GMAT Retake - AWA and IR

[confused13]

Dear community,

I want to retake the GMAT as soon as possible (have to wait until the 31 days are over).

I took the GMAT once and scored 620 (Q44, V31, IR 3 or 4 not sure right know, AWA 6).
On my retake I don't want to waste time and energy on IR and AWA. While I think I could easily score a 4 on IR again (I have a pretty good guessing strategy), I am not at all interested in redoing the AWA part.
Do you recommend to skip AWA completely and to guess on purpose on IR ? I mean I already showed once that I am good at AWA and I don't think I will score an 8 on IR even if I tried as hard as possible.

Alternatively, I thought about doing the AWA diligently, guessing on IR BUT to wait until the IR time is over, something I didn't do the last time.

My targets are some Msc Finance programs (not MBA), so maybe they care even more only about Q and V, and even less about AWA and IR.

[GMATinsight]

Dear community,

I want to retake the GMAT as soon as possible (have to wait until the 31 days are over).

I took the GMAT once and scored 620 (Q44, V31, IR 3 or 4 not sure right know, AWA 6).
On my retake I don't want to waste time and energy on IR and AWA. While I think I could easily score a 4 on IR again (I have a pretty good guessing strategy), I am not at all interested in redoing the AWA part.
Do you recommend to skip AWA completely and to guess on purpose on IR ? I mean I already showed once that I am good at AWA and I don't think I will score an 8 on IR even if I tried as hard as possible.

Alternatively, I thought about doing the AWA diligently, guessing on IR BUT to wait until the IR time is over, something I didn't do the last time.

My targets are some Msc Finance programs (not MBA), so maybe they care even more only about Q and V, and even less about AWA and IR.

I can certainly not recommend that you Take guesses on IR even if you get them right most of the time and Skip AWA even if you have done well in past in it.

Any university considers one score at a time and not best sectional scores of all GMAT scores available.

GMAT is not only the test of your aptitude but also the test of persistence and versatility across all the sections. Take all sections seriously and prepare yourself for the such situation by taking Mock CATs at home by attempting all sections diligently and seriously.

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Hi confused13,

Attempting to "game" the AWA and IR sections in the way that you're describing is NOT a good idea. If you leave the essay blank (or do anything else that implies that you didn't try hard enough, such as writing just 1 sentence), then your score will reflect that fact (a 0). This tells every School that you apply to that you didn't feel like taking the entire GMAT. You didn't want to do what they asked you to do.

I would hazard a guess that no School would be interested in an applicant who didn't want to do all of the necessary work to apply (to put it in context, what would you do once you got into school and the classes were too hard or you just didn't "like" them or you didn't want to do the work?).

You can certainly "ease off" the IR section a bit, but just sitting there for 30 minutes doing nothing but pushing the occasional random button? That just seems silly. Choose a few questions to guess on, but try to answer the others.

The GMAT absolutely tests your endurance (among all of the other areas that it tests), but so will Business School. Take this event as the challenge that it is - train for it, in its entirety. Work hard. Prove to Schools (and yourself) that you have all the skills that it takes to succeed.

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

[David@VeritasPrep]

Confused13 -

Rich has said it. There is such a thing as pulling back and not shooting for a perfect 6.0 and 8.0, but you do need to do the work. And I am not sure that it benefits you to skip these things anyway. They can provide a nice warm up.

This is just an anecdote but once when I took the GMAT there were only three people in the room (it was a holiday) and it was so quite in there. I started to type my essay and it seemed so loud and I did not want to distract the other test takers so I skipped both essays on the AWA (this was before the IR section came around). Well I just went right to the Quant and proceeded to earn my worst quant score I have ever earned.

The other times when I wrote the essays and did that hour of work before the Quant I score much higher. So I challenge your premise that you will perform better when skipping those sections.

What I do not challenge is that if you went all out on those sections and tried for the perfect 6.0 and 8.0 that you might get a little tired. So please seek the middle ground. Write an essay that schools will find acceptable but do not tax yourself too much. As Rich says try hard on some IR but choose the guess on a few others.

[confused13]

Thanks for the replies.