What to do when you have exhausted material and dont improve

[Mary1288]

Hi I wanted to share my experience with all of you and see if someone could give me any piece of advice on how to proceed. I took my GMAT yesterday and scored a horrible 620 (Q44/V31), this was my second attempt, in May I scored a 630 (Q39/V38). Although I improved 5 points in Quant I got a really low score on the verbal part and I dont know why really. I was always good at Verbal in my practice tests, in the different exercises of the OG and Manhattan and even in my official test taken in May last year.
Now Im shocked and I dont know what to do. After almost a year studying I scored lower! Now I feel that I have covered all the verbal material and dont know how to improve, or at least go back to my 38 score. In my last practice tests I was scoring 700 and in MGMAT CATs my scores on verbal were usually 41 and 40.
When I was taking the GMAT i felt tired and I knew I was not doing great in verbal because I was not approaching to the questions in the correct way, just reading them and answering what "sounded" good. Now basically I dont know what to study, how to improve and specially how will I know Im ready for a third retake if I have exhausted all the GMAT practice tests from GMAt Prep and MAnhattan.

Thanks in advance, it would be great if you could give me some insights

[Kasia@EconomistGMAT]

Could you please give more details concerning your preparation? How were you preparing before your second attempt? And why do you think you felt tired during the exam?

[Mary1288]

Could you please give more details concerning your preparation? How were you preparing before your second attempt? And why do you think you felt tired during the exam?

Hi Kasia
I prepared with the Manhattan Strategy Guides to learn the basic concepts, specially in Math. Then, I did the exercises from the Official Guide 13th both Quant and Verbal, and spent time reviewing the problems I got wrong. Also, I bought the Gmat Prep Pack 1 to get new verbal questions as I had exhausted all of them in the OG.
I also kept an error log where I would write down all my mistakes and review them fron time to time.
In general I thought my preparation was okay, I dont know what to do different now, and what is worse I dont know where should I begin....needless to say after 6 months of study Im starting to think I am not capable to achieve this.

My test scores were:
MGMAT CAT 1 - 680 (Q44/V38)
MGMAT CAT 2 - 690. (Q44/ V39)
MGMAT CAT 3 - 650 (Q 44/ V35)
MGMAT CAT 4 - 690 (Q45/V38)
GMAT Prep - 700 (Q48/ V38)
GMAT Prep 2- 700 (Q 47/ V 38)

I think that I may have experienced sone burn out..when I started the verbal part I was fine with the sentence corrections but after two difficult CR questions and one really long passage I felt I was exhausted and I stopped approaching the CR questions in a correct way(finding conclusion, prethinking, etc) i just started picking what sounded good, the same with RC. Also I ran out of time and had to guess the last 5 questions.

Please I hope you could give me some advice on how to proceed and how to study in a correct way.

Thanks!!

[Tommy Wallach]

Hey Mary,

So, as you may have guessed, I'm not going to be able to tell you anything massively surprising/interesting. But it will be the truth.

You've already described yourself what your problem was. It wasn't preparation (your practice tests are generally a pretty good sign of where you'll score on the real test), it was execution. On test day, it sounds like you had pacing problems, and you didn't actually use your skills. All the studying in the world won't help someone who goes into the test and does the questions the same way they did them (more or less) before they started studying!

Now here's the good news. You don't need all that much studying. What you need is to activate your skills on test day. Honestly, there's no such thing as "exhausting" material--or at least, not in the way most people think. Reset all the Manhattan tests. Go through the OG one more time, doing timed sets of questions. For example:

Random Math: 20 questions, 40 minutes.
Verbal: 7 SC questions, 7 CR questions, 2 RC passages: 40 minutes

Make sure you can stay on pace and testing. Do that for a week or so. Then, start taking the tests again. They'll be new enough that they will still be useful (believe me). Even if you recognize a questions...even if you remember the answer...just do it. Act like it's new. Activate your process. Make sure that every practice test you take is under the most realistic possible circumstances (you don't live in NYC, do you? Because you could come to our practice test center if you did...) in terms of timing, distraction, location, etc. By the time you go into that testing center again, you want it to feel like some old thing you've been doing forever.

Hope that helps! Don't get discouraged; you're much closer than you think!

-t

[Kasia@EconomistGMAT]

Hi Mary,

I understand that 700 is your desired score, right?
I absolutely agree with Tommy. It was a very bad idea to choose answers using "intuition" or whatever you may call this method. You need to be really focused during the exam and control your timing. A very useful idea is to check whether you solve 5 questions in around 10 minutes. This method lets you concentrate on your work and not get distracted while checking the time with every question. How did you revise your mistakes? Maybe it would be a good idea to revise some question types that you find more challenging?
Also make sure you never use your intuition during any test and either attempt to solve the question using a proper work order and not exceeding the time limit or use personalized guessing strategy if you know that your chances of getting it right are rather slim.

[lunarpower]

i received a private message about this thread.

you say you've been studying for the test for 6 months, maybe longer.
... and that's probably the issue: you are studying way too much for this exam. if you do way, way too much studying, then the most likely effect on your verbal score will be negative.

basically, the deal with CR and RC is this: the total amount of knowledge that you need for CR and RC problems is exactly zero. there's not a single fact that you have to memorize/recall/know, nor are there recognizable "templates" or "patterns" in the problems.
as a result, there's only so much productive studying you can do in those two areas. basically, all you can do is this:
1/ Achieve a general understanding of how each major task works;
2/ Understand the general mentality with which you should (or shouldn't) approach each major task;
3/ Get to the point where that is actually your default mentality.
... and that's it. once you've done these three things, there's really no more "preparation" that you can do for CR and RC; from that point onward, it's a matter of thinking and reasoning.

the problem with studying for too long is that, eventually, you are going to get bored and start trying to find "patterns" or "rules" that solve the problems. once that starts to happen, any further studying of RC or CR will actually have a negative effect on your score, because these faux "rules"/"patterns" (which don't, and can't, actually solve the problems) will start to crowd out the thought processes that actually do solve the problems.

so, basically, if you've been studying for that long, the first thing you need to do is step away from the test (esp. the verbal section) for a while. then, once you return, you should concentrate only on the types of things i've mentioned here -- since that's really all there is.

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here are some other posts i've written on this idea:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/580-re-take- ... tml#480613

https://www.beatthegmat.com/my-gmat-new- ... tml#538788

https://www.beatthegmat.com/last-2-weeks ... tml#473730

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good luck.