Looking for advice - Re-take

[Prasanna]

One month time for re-take is generally sufficient. Much depends on your areas of weakness. A question- were you referring to GMAT prep in your post? I think power prep is an earlier version and hence does not reflect well the probable score range. If you have not taken GMAT prep, you could take it once to assess your areas of weakness and probable score range. As you have mentioned, you would need to revise all areas before you retake.

Wishing you luck this time. This forum is always available to help

[wtpooh]

Yes. I was referring to GMAT Prep.

I guess I need to set myself some targets to sit for the exam sometime in January.

Thanks for the advice.

[bates88]

That's really weird that your score was so different on test day, because GMATPrep is considered the most accurate predictor of your performance. Did you feel while you were taking the test that anything was going wrong? How was your timing?

What did you do to prep besides GMATPrep? I'm guessing over a 2-month periodyou must have done a lot, but what materials did you use? Did you study test-taking strategy as well? Did you do practice questions with the Official Guide?

[wtpooh]

Well. I used many resources: OG 11, OG Verbal, OG Quant, Manhattan GMAT 7 series, 1000 questions, etc. I managed to even complete all questions in the OG.

As I said, I thought I was doing really well in quant. But it did strike me during the exam that I found the quant questions were relatively very easy as I progressed. So I knew something was wrong. But I just couldn't pin point the cause. I don't think I made careless mistakes after so much practice with quant questions, but I might be dead wrong. I did not run out of time in quant. In fact, I had approximately 3-4 minutes to spare. But I did run out of time in verbal (guessing on the last 4-5 questions). So, I thought my verbal score would be lower. Just a bit shocked to see the weird results.

I think I will give it one more shot in January. I guess it was just not my day

[Stacey Koprince]

It's a little odd but not necessarily that weird that your scores didn't match GMATPrep. The standard deviation on the official test is about 30 points and, though they don't publish SD for GMATPrep, I think of it as "almost as good but not quite" - so call it 40 points.

Even that, though, means that you have a 2/3 chance of falling in a 40 point range on either side of your score. eg, if you score a 720, that's saying you have a 2/3 chance of scoring between 680 and 760, and a 1/3 chance of scoring outside of that range.

Given your description of the test (timing was fine, questions seemed easier than you were used to), you probably were making careless mistakes due to nerves (and you weren't aware that you were doing so). Knowing that quant is normally a strength may also have lulled you into a false sense of security, which (coupled with the nerves / stress) also could have led you to make more mistakes than normal. And sometimes we just have an off day or have the bad luck to get questions that are more in our individual areas of weakness.

Unfortunately, you can't see your question results from the official test, so we can't know for sure. The only thing we do know is that you weren't performing as well as you normally do on mid-level questions (mid-level for you), so the test wasn't offering you even harder questions.

Go back and study all of your foundational stuff in quant to identify any little holes or areas of weakness that can pull you down. If you make your foundation very solid, you will minimize careless mistakes and, if you can get most of those questions right, that will lift you to the harder questions in the database. (And study the harder stuff too, of course - but don't neglect the foundational stuff.)

[mujeebshah]

what is the difference between these three books:OG 11, OG Verbal, OG Quant.
Is it ok to just use the official guide?

[Stacey Koprince]

They're just additional questions. the OG 11th addition has 800 questions that are a mix of math and verbal. The Quant book has 300 math questions and the Verbal book has 300 verbal questions. It's fine to use just the 11th edition.