GMAT Strategy

Hello,

Thought I would just vent here for a minute. I took my baseline untimed GMAT CAT two months ago and scored a 560 (19th percentile QUANT, 91st percentile VERBAL). After 2 months of intense studying, including a very expensive tutor, I decided to take another practice test, except this time it was timed. I had recently taken an untimed quant section and scored 66th percentile, so I assumed I'd do pretty well overall, given my 91st percentile on verbal on my baseline test.

To my utter dismay, I scored a 530 on the timed test. After over 300 hours of studying, I managed to score worse than my baseline. I got 29th percentile quant and 72nd percentile verbal. How could this happen?

There is absolutely no way I can answer the math questions in under 2 minutes. I need to try each problem a bunch of different ways until I figure out how to solve it. And as for the verbal, I ran out of time with 4 questions to go, but that doesn't explain a 19 percentile point drop from my baseline.

I don't know what to do and I'm so upset...

don't worry dude - people have done worse and ended up better before.

spend some time introspecting, not too much. then re-register.

don't discontinue your normal life either. you'd be stupid to let one exam affect your life.

in the meantime, watch these https://zenhabits.net/2008/08/top-5-most ... n-youtube/

and smile. :)

I dont this Stockmoose16 wrote the actual test. This was just the second sample correct?

Have you done all OG quant problems and reviewed the solutions?

LSB wrote:I dont this Stockmoose16 wrote the actual test. This was just the second sample correct?

Have you done all OG quant problems and reviewed the solutions?

I haven't done any OG problems yet. I went through all the MGMAT books, and do the questions from the online forums. I know how to solve a lot of the problems, but sometimes it takes me 2-3 tries to figure out the correct method. This is the first time I did it with time pressure, and I felt stressed the whole time. I started randomly guessing questions so that I wouldn't run out of time at the end.

Which sample test did you take? Some of those out there are a lot harder than the real thing! I scored higher than any sample test I took except for GMATPREP and POWERPREP.