GMAT Strategy

I've taken the GMAT twice now in the past two months, first time I was in shock with a 620 (Q48, V28). Given that I'm a native English speaker, and I scored much higher on my practice exams prior to the actual exam, I know that the 28 in Verbal was not representative of my ability. I spent the last month honing my SC skills and working on understanding patterns in CR questions. However, I didn't spend a great deal of time on RC, in part because I didn't really see any way to drastically improve RC. After taking the first exam, I really moved my efforts to work on verbal.

My second attempt was scheduled for November 1st. 30 minutes into the exam, the second AWA had a really vague opinion that threw me off and I had a hard time coming up with a good argument. I managed to get through it, but it definitely took more energy than I would have expected. Moving onto the math section, I saw a few curveballs in the beginning which I couldn't get my head around. I think midway through the section though, I started to make up for some of the difficult questions and felt halfway decent about my performance on the section.

As the verbal started, there were a few strategies I wanted to make sure I kept in mind. The first was to make sure I did everything I could to get the first 10-15 questions right, to ensure I started off with a higher percentile. With past exams, I have noticed that when I get quite a few questions wrong upfront, I have a really difficult time getting my score past a 35. On the real exam, around question 20 everything started to blur. I would read a question, but nothing was clicking for CR and for RC. For SC I was usually able to determine what the correct answer was, but for CR and RC I felt like I was in a daze and my head was on fire. I'm not sure if it was nerves kicking in, lack of stamina, or something else but I know that the second half of verbal I became progressively anxious. I finished the exam with a 660 (Q 47, V34). Disappointed, devastated, and I honestly don't know what to do. I've taken multiple practices now, including repeats of GMAT Prep. The highest I have ever scored on any single GMAT prep in verbal is a 40, so maybe that indicates that I'm not performing at a level where I should be. On my past practice exams I've analyzed my scores and typically I've scored around 48-50 for Quant and 34-40 for Verbal. I've scored 700+ on multiple GMAT prep exams now, but on the day of the exam I haven't been able to crack a 700. I've been prepping diligently for several months now, and I really only have one more chance for this exam which is scheduled for December 2nd, allowing me one month to get through applications.

This forum has been tremendously helpful in the past few months, with the success stories, motivation, and techniques people have used. If anyone has any advice or could shed some light on what I'm doing wrong, I would be really grateful. Like many others on this forum, I've spent countless hours prepping, studying my mistakes, developing stamina, etc. I will admit, I'm a terrible standardized test taker, but I'm hoping this next month I can do something different that will get me to a 700.

Sources used thus far:
MGMAT Guides, OG Guides (Verbal and Quant included), Powerprep, BTG Forums, MGMAT Forums

Hi there,

In response, I don't think you are doing many things wrong at all with a 660 score. I do think you can do many other things right.

By your own admission, you melted down in the second half of the Verbal and you also say that you didn't really concentrate on the RC because you didn't think matters could be improved there. Well, another question is how much time did you actually spend on the first 15 questions and whether any specific question tends to take you longer than necessary (eg 4 or 5 minutes or more)? You also say that essay threw you off.

OK now we are getting a clearer picture. Let's start with the AWA: If you practice the AWA (or any other part of the exam) with proper technique, you should not fall drastically. To be sure I am not saying that you did not work hard! God forbid, no! What I am saying is that certain strategies must come into play. In the AWA section, for example, if you learn the proper template (stick to one template for each essay) and only practice writing essays with the template, no particular topic should ever give you trouble. Learning how to think about your essays (brainstorming) and organizing it in exactly in the same way each time should help you get by the essay in a breeze. I have seen this with many many students, native and non native speakers of English.

As for the rest of the Verbal. Reading Comprehension does pose a problem for most people but there are very clear techniques that help people become systematic in their approach to the RC and the more they use a particular system, the less the text matters. In effect the idea is to trick the brain into not really looking at the text the way the GMAT wants you to but to break it into manageable pieces. For example, perhaps summarizing/note-taking is best for you for every single RC question. Perhaps mapping out the text before starting it would help. It is hard to know what is wrong without proper diagnostics here. That said, even with the best techniques, some students have difficulty with certain questions. Some questions are designed to take you long and if this is the case, why bother with them; I would rather sacrifice 1 or 2 questions that I know will take me 8-10 minutes to solve and do 7 other questions instead with no hassle towards the end and enough time to finish. So these kinds of timing strategies are also crucial.


Altogether a 660 is very good, but if you are there there is no reason why you cannot make the jump to a 700. Reduce the pressure on yourself, learn proper personalized technique (something just for you because maybe you need a bit of tweaking!) and practice using such technique so you do not get thrown off by something being a bit different. Don't just practice y doing a million questions. If you do not change the core of how you attack some of those questions, then nothing will change!

The very best of luck to you!

Hi Isaac,

I really appreciate the insight. I know that getting 4+ points in verbal, from my current score of ~34 is what will make the difference between getting a 700+ and not getting at 700+, I think the bigger problem is I'm not sure what the right approach is. I've gone through the powerscore CR bible, and I'd say for the most part the strategies were extremely helpful and gave me a new way to look at CR problems. For RC, I can probably go through the OG and try to refine my skills, but again, I'm not sure what the right approach is (I've tried diagramming, writing a few words after each para, etc). To try to provide some insight, I distinctly remember during the exam, on the last 2 RC's and the remaining CR's, I was reading the stimulus/passages extremely fast, and doing the same for the questions and the answers. From a timing perspective, I think I was actually doing okay, but between my nerves and the fear of not going fast enough to finish I feel like I started screwing up, and probably overlooked crucial details. In addition, generally I think my CR and RC are weaker, and for this reason I tend to have more difficult in the verbal section. Any suggestions or thoughts on ways to specifically improve in these sections?

Thanks

Hey! Your Verbal section sounded like my test experience! around question 20, I literally could not understand anything I was reading (I felt really confused and had no energy.. nothing was making sense). You aren't far off from 700.. what you have to focus on in verbal is not getting problems wrong in sequences (ie, get at most 2 wrong in a row... anything more than 2 in a row and your score drops noticeably). If you feel a little iffy on your previous question, do take a little extra time to make sure you get the current Q right.

Its weird, sometimes people who get 18 wrong will score higher than those getting 10 wrong on verbal simply b/c the person who got 10 wrong had 1 or 2 or even 3 sequences of problems wrong. The guy who got 18 wrong might have sprinkled his incorrect answers throughout.

BTW: I've been reading the CR powerscore bible and it really isn't helping me (CR is big weakness of mine.. I think its worse than DS in terms of draining my energy).

Could you let me know a couple of strategies from CR bible that really helped you?

The best part of CR bible is where it tells you what kind of correct and wrong answers expected in each type of question. I would focus on understanding this aspect of the book, so when it comes to the actual question, you have a great understanding of how and why you would eliminate a wrong answer.

uwhusky wrote:The best part of CR bible is where it tells you what kind of correct and wrong answers expected in each type of question. I would focus on understanding this aspect of the book, so when it comes to the actual question, you have a great understanding of how and why you would eliminate a wrong answer.

Hmm.. I'll give it a try (I skim when reading this type of advice.. it seems common sense "An incorrect answer will STRENGTHEN a weaken question"... DUH).

I started to go through it again.. what I am getting out of it is to really look at details of the premise and conclusion.

odannyboi wrote:

uwhusky wrote:The best part of CR bible is where it tells you what kind of correct and wrong answers expected in each type of question. I would focus on understanding this aspect of the book, so when it comes to the actual question, you have a great understanding of how and why you would eliminate a wrong answer.

Hmm.. I'll give it a try (I skim when reading this type of advice.. it seems common sense "An incorrect answer will STRENGTHEN a weaken question"... DUH).

I started to go through it again.. what I am getting out of it is to really look at details of the premise and conclusion.

EDIT.. when i said this in my previous post.. i meant i skim the advice in th cr bible, not UWhusky's post...

To Bansamit in reply,

You are most welcome. As for specific strategies, almost every question type has its own strategy and traps to look out for.

From what I see, I think that your errors have to do with paying less attention to detail (this is often the case). I will not touch on CR so much here, but will only advise you to learn the proper strategies for each question type, and make sure you can identify the question types immediately, and finally jot down some notes (I will return to this in a bit).

As for RC, again many strategies, but what has helped a countless number of students is note taking 'with purpose'. This makes the student a lot more careful, aware, and saves time:

So let's split the reading into 2 categories (for the purposes of conciseness here) : General (general idea, paragraph purpose, etc...) and Specific Questions (almost every other question type).

General questions can be attacked through some prereading, meaning before you attack even your first question you figure out the main idea, which will also help you with other general questions as well as with locating the answers to certain specific questions.

The main idea, by and large, comes from the first two sentences of each paragraph (sometimes the third sentence too, sometimes just the first): Take notes on what you read, sentence by sentence or chunk by chunk (but only on general material! never on the specifics); do not try to read too much and take notes, you will miss out on info that may be important. When you take notes make sure they are brief. Only then do you look at the answer choices and compare the various answer choices to yours. You will usually be able to eliminate most of the choices. When left to the last 2 or so, look at the differences in nuances between them. This should give you a fairly good idea of what they want. Remember, your answer is the correct one!

As for specific questions, it's the same idea. Look at the question, go find your answer and write the answer down. The difference is that the maximum that you should read is 2 or 3 sentences from the area you are directed to or which you have found yourself. Again, one sentence at a time, write down some notes and compare with the answer choices.

When comparing answer choices, whether for RC or CR, if too long then just go information chunk by information chunk (split the sentence up!); if only one part is wrong then the whole answer choice is wrong. Checking your answers in this way helps students avoid mistakes.

The main thing is to take those extra few seconds to make sure you have understood what you have read. Most people think that writing notes wastes time. However, this is not the case; in fact, the opposite occurs : The better you become at note taking and filtering out info you do not need, the faster you will be and the LESS you will need to go back and consult the text repeatedly.

Altogether, these are general guidelines. Every question has its own technique and its own set of possible traps which I cannot obviously go into, but the above reading guidelines are for study skills generally and psychometric exams particularly.

And yes, as others have observed getting several answers wrong in a row brings your mark down as does making it obvious that you are guessing the last few questions.

Hope this helps.

odannyboi wrote: Hmm.. I'll give it a try (I skim when reading this type of advice.. it seems common sense "An incorrect answer will STRENGTHEN a weaken question"... DUH).

Trust me, there are more to the book than stating the obvious. There was a period of time before I got "it," and I couldn't figure out why certain answers were incorrect. After going through the CR bible thoroughly, I finally understood why those answers are incorrect and how to identify those incorrect answer types.

Hi Isaac,

Thanks for your insight. I'm going to continue working on reading comprehension and building stamina on the verbal section of the exam. I know from here on out, I need to ensure that I complete the AWA's for every practice I take. Second, given that my verbal score has ranged from 29->40 (this was on GMAT prep after taking it nearly 5 times) on my practice exams, there has not been any consistency prior to the real exam, allowing me to walk in with confidence. I still have 2 fresh Manhattan GMAT exams, and in addition I have not taken the first 4 in almost 3 months, so hopefully repeats won't trigger the correct answer in my memory. I have about 3 weeks before the real exam, so I'm hoping by then I can figure out what's going wrong and fix it. I received the results from my first two attempts and I got a 5.5 on the AWA for both exams. Typically, verbal has not been a huge problem for me in the past, but I have to say this one has really taken the life out of me. Since I've already taken the exam twice, I feel like I only have one more real chance to take it before ad com starts questioning my ability. I've decided that I won't take this last exam until I'm 110% ready and walk in knowing that I'm at the right level to score 700+, not sure when that will happen, but I sure hope it will! I've put in almost 5 months now, if I have to put in another month or so I'm willing to do that, and worse case potentially even push of applications till next year. I really appreciate the advice, if there is anything else you suggest I do in the next few weeks please let me know.

Regards

Whoa! Ron,that was an incredibly amazing answer. I admire your patience while writing such detailed answers and also the insights you provide in your posts. What I also admire about you is that instead of providing answers on ten different threads, you give a killer reply to one post now and then ,but you make sure that the answer is gloriously amazing .Seriously, if there were one man on earth to be anointed as the "GOD of the GMAT", that person would invariably be RON PUREWAL!
Hats off to you!
I gotta ask you a question . After all these years of being in the "GMAT world", what keeps you going ? I mean you would have possibly explored each small bit about the exam,questions ,strategies etc.

Nice to hear from you ! You(and your posts) are an inspiration to us who try to help out others looking for advices here on the forum. Though we'd obviously be not able to give the kind of insights your pour in your posts, but then at least we can learn from you and help out others through the learning. Thanks a ton! \m/