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Hello,

Two months ago, I took a baseline MGMAT CAT (#2) and scored a 560. After studying all the MGMAT strategy books, and putting in over 300 hours of studying, I just took MGMAT CAT #3 and scored a 530. I dropped almost 20 percentile points in the verbal section, and raised my quant only 10 percentile points (started in 19th percentile, jumped to 29th). I don't understand how I could do worse than the baseline, given that I covered all the strategy books. I should be up near the 700 level by now.

Hi Stockmoose16,

I'm sorry to hear that you did not achieve the score that you wanted on your previous practice exam. However, I would strongly caution against interpreting practice exam scores as absolute markers of your performance on the GMAT. What the practice exams are good for is helping to guide your studies. Hence, if you look at your previous practice exam and see that you are relatively weaker in the Sentence Correction area, you know that you need to work on Sentence Correction techniques and concepts in order to improve.

Did you run out of time on your last practice exam? If you did and left some questions blank, you could have inadvertently trashed your score. The GMAT grades harshly against blank questions, and it's extremely important to pace yourself and complete the section in the time allotted.

What techniques did you employ when you studied? It's not enough to merely read the guides - you need to practice questions in the Official Guides and this doesn't mean simply looking up the right answer in the back of the book. You need to understand why you got a particular problem right or wrong, spending time to deconstruct it into digestible steps that can be applied to other problems on the test as well.

There are a lot of factors that can contribute to your score on practice exams. If you truly want to know, with a good sense of certainty, what you would score on a real GMAT, you should download GMATPrep from mba.com. This practice exam is released by the GMAC, the makers of the GMAT, and is extremely accurate.

Going forward, use the ManhattanGMAT practice exams to help guide your studies rather than take them as an absolute measure of your performance on the exam. Also, understand that achieving a score of 700+ can take a lot of time - there's no tangible number of studying hours you need to complete to achieve the score. Instead, you need to study more effectively by testing your knowledge with real GMAT problems and making sure you understand how you came to your answer.

Hope this helps!

Best,