I just Beat The GMAT!

Hi all,

just wrote the gmat today. got a miserable 640 (49Q 28V). I knew i was weak in verbal but 28 is definitely my lowest score. i just don't know what happened...couldn't believe it. I thought the verbal was rather easy and straight forward.

I think my problem was SC. I know i got most of CR correct since that's my strength. For the most of CR questions, i don't think i spent over a minute on any of them. It was that straight forward in my opinion. RC - i didn't find them too difficult either and the subjects were quite comprehensible. but i probably made few mistakes in RC.

SC was a killer though..i always struggled w/ SC and the real test was no different. But i thought i made some good educated choices by using POE and moved on. I finished the verbal w/ 8 minutes to go so bit of bad time management.

Energy was definitely not an issue. I'd have taken the test again if i could after seeing my score.

So, here i am, lost, disappointed, discouraged....but i'm not going to give up and will take the test one more time in a month.

I desperately need some advise. Is there a good verbal prep course i can take? I was looking at Veritas wknd verbal course? any recommendations?

Also, will i get a breakdown of the score in couple wks? i want to find out if SC was my nemesis or something else...

I know many people here has a similar situation as mine. Has anyone actually taken the test again and improved verbal by more than 10 pts? I'm looking for 38-40 on my verbal and i still think it's still within my reach.

Please comment..... thanks.

btw..i'm a native speaker.

you will not get any more brakdown of your score than what you already have.

I took Veritas Wknd. Now, I had strong foundations (especially in V) already. But I would say that some of their structured methods contributed to my 99% in V. Before I took the course I would say I was in the low 80% range. After the course I studied for 3 weeks full time ... but mostly focussed on Q since that was my weak area.

One more comment:
It sounds like you are intending to focus heavily on V. When I studied I also took a one-sided approach focusing heavily on Quant. But I would highly recommend that you continue to do some math practices as well during the next month(not necessarily as many as in V). The last thing you want is to raise your V by 5 points and drop your Q by 3.

The good news is that sentence correction is the easiest to improve of all verbal parts. It's just an issue of memorizing the rules.

Get a good sentence correctino guid and work on them. I am sure you can reduce your errors dramatically.

Thanks guys for your help.

LSB - I think i'm going to take the Verbal wknd course. If it helped you from 80 to 99%, i don't see why it can't help me to reach 80% which is my target. and you're absolutely on the money with the rec to do some math during my prep!! i'll follow what you said and work on math as well, perhaps targeting 50 nxt time. BTW. i can't believe they don't give you a breakdown of the score!!! how the heck am i suppose to improve if i don't know what i did wrong???!!!

gileyal - it's funny how SC should be the easiest to fix but during my 3 months prep, SC was the only thing i worked on and still failed. i'd say i spent 15% on CR/ 5% on RC and the rest on SC. Even with the heavy focus on SC, i just couldn't improve. During my last week of prep though, i thought i saw a huge improvement noticing parallelism, pronouns, etc whereas before i was just playing the guessing game. i exhausted all OG, GMAT Prep, old gmat paper test questions on SC so i don't even have any materials to work on anymore.

At this point, i think verbal course is the only thing that can help me...after all, there must be some critical concept that i'm not getting in verbal that is leading to 48percentile....

After reading so many similar situations as mine on this forum, i started to notice a trend. People that thought the verbal was easy scored really low on the verbal. It must be that we were getting easy questions after missing so many in the beginning. it's weird how everyone had a similar experience where we thought we were doing so well, and BAM, the score punches you in the face!

guess such is life in the gmat world....

I took the test today, I had the exact same experience with the verbal. I thought it was pretty straightforward, and I was expecting a very solid V score. I couldn't believe it when my result came up under 30. I had consistently been scoring around 40 on all of my practice tests.

Keep at it guys and girls... you have it, you just need to put it into practice.

Guys i took my GMAT test 3 weeks ago and i got 19 in verbal....!!! i am not a native speaker but it just can't be 19 !!!
it was straight forward questions and actually i was so relaxed solving them. I had extra 7 minutes remaining ....i expected to get at LEAST 37 ...There is something wrong in the verbal section...

i wish there was something wrong with the verbal...but unfortunately, there isn't. I think the biggest reason for me was that I didn't focus on the first 10 questions. I think this strategy is more important in verbal than quant. I'm giving my test in 3 wks again and this time, i'll spend whatever time necessary to answer the first 10 correct. Besides, if you hurry enough in verbal, you should never run out of time.

just my 2 cents..

I have read so many stories with people scoring a lot lower on the verbal than their expectations. Moreover almost everyone who scored low, found the questions to be easy. Its the same case here with you gmat2010. I really don't know if its the first 10 questions or its something else, but it is definitely scary.

Is it possible that GMAC has made the questions "look" easy but has heavy hidden traps ?

It could be that if someone gets many wrongs in the first few and the rest of the questions on the test come from the easy pool and thus a low score. It could be that the people who score really high in verbal have gotten most of the first 10-15 questions right.

I think it would be a good idea to focus more on the first 15 questions but somehow making sure to complete the test with as little guessing as possible. It is hard to balance, but looks like we got no other choice.

Took Veritas Verbal course over the wknd and I honestly thought the course was waste of my money. Now, if you're just starting to study GMAT, i think it can definately help you. But if you're well into your studies, or attempting for 2nd time around to get 700+, don't waste your time and money here.

The problem i had was that i assumed the wknd course would be somewhat advanced since it has to go over the whole verbal in 16hrs. But in the class, we went over basic strategy which might help you get over 600 but no where close to 700+. I mean, we spent first 2.5 hours going over the structure of the test....total waste of time...

SC, CR, RC had some good strategies to apply, but pretty similar to what i read in the forum or prep books. Instructor was animated, lively and knowledgeable but never really got into the tough topics.

So, if you're in the early phase, maybe the class can help you. if you're looking for 700+, your money and time can be better spent elsewhere..

GMAT in two weeks!!!

Agree with gmat2010 100% on Vetritas.

I also had troubles with V, scored 28 and on practice CATS never below 38.

I think in my case was mostly 2 issues: was exhausted and thought I did really bad in math (which I didn’t)