560 (Q43 V24) - Strong on quants; weak on verbal

[Sun.Gireesh]

Greetings to all the BTGMAT readers,

24 years, Indian, Male, non-native English speaker, 2.5 years experience. I have been preparing for GMAT for the past 6 month since New Year, my New Year resolution being I somehow have to beat the GMAT this year. Though like most of the GMAT writers I have an aim of getting 700+ on the GMAT.

The materials that I used for reading:
- OG version 13
- Nova's GMAT prep course
- 1000 DS, 1000 PS for practice
- In the last week I got Manhattan 8 books series

Being a full time worker, since January whenever I get time on a day to day basis, I have been working out Math for about 30 mins to 1 hour a day. On weekends, I used to read verbal for about 2 - 3 hours. This routine continued for three months until March last week. I then realized that I am not gaining pace in my reading and once I book for GMAT, I will get seriousness to read. I was pretty confident at that time that I can do fairly well on GMAT. So on March 22nd I scheduled the test on 30th May 2015 and informed for a weeks' leave at my work place so that I will have a good 7 days for full fledged preparation before the exam. I put hold for almost all entertainment activity from when I booked GMAT.

After scheduling the exam too for almost 7 weeks, I concentrated fully on Math and I was pretty confident that I will be able to do well on math. Until 23rd May, I never took even a full time practice test, though I will solve math problems from OG and 1000 DS and 1000 PS and I will score fairly well (for every 20 problems that I solve, I used to get about 17-18 correct).

Exactly one week before GMAT, I took the first practice test on the GMAT prep software and I just scored a 470 (Q43 V13) and got a mini heart-break. At that point of time I realized that I realized that I am very weak on verbal and I somehow had to correct it. I believed that I still had time to do so.



I was just able to naturally solve math and I assumed that in the same way even verbal can be solved instinctively.

For entire next three days, I concentrated on verbal sections one each day. If I was reading SC, and a section in SC (say subject-verb agreement), and then immediately solve the topics related to it, I was able to fairly solve it, since I knew where to look for errors. But then if I was given a pool of 25 questions, I was not able to solve.

I was irritated that I did not give equal importance for verbal and quants for the past 6 months and had to make it up somehow within next two days. I fully concentrated on verbal, though from different sources, I was not able to make it up.

In my second practice test a day before test, I scored 550 (Q44 V21). I still hoped to get around 650 (Q44 V35) on the actual test.



On the test day, I was bright and was expecting that the luck would favour me. I knew I will do well on the quants section. I had a good sleep the day before and was relaxed when I sat for the test. Since I can type at the speed of over 60 words per min, AWA was simple and I had no troubles. I always fell short on time on IR and quickly tired to solve all the problems. I completed the section with about a minute reminding. I took the first break and was feeling optimistic. I made sure that I did not lose my enthusiasm and kept saying to myself that I will nail this exam. I used one minute extra of my break and still I had no trouble in Math. Question after question I solved with patience, though I burned a little over 3 minutes on couple of questions, I was able to finish the section comfortably. All my practice for past 6 months came handy.

I took the second break and still was feeling optimistic since I did well on quants. When I sat for verbal, I started to struggle right from the second question. For each and every question I faced dilemma on which option to choose. Only a couple of RC went smooth for me. Every SC was a struggle looking for parallelism and subject verb agreement; I could just narrow it down to 2 or 3 options for every question.

The final score read a sad 560 (Q43, V24, IR 5).

Though spending a $250 again is a bit too high for me, I am planning to rewrite in October/November again. I am going to take a two month off from reading in June and July and will restart from August. Please suggest how to improve verbal, since a Q43 V43 score is a 700, I hope to achieve that feet.

Please suggest me how to crack the verbal section.

[MartyMurray]

First of all, looking at your verbal scores, 13, 21, 24, one can see that the trend is positive. So it seems that whatever you were doing to increase your skill in handling the verbal section was working, and part of the issue is that you simply did not spend enough time on verbal.

I find that you basic idea that you can use instinct, or logic and common sense to get the right answers to verbal questions is largely correct. At the same time, in reading what you have written here, I can tell that you could be better at English in general. So while you can use logic and common sense to answer verbal questions, you need a fair amount of practice just to get better at handling the language specific aspects of the section.

To address this, one thing you could do is make a point of doing some regular reading, basically every day, in English. In other words, whatever you are interested in and reading about, seek to find English sources of writing about it. Even if you take a summer break from GMAT preparation, I suggest you don't take any break from reading in English. There's no reason to really. If you are reading, read in English. Get used to how the language works and to quickly understanding what is being said.

One area of English that you need real work on is the subjunctive mode. For instance, this sentence you wrote is not really right. "I knew I will do well on the quants section." It would be more correct this way, "I knew I would do well on the quants section." There were many places in your post where the the subjunctive would have been more appropriate than what you used. So getting that one thing clear could help.

You have the Manhattan books and they will probably be sufficient for your preparation. The only other thing you may need more of is questions. One good source of verbal questions is the Veritas Question Bank. There are many other sources. Here too my suggestion is that you not fully take a break from GMAT Prep. If you really want to score over 40 on verbal maybe you should keep doing at least a few questions a day, even during that break. The familiarity you could gain by doing reading in English and GMAT verbal questions for months on end could be amazing. Put it this way. Consider how much better you become at anything you do consistently, with some intensity, for six months.

Along with this preparation, you need to be taking practice CATs. In your first round there were not enough CATs and you waited way to long to take one and so got surprised soon before your test. This time around, take regular practice CATs, at least one every couple of weeks. There are two more GMAT Prep tests that you can buy and also Veritas and MGMAT sell sets of CATs that are pretty good. In addition, once you start scoring higher, even the two GMAT Prep CATs that you have already taken will serve you sets of mostly new questions.

On another note, if you really want to break 700, it would make sense to also drive you quant score higher. That way you could hit your score goal without having to increase you verbal score quite as much. For instance, with a quant score of 46 or 47, you could score 700 with a verbal score of 40. Hey I would love to see you score V43, but why make yourself do that much work when by working on a few quant topics you could achieve the same total score.

Overall, maybe this is partly a panic thing on your part. I mean you went from V13 to V24 pretty quickly. So maybe just by continuing to work on verbal you can make consistent progress. So maybe hit the Manhattan books, do questions, see what you need to learn, and take a couple of CATs, and let's see where you are in a month or two.

[Sun.Gireesh]

Dear Marty Murray,

Thank you for your reply and encouragement. Yes I have planned to read materials of standard english for an hour daily until two months.

I found few areas in quants as well where I can improve a little probably to get a couple of more points in quants section. Let me see how well it goes.

[MartyMurray]

Really, from you I get the impression that with a little more work and a little more confidence you could push that quant score into the upper 40's.

Partly depends on how much time you want to invest.

Also have to love the way your verbal score went up.

Something about the way you feel comfortable basing what you do on logic and instinct sounds pretty solid.

Look at what a person from GMAC has to say about what they are testing via the verbal section and work accordingly.

https://www.mba.com/us/the-gmat-blog-hub ... -exam.aspx

[[email protected]]

Hi Sun.Gireesh,

Many Test Takers re-take the GMAT, so you're not alone. You've come to realize that there's a lot more that goes into scoring at a high level on Test Day than you originally realized, but you can use everything that you've learned so far to plan out a more effective study routine for this next attempt.

Part of your 'problem' likely comes from the 'book-heavy' study approach that you took. Many Test Takers get "stuck" at a particular scoring level when studying in this way and that's almost certainly factor in what happened here. To hit your score goals, you'll likely need to make some big improvements in BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections, so you'll probably benefit by investing in some new computer-based resources.

While there's nothing wrong with taking some time "off" before you re-start your studies, 2 months "off" might be too much time. To hit 700+, you're likely going to need at least 3 more months of consistent, guided study. Given the deadlines that you're hinting at, you might want to start back up earlier than August.

When are you planning to apply to Business School?
Do you know what Schools you want to apply to?

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

[Rich@EconomistGMAT]

Hi Sun.Gireesh,

Students enrolled in Economist GMAT Tutor have had success improving their Verbal skills by supplementing their study materials with outside reading. Pick some opinion pieces from news outlets like The NYT and Economist (or whichever ones you read most often for pleasure). We also helped someone in our advice column recently who wants to improve their verbal, which you can check out here: https://bit.ly/1G9eW0v

Best,
Rich