GMAT Strategy

When I see a large discrepancy between practice tests and your real test score, I have a few questions:

- did you struggle with anxiety during the test? You frame of mind matters a great deal. If you felt like you were panicking, that would impede your ability to think clearly.

- how was your timing? Did you run out of time, or finish ahead of time?

- did you take all of your practice tests under realistic timing conditions, including the essay and Integrated Reasoning? If you were practicing with unrealistic conditions, then it would be very difficult to balance your time well on the real test.

- did you only take those 2 practice tests? If so, that's not enough practice.

Hi nsuen,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day didn't go as well as planned. When these types of score drops occur, the two likely "causes" involve either something that was unrealistic during practice or something that was surprising (or not accounted for) on Test Day.

If you can answer a few questions, then we should be able to figure this out:

When you took your CATs:
1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)?
2) Did you take them at home?
3) Did you take them at the same time of day as your Official GMAT?
4) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, skip sections, take longer breaks, etc.)?
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once?

Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Test, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. Unfortunately, raising a 420 to a 600+ in just a month's time will be somewhat difficult.

1) What is the latest that you can send in a GMAT score to the School that you applied to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi nsuen,

Test Day is a rather specific 'event' - the details are specific and they matter, so you have to train as best as you can for all of them. The more realistic you can make your CATs, the more likely the score results are to be accurate. The more you deviate, the more "inflated" your practice scores can become - and that's what happened here. By retaking CATs, taking the CATs at home, taking them at a different time of day, etc., you weren't properly training for the FULL GMAT 'experience.'

Thankfully, this is a relatively easy set of problems to fix. The big question now is "how long will it take you to properly get 'used to' taking the full GMAT?" You'll certainly need a new set of practice CATs to work with and you have to put in the necessary time to train your brain (and body) for the FULL GMAT. Given what you've already described, I think that you would need another 2-3 months of consistent, guided study to score 600+.

From your post, it sounds like you've already realized that you might have to wait to apply next year. While I'm sure that that idea doesn't make you happy, it's the logical way to look at this whole situation. As such, you can absolutely take a week 'off' from studying. When you're ready to restart your studies, I have some suggestions about how you can proceed.

I do have one more pair of questions about your Official GMAT:
1) When you said you 'barely finished' the Quant section, do you remember how many questions you had to rush through at the end?
2) In the Verbal section, how many questions did you leave unanswered?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

nsuen wrote:When I was taking the exam, I felt like I did not know any of the math questions but I thought verbal was okay. However, looking at the score, I did worse on verbal.

One of the paradoxical features of the GMAT is that feeling that the questions are easy can sometimes mean that things are going poorly.

Here's what I mean: if, for example, you got the first 2 questions wrong, the GMAT scoring algorithm would have presented you with an easier question for question #3. One of the problems with easier questions is that we may sometimes answer them a little too quickly (since they seem easy, we don't really focus on the question) and sometimes, in our haste, make careless mistakes or miss key pieces of information. If this happened to you on question 3 and you got it wrong, question 4 would have been even easier, and so on.

I'm not certain that this is what happened to you, but I have heard very similar stories from other students.

The good thing is that you have already demonstrated that your GMAT skills are better than 420, so achieving a higher score (even 600) on your next attempt is a reasonable expectation.

I suggest that you take more practice tests to work on your test-taking skills AND help identify remaining areas of weakness. While CAREFULLY analyzing your practice tests, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:

1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options.

If your test-taking skills are holding you back, then you need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... video/1244

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/articles/avo ... teaks-gmat

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Brent