GMAT Verbal & Essays

Hi,

I took my GMAT exam yesterday and got a 660 (Q49, V31).

My background is - Indian Female (24), Work ex - 2 yrs. School Academics - Really Good. Undergraduate - Engineering with a good GPA (from one of India's top 20 colleges)and some decent extra curricular activities.
I really want to apply this year and wish to be enrolled in a program starting 2014 Fall (US B schools).

Since my work ex is pretty low, I am planning to retake the GMAT. But I have the following questions:
1) I would need another 2 months for preparing and improving my score, will that leave me enough tie to work on my applications this year?

2) Hoping I get a decent score the second time, will it be a disadvantage to have gotten the score on a second attempt?

3) Since I have exhausted a lot of material already (I used 60-Day GMAT Guide for this attempt and already gave each GMAT prep 4 times) I am not sure how would I be able to measure my improvement.


I also need some advise on how can I improve my score. My verbal is really bad. My problem is that almost all the wrong answers I mark appear right to me. This is mostly the case with CR and RC. I am not sure why am I not able to improve on my Verbal Score.

Please Help!!

Hi swatigulati - you posted this a week ago but let's see if we can still provide some answers to your questions - we're not experts on the GMAT so probably can help across the board but we do have some input for you.

First off - the 660 isn't a bad score, it's just too low for the best MBA schools, so two things: 1) congrats on doing so well on the quant!! and b) it's good to see that you're planning to retest.

It's tough to do GMAT prep and essays at the same time, so we are a bit concerned with your timing. However, getting a higher score will make more options available to you, so it's much preferred to delay your apps to Round 2 if you have to, and present a higher GMAT with them. If you can still manage to get everything done by Round 1 then that's certainly an advantage, but a bigger advantage will be a higher score.

The good news is that you'll be able to bump your total higher pretty dramatically with an improvement on the verbal side. You could easily break 700 if you increase the verbal by just a handful more points (e.g., 49Q / 35V = 700).

There is no downside for you in retesting. Taking the test one more time - or even two more times if you had to - will not adversely affect your profile.

We're not able to recommend any specific study guides but you might want to look into some of the free offerings that are now available - both Economist GMAT and Veritas Prep have a free 7-day subscription to their online products. Maybe you can sign up for one or both of those? Obviously those companies would prefer if people pay for the whole thing! But it's a resource to consider and the online versions tend to be reasonably priced if you decide to do the whole program.

Hope this helps at least a bit. Mostly we wanted to encourage you - your first test wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things, and we're sure you can do better next time! Please keep us posted and good luck with it!

EssaySnark