GMAT hit me hard !! (490 Quant. 33, Verbal 25)

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This is my fatal GMAT-story !!

I'm a student of business and economics in Germany and finished my studies this summer and gained an undergraduate (BSc.). I decided to apply for a masters programme in the Netherlands. Therefore a GMAT with a score of 600 is required.
So two month ago I choose a test date and started my preperations. After one month (Sept.) of training with the OG as well as the Quant.- and Verbal-Review I took the first Prep-Test and surprisingly scored 620 (Qu.:40 and Verbal: 34). I was happy and surprised to be so close (or maybe even over) my aim. So I started the following month with a lot of confidence and invested much of the time in improving my SC and Quant. skills. I also took several Tests and scored as follows:

Princeton Review PrepTest: 560 Q: 40, V: 27
Manhattan GMAT PrepTest: 550 Q: 36, V: 30
GMATPrep Test No.2: 570 Q: 41, V: 28

I thought the decreasing scores in verbal were just because of a lack of concentration at the end of the Prep-Tests. So I nearly anwered all the OG, QR and VR questions and the last two days I tried to refresh my Verbal skills and lift them to a higher level (at least over 30).
Yesterday I headed to the city where the test-location is and stayed the night in a hotel room. I told me stay concentrated throughout the whole test and to focus on every question, especially in the Verbal section. Because I always had troubles with the timing in the Quant. section, I established a table to control my pace in that section (that was a tipp from a tutor in a forum of btgmat.com by the way). This table showed me when I was behind the clock and therefore had to guess on a question to make sure that I would finish the section without guessing several questions at the end. At the end of the day, that didn't pay off, maybe because I wasn't familiar with that strategy. My timing was good, my score not. In the verbal section I felt that the questions were a lot tougher than those in the OG and the PrepTests. All in all I got a horrible score of 490, with ridicoulus Q:33 and V:25. The first moment it felt like a really bad joke, but now I'm just frustrated about me and my weak performance. The next few days I'll decide wether it is worth retaking the GMAT or not.

If someone can give me a good advice how to improve my scores, or has a good explanation for my weak performance, it would be very helpful to me.
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by ivyctor2010 » Tue Oct 30, 2012 10:15 pm
Mocks
Ideally you should take 8-9 mocks in a period of 2 months. And 3 of these mocks should be full fledged i.e. along with AWA, IR, everything. Because that helps you make mistakes and learn from them. Go with Manhattan mocks specifically as they are quite good.

Improving specific areas
A very simple tactic to improve scores is to reduce the practice of those areas where you are good and do more questions for areas where you are bad. For example if you identify that you are doing very well on geometry questions and bad on algebra you know where to hit. If you are doing well on idioms but getting most of modifier questions wrong then those are the ones you need to practice.

Improve specific areas, and give some complete mocks, you will surely do well the next time.
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by BoboGMAT » Wed Oct 31, 2012 1:23 am
Thanks ivyctor for the nice reply. I think I really should do a lot more Mock Tests.

I tried to improve my weak areas, but as you considered, maybe to general. So focusing on specific areas is a great hint.

What really shocked me was the extremely low score. In all my tests I had no problem scoring way above 500.

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by ivyctor2010 » Wed Oct 31, 2012 2:55 am
Aim a score of 650-700 and start getting that score in mocks, believe me your score will be well above 600 in the actual test.
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