Doing well on OG but horrible on mock?

Hi yousufa,

Practice CATs are great "measuring devices", meaning that they give you a measure of your ability at that point in time. They don't inherently make you a better test taker. You could take a CAT every day for a month and NEVER IMPROVE. This means that the bulk of your study time should be spent on practice problems, drills, etc. and then you periodically take a CAT to measure your progress.

Your "problem" might not actually be content-related. There are any number of factors that play a role in your performance, including: fatigue/endurance, organization, pacing, physical/psychological issues regarding how you take the test and how you deal with the clock, etc.

How far along are you in your studies? What materials are you using? What have your other practice test scores been?

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

yousufa wrote:.
I just did over 20 questions from each section of the verbal OG and got between 0-3 wrong in each section.

Keep in mind that the questions in the OG are arranged in order of ascending difficulty. So, good results on the first 20 questions does not necessarily show proficiency with the content, while good results on the last 20 questions indicates some proficiency.

Having said that, if you answered only half of the questions and still got a verbal score of 31 (60th percentile), you must have done well on the questions that you DID answer. If that's the case, you may just have a time-management issue. I suggest that you use a Milestone Chart to keep you on track. This is covered in our free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244.

Once you have a time-management strategy in place, I suggest that you take another practice test and see if this makes a difference.

Cheers,
Brent