GMAT Strategy

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kamathshailesh, I would be happy to help. I'm going to suggest, though, that you start your own thread so that we can keep your situation separate from GMATMadeEasy's (and others). You can copy and paste what you already wrote above into a new thread (and you can also link to this thread if you want, since you said you had similar issues). Then send me a PM (private message) with the link to your thread and we can start a conversation about your situation.

GMATMadeEasy, I'll start a separate reply for you.

Back to GMATMadeEasy.

Yes, it is challenging to score in the 40s in verbal. A 40 is about the 89th percentile - so only 11% of all test-takers are scoring that well or better.

If you do have deadlines in the next month or so, then you don't have much choice. It's best to make sure that the whole application is as great as it can be - you can't afford to concentrate on the GMAT if that weakens the quality of the rest of your application.

If your deadlines are still a ways off or if you decide to postpone for a year, then you can think about taking the test again (if you think that's the right move for you).

Between those two options, I can't tell you what to do. You may want to talk to an admissions counselor to help you brainstorm which direction to go on this; a counselor would have a better idea of what questions to ask and what factors to consider in making the best decision for yourself.

You do mention continuing to have some timing problems on the verbal; you ran out of time on the last couple and had to do the last RC passage too quickly. The likelihood is that you got a number of those problems wrong and that obviously would have impacted your score negatively. I really wish that we could have the data regarding how you did on each question - including how much time you spent - because I'm worried about the way in which you might have tried to fix your timing problem.

I mentioned upthread that it typically takes longer than you had to fix timing problems. What happens a lot of the time is this: people know they're too slow, so naturally they try to speed up on some questions. They feel most comfortable speeding up on questions that they understand / feel comfortable with, so that's where they speed up. On those questions (which they used to get mostly right), they start to make more careless mistakes. They still spend too much time on the "too hard" questions, and they still mostly get those wrong, as they were before. They finish the test on time (or almost on time), but at the expense of questions they might have gotten right, which still keeps their score down.

The questions you actually want to sacrifice are the "too hard" ones - you're mostly getting them wrong anyway, so you want to get them wrong faster. But it takes practice to identify them accurately and deal with them effectively - typically more time than you had. I'm thinking that this might have been part of your problem - in which case, there is reason to believe that you could improve upon your score with adequate work / time. (Though, still, getting to a 40 in verbal would take a lot more than fixing the timing problem.)

Do you think that what I wrote above could apply to you? (About your progress on the timing issues we discussed in the past?)

I'm thinking that you need to continue on with what we discussed before re: fixing your timing issues. That's number 1.

Then we also discussed making sure you knew what to do with respect to your process for each type of verbal question - I linked to a bunch of articles. Did you work on those things? Do you feel like you now have a very clear process for each question type? If you don't, which areas are still problematic?

(There's a new RC article today, by the way: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/07/ ... rc-passage)

Have you also revamped your review process? Are you asking yourself the questions / doing the analysis that I discussed in the "How to analyze a practice problem" article? Are you keeping a log of your errors and doing the appropriate analysis and practice to identify and minimize them?

Those are all the keys to start. I would use that material to learn how to learn, to have a set process, and to analyze (thoroughly) a bunch of OG questions. As you do that, come back and ask questions about specific things - whether strategies, how to fix something, how to interpret some data, how to think about a specific problem, whatever.

Short answer: what we discussed before - but you need more time with it than you gave yourself the last time around.

It sounds like you've got a good plan in general. For verbal, especially, I like working with official questions as much as possible. As hard as we (the test prep people) try, we can't exactly mimic the real test writers on verbal - there's a particular style that can come through based on the specific person who wrote the question. It's much easier to mimic the math.

You've got a ton of SC questions though - OG12, OG11, OG10, Verbal Review 1st and 2nd edition. If you've already used GMATPrep, then you can also so back over those, or even keep taking it to "extract" other verbal questions that you haven't seen before. (Note: if you do this, don't take it as a real test, or rely on the score, because you're going to see repeat questions as you keep re-taking it, but this can be a good way to pull additional new practice Qs out if you've already exhausted the software from a true test-mimic standpoint.)

And remember - just because you've done a problem before and you already know the answer is C, that doesn't mean you're done studying that problem!