Devastated again

parmarnavdeep wrote:Hi all,
I gave my gmat yesterday and got only 530.It was poorer than my last score 550.It was a shock to me as i was doing pretty well in the prep's. I got 660 in Gmat prep 1 and 660 in gmat prep 2.
After i finished my essays i was quiet relaxed and finshed my quant on positive note.
Even though i guessed 3-4 questions which i couldn't get the answer. Just the day before i prepared myself mentally to do atleast these two things

1. Never skip any question.

2. Think and solve the questions no random guesses.

Worked well for the quant but just as i started the verbal, I got some tough SC questions which kind of distracted me and I thought i did it wrong ...and from there on i could n't understand the RC passage and could n't focus and at last lost concentration.
I had prepared myself for this kind of situation so made the grids and tried omitting the wrong answers and then choosing the correct choice. But on that day it did n't work. Mistakes i could have done ..1) I never practicized the AWA's in any prep.
2) As i said i lost focus after the 5-6 question and really could n't recover from that..Please suggest what can i do right for next exam??

Hello Parmarnavdeep,
Learning from your mistakes is of upmost importance so going back through what you did is critical. How long did you spend in between exams? Did you really review the areas that you were weak in? Did you review your strengths?

Also, doing practice exams in the exact same manner as the actual test is also very important. The essays may not be the most important thing to admissions committees, but they definitly need to be practiced because they use mental energy and therefore make the rest of the test more difficult because stamina starts to become an issue. Take full length practice tests and I bet that you'll see that some of the mistakes that you make are caused by just being tired at the end.

Finally, you said that you didn't want to skip any questions. While it's true that you shouldn't blind guess on any question, there are times when you need to cut you loses, make an educated guess, and move on. Almost no one does every question completely.

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