importantly, (b) about 25-30% of all the problems are experimental, and experimental problems are of completely random difficulty (therefore thwarting your attempts to figure out the trajectory of the exam).

two:
you should try dealing with anxiety by re-framing it in a positive manner.
instead of thinking about test anxiety as "test anxiety", try thinking of it as "extra mental arousal". in other words, the same symptoms that occur with test anxiety - nerves, arousal, quicker processing, etc. - also occur when you're just in a state of heightened awareness. so, if you can convince yourself that "test anxiety" is really just "heightened awareness", then the test anxiety problem may disappear altogether.
this requires a certain amount of self-convincing (or even self-fooling) at first, but, trust me, it works. i have used similar techniques to dispel other kinds of anxiety in the past, with very positive results.

Ron, in your experience, what would you recommend for a more rigorous strategic practice on CR verbal questions?

depends on where your weaknesses are.

the fact that you're asking this question the way you are - treating all of CR as if it were a single, monolithic entity - seems to indicate that you don't separate the different CR problem types from each other as much as you probably should.
you really need to develop SEPARATE STRATEGIES for the different CR problem types (e.g., find the assumption, draw a conclusion, ...). the different types don't work at all like each other, so trying to take the same general strategy into all of them is disastrous. (imagine trying to solve data sufficiency problems in the same way as you'd solve problem solving problems - yikes!)

are there particular TYPES of CR problems on which you have more difficulty than on others?