I just Beat The GMAT!

Hi All,

I regularly referred this forum to clear my doubts. I gave my GMAT last Thursday and scored 620 where as on my practice was consistently above 620 as given below:

GMAT Prep 1:660 (Q:49,V:31)
KNEWTON TEST:670 (Q:44,V:38)
Princton Review:670 (Q:47,V:36)
GMAT Prep 1 Retake:680 (Q:49,V:33)
MGMAT CAT 1:590 (Q:44,V:29)
MGMAT CAT 2:650 (Q:46,V:33)
MGMAT CAT 3:700 (Q:50,V:35)
MGMAT CAT 4:670 (Q:47,V:34) (Timing Issue in Verbal & Quant)
MGMAT CAT 5:660 (Q:47,V:33) (Timing Issue in Verbal & Quant)

GMAT Prep 2:680 (Q:50,V:31) (Day before the exam)

I referred OG 12 & MGMAT SC & CR & RC guides during my 2 month preparation.

During the main exam I ran out of time during both sections although I was able to manage the quant without making any guess but in verbal i guessed many question e.g i guess RC question set as was not able to understand RC under pressure.I think pacing was main weakness during the preparation any suggestion to improve the same.

I am planning to retake the GMAT and need your advise on how to start if i have already used the resources such as OG & GMAT Prep & MGMAT CATs

Your status same as me. Even I have scored 620 [Q50, V24] in first chance.
Here is my strategy:
1. Quant 15 min a day
2. Revise SC of MGMAT twice
3. Practice, practice & practice. I did daily 4 hrs of Verbal.

I didn't touch any of practice test for a month.
In last a week, I have done 5 MGMAT tests & all scored 680 to 720.

I am going to give my GMAT at 9th April, hopefully can crash 700.

Hopefully this can help you to plan ahead

same here
I gave my gmat yesterday 620 (Q48 / V29)

needed to cross 700 mark.....quants was OK.....
I struggled in verbal a lot.
din understand rc.
in pressure could not solve CR.
I want to give the exam again....
what should i follow now???
in terms of strategy...

Similar plight here...I scored a 640 Q50 V28...RCs were way too hard...Ate up my time...I am in shock and disbelief...

Hi strider, I can understand your situation...although I was not able to improve my score much (scored 680 - Q49/V34) but i would say that you can definitely improve your score. If you have 2 months with you, I will suggest following things to do:

1) Maximize your accuracy in SC: for this e-gmat was really helpful.The methodology used by them helps you build strong fundamentals for SC. Learn there methodology and apply to set of questions with timing yourself. For this practice you can use 1000SC shared on various forums and use forums like beathegmat or gmatclub or manhattan for the explanation. You dont have to do all 1000 questions but whatever you do try to focus on "WHY THE OPTION IS CORRECT OR WRONG".
Read Economist and try to understand how correct sentences are structured.

2) For CR I would recommend to start practicing with LSAT CR and understand how to tackle different types of questions by going through the explanations provided by KAPLAN (everything is available on internet). And once you are comfortable move to OG, while doing OG one thing you should keep track is the pattern in wrong answer...on real test you find same pattern.

3) For RC I will not be able to help much...as I havent seen any improvement in my RC score...my strategy was to read and understand whole passage and try to figure out the main point etc. and then answer the question. You can use LSAT paper for practice will help you build the stamina to read.


MAIN POINT : TRY TO UNDERSTAND A PATTERN IN CORRECT OR WRONG ANSWER THIS WILL HELP U IN REAL EXAM.

I hope you find these points helpful..

Best of Luck

aimingfor800 wrote:Similar plight here...I scored a 640 Q50 V28...RCs were way too hard...Ate up my time...I am in shock and disbelief...

@aimingfor800
I just saw another post from you where u have mentioned a different score (500)...doesn't look like a typo
just wondering!!!!
https://www.beatthegmat.com/got-badly-be ... 91885.html

SUHAILK wrote:Hi All,

I regularly referred this forum to clear my doubts. I gave my GMAT last Thursday and scored 620 where as on my practice was consistently above 620 as given below:

GMAT Prep 1:660 (Q:49,V:31)
KNEWTON TEST:670 (Q:44,V:38)
Princton Review:670 (Q:47,V:36)
GMAT Prep 1 Retake:680 (Q:49,V:33)
MGMAT CAT 1:590 (Q:44,V:29)
MGMAT CAT 2:650 (Q:46,V:33)
MGMAT CAT 3:700 (Q:50,V:35)
MGMAT CAT 4:670 (Q:47,V:34) (Timing Issue in Verbal & Quant)
MGMAT CAT 5:660 (Q:47,V:33) (Timing Issue in Verbal & Quant)

GMAT Prep 2:680 (Q:50,V:31) (Day before the exam)

I referred OG 12 & MGMAT SC & CR & RC guides during my 2 month preparation.

During the main exam I ran out of time during both sections although I was able to manage the quant without making any guess but in verbal i guessed many question e.g i guess RC question set as was not able to understand RC under pressure.I think pacing was main weakness during the preparation any suggestion to improve the same.

I am planning to retake the GMAT and need your advise on how to start if i have already used the resources such as OG & GMAT Prep & MGMAT CATs

Hello,

Allow me to step in. First, you have to be ready that your real GMAT score may not come as high as your practice score. For instance, during my prep for my last attempts, I constantly scored 740-770 on GMATPrep, but only managed to score 720 on the real test. So, depending on your target score, you need to save some buffer, scoring 20-50pts higher on your practice tests.

Second, while you are free to use any materials available from many test prep companies to equip you with the concepts and strategy, you want to practice your skills only with OG and GMATPrep. The primary reason is, only OG and GMATPrep contain questions whose style resembles that on the real test and you want to as much as possible get exposed to the kinds of questions that you will likely see on the real test.

Finally, it is good that not only can you identify your weakness in Verbal, but also you can drill down to which specific area (RC) that you are struggling with. The bad news is, there is no specific strategy that you can use on RC. Unlike CR and SC, RC does not follow any systematic patterns. The good news is, you can actually plan your strategy based on the types of questions. In RC, you will usually find three major types of questions : General, Detail and Inference. The first thing you need to do is, understand what the passage is trying to convey. You don't need to spend a lot of your time reading and understanding each sentence in the passage, but you don't want to only skim the passage and, as a result, are left with little, if no, comprehension of the author's points. Limit your self to 3 mins maximum to read an RC passage.

When you read each paragraph, you need to be able to identify what it is all about and what it is telling you. Keep reading closely until you get those points on your hand. When you start seeing some details, don't spend as much time as you did before but remember their location so you will not have a hard time to find them later.

Another thing that you should note is, on Detail and Inference, you need to read the questions carefully. Pay attention to every word in the questions, because you need to then locate the part of the passage from which you can imply/answer the questions. Don't quickly justify what the questions ask that you end up guessing the answer from how you feel the passage looks like. You should always be able to relate what the questions ask to any specific section of the passage.

One final piece of advice before I stop is that so many people can tell which one is the correct answer, but only a few, likely to be high scorers, would spend their time ensuring why the other four answer choices are incorrect. If you want to boost your score to 700+, you need to start getting used to not only picking the answer choice that you believe is the correct answer, but also checking why the rest of the answer choices are wrong.

Let me know if you have further questions to clarify

SUHAILK wrote:
3) For RC I will not be able to help much...as I havent seen any improvement in my RC score...my strategy was to read and understand whole passage and try to figure out the main point etc. and then answer the question. You can use LSAT paper for practice will help you build the stamina to read.

I'll second this. When I prepped for verbal, I basically conceded that I wasn't going to improve RC much, so I focused on SC and CR, and by being able to do those questions quicker, it gave me more time to go through the RC passages without feeling rushed...I finished the Verbal section with about 9 min to spare.

My verbal score was 35, not great, but good enough for a 700 when paired with my 49Q.