500 with 1 month Preparation

Hi rohitgmat,

First off, it sounds like your goal score and goal school are a bit vague: do you have a "dream" school? If so, then you should be able to research it and figure out what GMAT score you would need to earn to have a chance at admission. Having that information can also help you to determine admission deadlines, among other things.

Your first GMAT score is just below the average, so you did not do badly considering that you studied for just 1 month (and took just 1 practice CAT).

Was there anything about Test Day that caused you any particular problems? Was there anything surprising? Did you run into pacing problems or questions that you didn't know how to answer?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi rohitgmat,

You might consider signing up for Beat The GMAT's free 60-Day Study Guide (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide). Over 25,000 Beat The GMAT students have already done so.

Each day, you'll receive an email with a series of learning activities that guide you, step-by-step, from Day 1 to test day. This will ensure that you will cover everything that the GMAT tests.

Here's an outline of all 60 emails: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide-outline

Cheers,
Brent

rohitgmat wrote: I will summarise it by saying that I was poor with the time management on the test day and the lack of concentration was the another killer.

For this reason, it's very important that you take and analyze several practice tests before test day. This will help identify weaknesses and, more importantly, help build your test-taking skills (endurance, time-management, etc).

While analyzing your practice tests, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:
1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options.

If your test-taking skills are holding you back, then you need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244.

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article for BTG: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/09/ ... n-the-gmat

Cheers,
Brent