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No Improvement on Quant; Verbal Lower Than Practice Tests

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No Improvement on Quant; Verbal Lower Than Practice Tests

by TULOSAB3 » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:45 pm
Where I Currently Stand:

Today marks my fifth time sitting for the GMAT exam and, once again, I've left the testing center unsatisfied with my performance. This is my fifth actual GMAT in roughly two years and I'm very frustrated that I may never conquer this exam. Over the past two to three months, I have spent my time diligently reviewing content and taking practice exams. I managed to improve by Verbal Score from an average of V30 to my all-time best of V35. Quant, on the other hand, has been very difficult for me as I have not been able to break through the Q38-Q39 mark.

Test Scores:

Actual GMAT Exam (Aug 10, 2015): Q39/V31
MGMAT Mock Exam 3 (Aug 1,2015): Q40/V35
MGMAT Mock Exam 2(Jul 28, 2015): Q39/V29
MGMAT Mock Exam 1 (Jul 7, 2015): Q42/V31


Study Habits:

- 2-3 hour sessions of study after work
- Read through MGMAT study guides a few months ago
- Kept a study log of problematic topics for me
- Spend roughly 10-20 minutes reviewing problems that I do not understand
- Took one timed practice exam every two weeks

Background:

- Hispanic Male (Moved to US in early 90's and English is my second language)
- Grew up in household where parents did not speak English
- Parent never attended college
- Degree from Liberal Arts School in NE with double major in Finance/Economics
- Six ears work experience (3 Years in IB & 3 years in Corp. Development)
- Currently working approximately 60-hours per weeks
- Study GMAT for 10-12 hours per week
- Minimal issues with real-work quantitative problems in the workplace

Biggest Issues

- GMAT Timing
- I think I have a good understanding of the content and generally feel pretty good about my answers on the mock exams and actual exams (only to find that the majority of them are wrong)
- At this point, I'm very frustrated because I have put the time into study for this exam, however, my scores do not reflect all of the effort I put into my studies
- Feeling burnt out
- Not sure what to do next (I would like to improve at least attain a 670 in order to be considered for some of the top-15 MBA programs in the US)

I would be greatly appreciative if someone could help give me some guidance as to how I can improve my Quant score. I will continue to work on my Verbal strategies to improve and maintain my average verbal score around the 80th percentile.

I have promised myself to continue working hard to overcome these difficulties on Quant. I'm not going to let this exam continue to get the best of me.
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by [email protected] » Mon Aug 10, 2015 4:32 pm
Hi TULOSAB3,

Can you post each of your Official GMAT scores (including the Overall Score and the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores) and the approximate date that you took each?

I'd like to know a bit more about your recent studies and your timeline:
1) What materials did you use?
2) Did these materials differ from your prior attempts or were they the same materials?

3) Have you set another Test Date?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School?

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Rich
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by TULOSAB3 » Mon Aug 10, 2015 6:35 pm
Hi Rich,

Thanks for the response. Here are my last four scores:

- Dec 2014: 590; Q42/V31
- Aug 2014: 600; Q40/V33
- Aug 2013: 580; Q39/V31
- May 2013: 530; Q35/V28

1) I used Official Guide book for both PS-DS Quant and kept an error log. I read through all MGMAT's study guides twice. Also used MGMAT's mock CAT exams to work on timing. In all cases, I would review questions that I got wrong.
2) Prior to purchasing the MGMAT books, I only used the OG review guides for Quant and Verbal.
3) I have not yet set up another test date. However, I am motivated to continue the quest to improve my overall score.
4) Interested in applying to Business School in Round 2.
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by [email protected] » Mon Aug 10, 2015 8:33 pm
Hi TULOSAB3,

Your last 3 Official GMAT scores show that you're essentially approaching this Test in the exact same way each time. Thus, "your way" of doing things will probably continue to get you a score right around 600. To raise your score to 670+ range, you're going to have to make some adjustments to how you "see" (and respond to) the GMAT. The good news is that you can pick up those points in a variety of ways (and you have the opportunity to pick up points in BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections). The bad news is that you've likely developed some 'bad habits' during your studies - and it will take some time to get you out of those bad habits and into new "good habits."

With the Round 2 deadlines, you still have plenty of time to study and take the GMAT.

On Test Day, did you have problems finishing any of the sections on time? Did you have to rush (and guess on a bunch of questions ) just to finish? Did you leave any questions unanswered?

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by MartyMurray » Mon Aug 10, 2015 8:59 pm
In a way you nailed the issue when you said that you have studied the content and taken practice exams.

So you learned the content, but not how to play the game. Then to practice you mostly just jumped into the game to see how many questions you can get right in 75 minutes per section.

Where in the process did you really spend time learning to get right answers though?

Not anywhere I can see.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that only on a limited basis have you practiced GMAT questions on an untimed basis.

I have seen someone increase his score by close to 100 points in a few weeks mostly by doing one thing, doing practice questions on an untimed basis and seeking to get most of them right.

Here's what happens.

People preparing for the GMAT often learn a bunch of stuff. Then they feel that to a degree they have prepared, and they start banging out questions, taking two minutes each.

What's wrong with that? When you only give yourself two minutes, you may never really give yourself a chance to learn how to figure out the right answers. You just do the questions quickly, come what may, and then you get them wrong or right and go to the explanations to see what someone else would have done.

That's not what the GMAT is about though. Rocking the GMAT is not about learning 1000 explanations. Rocking the GMAT is also not about just knowing a bunch of "content". The GMAT tests your ability to come up with ways to get to answers, and while you can apply concepts and while you can learn by seeing explanations, by learning concepts and reading explanations you don't really ever learn to hack hack hack your way to right answers, doing whatever it takes.

So if I am right about this, my suggestion to you is to go to a question bank and start doing problems slowly, taking even a half hour or more to do one problem, if that's what it takes to get to a right answer. Really seek to see all the angles, and seek to be accurate in your work, and seek to get right answers one after the other.

When you can do strings of problems slowly and get 85 - 100 percent of them right, THEN you will be ready to start speeding up.

For quant, you can practice that way using the question bank here. https://bellcurves.com/ Just go to the GMAT section and set up a practice account. Not all of the questions are just like the ones on the GMAT and some of the explanations could be better, but you can get a LOT of good practice by working on the quant problems in each category.

For verbal, find another resource, maybe the Veritas Question Bank, and do something similar. Some test prep company verbal questions are not that tight. So you probably won't get 100% of them right, no matter how careful you are, but you can learn to get the vast majority of them right.

If you don't get them right on an untimed basis, then you need to figure out what you have to do differently in order to get them right.

I am sure you can score much higher and hit your target. As Rich said, you just need to see the test differently, and one way to do that is to slow way down and really seek to see what's going on.
Marty Murray
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by ceilidh.erickson » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:05 pm
You mentioned that you've read the strategy guides and done problems from the OGs, but you didn't mention anything about doing practice problems by topic. It's one thing to read about parallelism, for example, but it's much more productive to read about parallelism, then DO a set of 8-10 parallelism questions in a row, so you get a sense of variations on the same theme. Get mastery of individual topics one at a time, then use practice tests as a mixed set.

Your in-depth review of individual problems is good, but you need more - you need deep content mastery, which comes from practicing and reviewing topic by topic.

Use the Mprep Navigator to search problems by topic and track all of your data: https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/stor ... resources/
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by TULOSAB3 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:22 pm
I was really disappointed after my performance yesterday, but reading through everyone's feedback and recommendations has really motivated me to focus and work on those areas that need improvement.

Rich,

Thanks again for your responses. I agree with you. I will need to use a different strategy in my studies and figure out what my "bad habits" are at this point. Ceilidh makes a great point below - I think not studying "by topic" could be one of the reasons why I'm not making progress.

Furthermore, I'll need to somehow deconstruct the way I approach the quant problems and slow down. For instance, during my practice sessions and actual tests, I tend to rush into solving the questions quickly without fully identifying what topic(s) the question is testing.

During my last three actual GMAT attempts, I have not experienced issues with timing on either section. Reason being: I've programmed my mind to try to work out a Quant solution in about 1 min 30 seconds; if I do not come up with the right answer, I'll just try to eliminate some answers and try to make an educated guess. On the other hand, timing was an issue during my mock exams so I made sure not to let that happen on the test date.

Marty,

Thanks for responding to my post. You're exactly right; I've become fixated on doing as many problems (giving my best answer in under two minutes) as I can in one to two hours then reviewing the answers and making some mental notes. However, when it comes down to answering the problems on the actual test, I feel like I would need way more than five minutes in order to correctly solve the problem (in some cases).

I reviewed my error log earlier this morning and I see that my accuracy rates on most Quant topics are between 50% and 60%. My understanding of the Quant content may be one of my issues as well.
Thanks for recommending Bellcurves.com and Veritas Verbal question bank. I'll check them both out.

Ceilidh,

Thanks for responding to my post. Very strong observation; my study sessions have not included in-depth practices "by topic" in at least a few months. Most recently, I have been strictly going through problems in the OG and taking practice exams. When it comes down to reviewing my answers, my mind is all over the board. Because of that, I feel like some of the Quant topics have become blurred.

General Question:
Since my accuracy is sub-60% on Quant topics, do you all believe that it would be best for me to read through my Quant study guides once again? Or should I turn the timer "off" and work on improving accuracy by focusing on deriving the correct answer by topic?

-TuLoSab3
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by MartyMurray » Tue Aug 11, 2015 8:21 pm
I say you should definitely do the latter, turn off the clock and do questions topic by topic, basically becoming an expert in each topic.

It may be that your only use of the guides at this point is for reference. If you are working on a topic and are relatively clueless about how to answer a question, then you could refer back to the guide to get some ideas.

You need to learn to work your way to right answers.

As a matter of fact, here is the type of extreme I went to.

I would see a problem and have no clue how to get the answer, but I would not look at the explanation. Instead I would make the problem into a research project. If, for instance, it were a coin flip problem I would look around for information on how to handle coin flip problems and learn all about them. Then I would go back to the problem and solve it.

I wanted to as much as possible duplicate the experience that one goes through in getting right answers on the test - see problem, consider how to solve it, apply concepts and get answer.

If you look at explanations all the time, you don't get used to that experience. Often when preparing I would spend a half hour or more working on one problem, especially if I basically knew all the fundamentals related to solving it. I mean if an equilateral triangle were in a circle and I needed to somehow get from the side of the triangle to the area of the circle, I would realize that I know all about triangles and circles. So the real issue was my skill in figuring out how to get to a particular answer. If that problem took falling asleep with it not done and working on it more the next day, that's what it took. Better than looking at the explanation.

I got used to doing exactly what the GMAT is testing your skill in doing, figuring out a way to get an answer, whatever it takes.

That goes for verbal too.

For quant, do check out that BellCurves question bank. You start off taking 10 minutes to get a right answer in a particular topic, and then by the time you do 60 questions in that one topic, you are getting them right in two minutes. You get your hit rate to the point where you are getting 90 - 100% right and then you go to the next topic. Do that with every topic there and you are pretty much going to score Q48 - Q51.

Be like a kid who plays a video game until he gets the highest possible score pretty much every time. Other kids don't even come close, but he knows every angle etc. That attitude and approach work like a charm.

For verbal use that Veritas Question Bank or something else and do something similar. Test prep company verbal questions often have issues. So probably you won't achieve a 90 - 100% hit rate, because with test prep company verbal what's right is often debatable. Still, you could achieve maybe an 80 - 90% hit rate.

If you don't get 85% right untimed, what do you expect will happen on the test? For reference, 75% right in verbal can generate a score somewhere between the 20's and the upper 30's, depending on how the right answers are distributed.

Check out this article too.

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/understand ... rformance/

The bottom line is this. Stop giving yourself an out with the timer and learn to get long strings of right answers. After you have done that, if necessary you can figure out how to speed up.
Marty Murray
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by [email protected] » Wed Aug 12, 2015 8:41 am
Hi TULOSAB3,

There's a big difference between working fast and working efficiently. Based on what you've described, you've been focusing on trying to work fast - and THAT is likely costing you a lot of points. Many questions that you'll face in the Quant section of the GMAT cannot be solved in 90 seconds (and certain questions require upwards of 3 minutes); if you're truly attempting to get each question done in 90 seconds (and if you can't, then you eliminate answers and guess), then this approach is absolutely going to limit how high you can score in the Quant section. This is one of the 'bad habits' I was talking about.

On your last CAT...
How many Quant questions did you get wrong because of a silly/little mistake?
How many Verbal questions did you 'narrow down to 2 choices', but still get wrong?

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by ceilidh.erickson » Thu Aug 13, 2015 9:53 am
TULOSAB3 wrote: Thanks for responding to my post. Very strong observation; my study sessions have not included in-depth practices "by topic" in at least a few months. Most recently, I have been strictly going through problems in the OG and taking practice exams. When it comes down to reviewing my answers, my mind is all over the board. Because of that, I feel like some of the Quant topics have become blurred.

General Question:
Since my accuracy is sub-60% on Quant topics, do you all believe that it would be best for me to read through my Quant study guides once again? Or should I turn the timer "off" and work on improving accuracy by focusing on deriving the correct answer by topic?

-TuLoSab3
Here's what I recommend: take a topic that's particularly weak. Maybe for you it's exponents, for example. Use Navigator to find all of the Easy and Moderate exponents problems in the OG, and do them as a set. Afterwards, review them all in a row, thinking about patterns and connections. Then re-read the exponents chapter in the guide, and the concepts/rules that you got wrong will stand out more starkly, and will be easier to remember.

Review 2 or 3 topics like this, then do a mixed set to keep your brain flexible.

Most students make the mistake of reading all the guides first as if they were plodding through a novel, and then doing all of the practice problems. They usually forget a large portion of what they've read before they have time to practice it.

It's actually much more effective (and there is a lot of learning science to back this up) to practice first, allow yourself to "fail" a little bit, and then read the theory while the memory of your mistakes is fresh. Then, return to the same problems a few days or weeks later, and see if your knowledge is better the second time around.
Ceilidh Erickson
EdM in Mind, Brain, and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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