I just Beat The GMAT!

Hi guys,
I'm posting to express how deeply disappointed I am. I can't understand what went wrong today. I scored 710 on the GMATprep test yesterday and today I scored 600 on the real one. Even if I had a bad day, that difference is too big!

I am too stressed over my score. I was aiming to score around 700. In worst case scenario I could have dealt with a 650 - 660 but this has really discouraging.

I have serious misgivings about my verbal section. I scored 29!, that is so low! I actually thought that I did pretty well. I'm thinking about asking princeton to check the correction of that part. Is that possible? does anybody know about any similar case or correction errors?


Any suggestions of what I should do???

Thank you!

I did not know this much wide difference could come up. How many Practice tests did you take before your GMAT? Did you score consistently in all the tests or you took only one test before the exam as mentioned. If thats the case, then there are chances that a you can score low. Because you will come to know how you perform only when you keep taking practice tests. Sometimes it can occur in the reverse too, and there are examples in the forum itself right here. People scoring less in practice test have scored better. Try to analyze how you gave the exam and your probable weak points that you think might have lead to your lower score.

That is sad news. It can be hard to go down that much.

You have mentioned Princeton. I assume you meant GMAC. There never are correction errors. The algorithm is solid. But if you are 100% confident that something went wrong with your test, you can try approaching GMAC. But let me tell you, it is not going to be easy.

Give yourself 3 months and give the test again. (I am!)

If not, based on other parts of your profile, you can see whether you are a good fit in any school. If yes, then dont worry about the GMAT again.

All the best.

(If I may deviate, this post would be better off in the GMAT strategy or similar forums.)

Thank you very much for your advice!!

Well, I am not 100% sure that something went wrong, probably it was just me that had the answers wrong or just had a bad day. I am not going to pretend that the whole gmat algorithm is wrong because I had a bad result. It was just a feeling, I was pretty confident that I did pretty well in the verbal so I am shocked by such a low score.

Also there was one question in my quantitative, I think it was the second one, in which I couldn't see what the variables were. I asked the supervisor to come check if she was able to distinguish whether it was an "x" or a "k". She wasn't able to tell either, so I had to skip the question because I was wasting too much time figuring out. One of my problems with the quant is that in the end I ran out of time and I had to guess some questions, partially because I started to feel more pressure after knowing I had to skip the second question. Can a wrong response on the second question cause a big difference in my final score? Since it is a CAT I guess it is not the same to have wrong one of the last questions than the second one! Is that enough to invalidate a score?

I'd like to study a couple of months and crack the test to get rid of any doubt but the thing is that I don't have much time. I can just study one or two more weeks since I already started my application process and I have to meet the deadline. I can tell I didn't expect to have such a bad performance. So my last chance is to take the exam next month.

What do you think?

I certainly feel that many mistakes in first few questions leads to low score. Just to give you some comparision points.

In my GMAT prep I made total 11 mistakes out of these I made 5 mistakes in first 11 questions. Result was Q44.

A friend of mine got total 14 questions wrong. Only 2 wrong in first 20. He got quant score of 48.

This strongly suggests that first 15-20 questions are very very critical to your score.