Screwed up my GMAT online ! Need help

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Screwed up my GMAT online ! Need help

by Niteen » Mon Sep 07, 2020 1:26 am
Hi guys,

I took my GMAT exam today at 1AM IST. Though the scores have not come yet but I know I have screwed up.

Quants: I was not able to understand the questions at all, still not sure what happened as I was consistently scoring between 48-51 in official mocks. I was completely blank after seeing the first question (which I was able to solve after my exam was over). I don't know why but the first question shook my morale and I became too nervous. When the quant section was over I knew it did not go well.

Verbal: This section is still a mystery to me because of the happenings in last 15 days. When I took my 1st official mock and scored 600 (Q48, V23), I realised I had to work on my Critical Reasoning. Then after few days I took a mock again and scored a 650 (Q49, V28), cool a little improvement. CR and RC still needed a little work. I tried following "read slowly" approach in CR and RC to understand it well and I think it worked as my next non offical mock score was 670 but this time I had screwed up Sentence correction. I visited sentence correction basics, solved about 50-70 OG questions and then took the official mock 2 days before my actual exam and score a 700(Q51, V33) (took it at 1AM as per my booked time). I was elated as out of 14 Sentence Correction questions only 2 were wrong. CR had 9 questions out of which 6 or 7 were correct. I RC wasn't up to the mark but that was mostly because I was not able to read the last passage at all because of the time constraint and guessed all the questions in it and as expected all 4 were wrong. Also, I was not able to complete the verbal part (time expired when I had 1 question left). So overall, I was quite satisfied with the score. I was relaxed and thought of taking 1 more mock just to check if the previous mock was a fluke. I took it the next day at night 1AM again and scored 590(Q48,V25), just a day before my main exam. I analysed my mistake and realised I have been getting almost all CR and RC questions wrong. I was not able to understand what was happening. I started trying the questions again but it felt like my mind was blocked, I was not able to understand a single passage of RC or CR. I hoped it was just a bad day and waited for the main exam but the score was lingering at the back of my mind. D-Day arrived and I tried imitating everything I did on the day I scored 700. Drank coffee, watched a youtube video, and then finally started my exam. And I feel I bombed the verbal section too. I did not get a single boldface question in CR (read somewhere on this forum that getting a boldface indicated you have been attempting the CR questions correctly, not sure how true is this claim), quant's performance affected my verbal too, I could not keep my Quants performance out of my mind. Couldn't complete verbal again (attempted everything but last 4 questions were pure guess) as I got 3 RC questions at last and one CR.

After this section was done, I knew something was off today and then attempted IR and couldn't understand a single question there too ( my IR scores have been consistently between 5-7 in mocks).

Now, I am not sure what to do next as I am not able to grasp the CR questions and RC for sure goes over my head. I have tried "reading slow" technique and it did not work. I tried "skimming" technique and it did not work. Tried "Note making" for RC too but did not help either. And I am not sure what happened to my CR suddenly as I was doing quite well there. I am not able to pre-think like everyone else

I want to get into a good college this year, can not wait for another year. I thought I would be writing my GMAT score debrief like everyone else as to how well I scored but instead I am writing how I messed up.

Any guidance as to how should I approach the RCs and CRs would help and also how should I approach GMAT as a whole after this blunder. I just want to get into a good college by March 2021.

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Discuss it with mentor with over 15 years of experience in GMAT coaching.
Attend one of our free GMAT webinars at www.oneclickprep.com or read our blogs for clarity.

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Re: Screwed up my GMAT online ! Need help

by dsan6422 » Fri Oct 02, 2020 2:03 pm
GMAT PROS is offering a FREE 40-minutes Live-Online GMAT Tutoring Session where you can choose the topics and/or questions to go over.

It might be worthwhile to check them out.

https://gmatpros.com

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Hi Niteen,

I'm happy to provide some advice; however, can you first tell me how you scored on your GMAT?

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder and CEO
[email protected]

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For RC, prepare using the LSAT material and for CR use the PowerScore CR Bible. The best resource is the OG. For every question try to understand why the choices that are incorrect are the incorrect ones.
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Re: Screwed up my GMAT online ! Need help

by Rossyjo » Tue May 11, 2021 5:12 am
Hey!
Never let yourself down. I passed my Gmat a couple of years ago and after I finished it I right away thought that I failed completely. I was so devastated that I started looking for colleges with lower GMAT needed to pass than I actually wanted. But it turned out to be not as bad as I thought so I overpanicked for nothing. Get yourself together, try not to overthink, what is done is done and it is not the end of the world. The best thing you can do now is to wait and stay calm, take care!

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Hello!

To improve your GMAT score, you need to go through quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you had to know to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

Call us at 888-215-6269 or live chat with us on our website if you need any GMAT Prep help at www.manhattaneliteprep.com! Thanks for your interest!

Manhattan Elite Prep

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Re: Screwed up my GMAT online ! Need help

by sonalford » Fri Sep 03, 2021 10:45 pm
Prepare utilizing the LSAT materials for RC and the PowerScore CR Bible for CR. The OG is the finest resource. Try to figure out why the alternatives that are incorrect are incorrect for each question.