expert plz give honest advice

[arghya05]

i dont know at this point what to do.
i prepared for one full year each single day.
all mocks i scored around (680 to 730)
2 gmat prep test,6 Manhattan test, 5 veritas test,1 knewton free test,1 master gmat tests,4 kaplan tests
i have solved every material available
i have scored a dismal 590(maths 44, verbal 27)
i felt maths too tough to be solved in 2 minutes.
verbal i was confident and solved sc,cr and RC with breeze
when the results came it was a shocker.
now i do not know what happened wrong and how to improve

it is my second attempt after 560 .

i am seriously thinking of my ability ?
i guess i dont have i high IQ.

plz show me some way

[Brian@VeritasPrep]

Hey arghya,

I'm sorry to hear about such a frustrating GMAT experience! But please keep in mind that a 590 on the GMAT is NOT a sign of "not a high IQ". That's still just about a standard deviation above average on a test that by definition attracts examinees who are just about all above average intellectually. It's a competitive graduate school test...a 590 on the GMAT translates to well above 700 "in life"!

What's interesting to me about your performance is that it went inversely to how you felt about it. You thought that the math was tough, and you scored really well there; you thought that the verbal was easy, and you didn't score as well there. Which makes some sense in an adaptive test...seeing harder math questions meant you were doing well enough on that section to see such questions.

But the verbal I think has a lesson in there. If you thought that you were breezing through those questions but actually you weren't, it sounds like you were falling into some clever GMAT traps. My guess is that you:

-Missed the conclusion on some CR questions by letting your subconscious take over, and you fell right into the trap answers (for example, if the conclusion specifically says "we should restructure the workday so that people can schedule their hours with flexibility and get more sleep", your mind wants it to say "we should shorten the workday", and there's a trap answer for that)

-Saw some familiar SC idioms and picked those answers while missing a Verb Tense or Subject-Verb error that was somewhat cleverly hidden with the correct answer containing a correct-but-unfamiliar idiom

-And made other mistakes in that "not so fast, my friend!" category in which the GMAT uses your inertia against you.

So I'd suggest going back to your practice tests and homework sets and paying attention to the trap answers that you picked and that you considered in any 50/50 guesses. Don't just think about "why was this wrong?" but spend some time considering "why did it tempt me?". If you confidently answered that many wrong answers, my prediction is that the best way for you to improve is to learn about which traps tend to get you so that you can look out for them.


And again, don't doubt your ability - you can't really fake 700-range practice test scores on a regular basis!

[arghya05]

what to do now, i do not have any more tests left.
i hate to study all the stuff like 1000sc,cr,rc rc99.
i do not have new material
can you help me design a study plan and after how many days will it be okay to retake
i guess in this time i will study 50 % of what i have done
plz plz help me