GMAT Strategy

Received a PM asking me to respond.

The penalty for not answering a question is 3 percentile points (per question). So the penalty you received would have depended upon the number of questions you left blank.

Question for you: do you take the essays when you take your practice tests? It's really important to do so - you need practice building stamina. A lot of people don't do the essays in practice and then the verbal score drops on the real thing because our energy drops if we're not prepared for the full length of the test. So that may also have been a factor.

You mention that you struggle with RC. What materials are you using that teach you how to get better at RC? (OG doesn't qualify - it doesn't teach you HOW to get better.) If you aren't currently using anything, you need to identify a source (it will come from a test prep company) that teaches you how to get better at RC: how to understand and organize the info, how to answer the questions, how to identify wrong answers more easily, etc.

Some ideas for RC are at the below link; if you like this approach, you can find more in the MGMAT RC book. If you don't like this approach, ask around to see what others like for RC, or go to a bookstore and browse through the different books till you find something you like.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/verbal-strategy-t14035.html

You may also want to do this for CR - you said it's "okay," which sounds better than RC, but maybe not great.

I wouldn't spend more than 2 hours on a weeknight after you've been working. The work you do has one goal: get certain things into your long-term memory effectively so that you can recall those things when you need them. If you do too much after a long day at work, that time isn't going to be very efficiently used because you won't be encoding things into your long-term memory well enough.

In fact, if I need to study anything, I study for 90 minutes to 2 hours at a stretch - that's it. After about 2 hours, my brain starts getting saturated, so I stop. If I want to study more on that same day, I do something else for at least 2 hours before I start studying again. (That gives your brain time to process the info into long-term memories; this actually does continue to happen after you've stopped actively studying.)

For AWA, take a look at some of the suggestions in the Essays thread here. Once you feel like you've gotten better at this, you can get essays graded by the same computer program that will grade your essays on the real test via the GMAT Write program (offered by the people who make the test; there is a fee for the service). See here: https://www.mba.com/mba/store/ProductInfo?SKU=1623X

After you've worked with your new RC (and maybe CR) materials for a little while, come back on if you still feel like you're having trouble making progress and we'll try to help!

I prefer to write as I read each sentence, not the whole paragraph. Sometimes I read two sentences before I write, because one sentence wasn't enough for me to fully understand. But remember our overall goal: to get the basics down on the *first* read-through. If I read a paragraph and then go back to write stuff down, I'm reading it twice, not once.

I personally don't use key words at all. This is why: I'm only going to get 3 or 4 questions, and those questions aren't going to cover everything in the passage. I don't know which words are going to show up in the questions. So I could be writing down a LOT of stuff that's unnecessary.

Instead, I just go for the main ideas / overall topics in each paragraph, and I use keywords in a different way. When I get a question, first I ask myself (based on my outline) which paragraph is most likely the best paragraph to answer this question. Then, I see if there's a keyword in the question and I use that to scan the paragraph to find the right text.

Finally, you do NOT want 100% accuracy - you pretty much can't get that throughout the whole section. Most people are getting only about 60% of the questions right in a section; even at the 90+ percentile (within one section), people are only getting about 80% of questions right. You are not going to get 100% of them right - the test is just going to keep giving you harder stuff until you either (a) get them wrong or (b) spend so much time that you get other stuff wrong later because you run out of time.

You want to get right the ones that you can get right within the given timeframe, and you want to make your best educated guess (within the given timeframe!) on the ones that you can't answer within that time. (This applies to quant, too, by the way.)

Also, timing guidelines are only 1 min for general (main idea, tone, passage structure) questions, and 1.5 to 2 min on specific questions (timing will vary a bit based upon complexity of subject matter and question).

The big difference between the two tests? You didn't take the AWA on the 2nd one, and then your verbal score got a lot better. That's not surprising - if you don't spend an hour on the essays before the verbal, then you're a lot more fresh when you get to the verbal.

The valid test score for you at this point is the 620, not the 690, unfortunately - because the 690 test did not mimic what you will have to do on the real test (namely: the essays).

If you don't yet have the verbal score that you want, don't throw away those official questions. You haven't actually learned what you need to learn from them, so moving to other questions (that aren't even as good as the official questions!) won't help you much either.

Most of your learning comes from the review and analysis you do after you have already tried the problem - not while you're doing the problem in the first place. See this thread (that I posted earlier today) for more ideas about what to ask yourself when analyzing problems: https://www.beatthegmat.com/how-should-i ... 44088.html (see my post from today - 16 Sep)

Lessons to learn:
1) take practice tests under full official conditions; otherwise, your score may be artificially inflated by advantages that you would never have during the real test

2) Don't take practice tests two days in a row. Nothing has really changed in your ability to perform, so the "new" data isn't actually new.

Re: essays, GMAC does offer an essay-grading service (called GMAT Write, https://www.mba.com/mba/store/ProductInfo?SKU=1623X). They will grade your essay using the same computer software that will be used to grade your real GMAT essay. (That's only half of the official grade, though - a real person also grades the essays on the real test.)

Ideally, your practice test scores should be in the same range as your goal score before you take the test - so, if they're not, and if you have the flexibility to postpone, then you should do so. (And it sounds like you do have that flexibility, should a postponement be necessary.)

Most schools do not care if students take the test up to 3 times over a relatively short period of time (within 6-12 months). [The rules are a bit different if you took it twice more than two years ago and want to take it again now - then you can probably take it at least twice more without any raised eyebrows.]

GMAT scores are valid for 5 years, so if you take the exam in 2009, the score is good until that same date in 2014. So I think you're okay.