I just Beat The GMAT!

Hello friends,

I appeared for the GMAT in the last month. I got 420 on the GMAT exam. It is 150 less than my scores of GMAT prep and other cat exams. I will appreciate your help if you could guide me for improving my score.

How I prepared for my GMAT?

I prepared for the GMAT for 4 months full-time (4-5 hours every day with one day break in a week). I am good at Math. So, It was not difficult me to get good score in the math. I was easily getting 40 or more in all my cat exams. I prepared for Math from mgmat guides and those were really helpful. In English, I am non-native English speaker. I face lot of problems while preparing for the verbal. For SC, I was able to get 7 answers correct out of 10. I also prepared for verbal from mgmat guides. For CR, CR is quite difficult part for me. I have learned the rules for CR but rules are not the only thing working for CR. It also requires CR kind of thinking. I think, I am falling behind at that point. I also started learning from CR bible. I was able to finish 11 chapters from CR bible before my GMAT exam. It has helped me but not much. So, In CR questions I was getting 50% answers correct. Same thing happened with me in RC. Only 50% of RC questions I was getting correct in my exams.
The material I used for preparing includes OG 10, OG 12, OG math review, OG verbal review, mgmat guides, Kaplan verbal workbook, Kaplan 800, CR bible.

The CAT exams which I took before my actual GMAT are 5 exams of mgmat, GMAT prep exam (4 times), 2 - Peterson's (Master the GMAT book ) exam

For all the exams, I got the score between 530 and 600. I know, appearing for GMAT prep exam for more than 2 times can give great variation in the score. I was just expecting the score around 550 on my actual GMAT. I have never heard of this kind of big variation in the score. In my cat exams, my minimum score of verbal was 24 and minimum score of math was 40. I got 11 in verbal part and 39 in math part of actual GMAT. I want to improve my verbal score and I am targeting 550 for my actual GMAT. I need your help to improve my verbal. Which books should I use for improving the score of verbal? What can be the best way to prepare for verbal? I have 1.5 months to prepare for my GMAT.

I will appreciate your suggestion/guidance.
Thanks

For the verbal part, all I can say is that you have to read English ferociously. Go to your local library and shred the Economist, National Geographic. Make sure you read all the articles and make sure you understand everything. Try to read English every day. This doesn't mean that you should read english on the internet all day, because the English used on the internet isn't of a very high level.

For content I can only give you advice on the SC, make sure you buy MGMAT SC. This was for me ( a non-native speaker) the best investment for the verbal section.

You say you are strong in math. Try to figure out why you keep hanging around a score of 40.

I think you study way too much by the way.

Good luck.

Your target score seems fairly achievable and I think with 1.5 months of dedicated studying you should be able to get that score. I don't know how did you land up with a 11 on the Verbal section because your English doesn't sound that bad. I think probably the way you prepared the first time around was not correct or probably it was just not your d-day when you appeared for the GMAT. Go through this forum for articles, see how did others prepare and then you can emulate the way which suits your requirement and get going.

Some advice:

I think probably you need to change the way you study a little bit. You are putting in 4 hours a day but I feel you are not using the time to analyze the questions and work on your weaknesses, rather you are trying to complete 'n' number of chapters/questions. If your accuracy is low in SC for example, probably there are some topics in which you are weaker than the others, and you need to figure that out and work on it instead of going through the whole lot. Especially since you say you have only 1.5 month left.

You have gone through a lot of material and I won't suggest any more books. Just revise what you've done, see if you can do a deeper level of analysis on the questions you solve and perhaps try to work on the concepts you are slightly weaker on.