GMAT 720- IR8 Q49 V40; First Attempt- Contemplating a Retake

[akhilsuhag]

Hi,

Posted in the wrong section initially, moving it here.

Gave my GMAT today and scored a decent 720, but was expecting higher so am not sad or happy with my result. I wasn't anxious but somehow my sleep cycle just screwed me over. Got just 2 and a Half hour of sleep before the exam and I could see that affect my performance- specially in verbal, where I could feel the screen go hazy. Ended up washing my face, during breaks, prepping myself up and even doing pushups at the center to stay in the game.

I also finished both sections with around 12-15 minutes to spare.

My test scores so far gave me confidence of at least a 740 but by the end of the test I knew I might not hit it. Here are my scores (started in August) and final few leading up to the test.

EconomistGMAT- 680 Q48 V35 (August)
GMATPrep- 710 Q46 V41 (August)
Economist GMAT- 710 Q50 V38 (December)
MGMAT- 680 Q45 V38 (December)
EconomistGMAT- 740 Q50 V40 (January)
GMATPrep- 760 Q49 V45 (January)

All Dec/Jan exams given under test conditions with IR and essay. Economist I felt underscored my Verbal and MGMAT just thrashed my confidence with the scores it put out= but I read around and did not look too much into it.

I have a decent score in my pocket but want to give it a shot for a higher one- maybe after getting a proper 8 hour sleep. I would want to know how can I approach the retake.

1)My final days of prep for verbal was based around the OG13 and I seem to have exhausted a lot of resources.
2)Should I take a break and get back at it or have a crack as soon as possible.
3) I should I prepare again - as although I think my sleep had a major part to play but what if that is not the case.

Generally I never gave retake a thought. I was somehow confident I will achieve my target- I think that is required to do well on the exam (no self doubt) but now I feel a little lost as to what pieces to pick up and start with.

Please feel free to ask any questions possible I would be really happy to help (although with so many 760's around I might not be the best guy) and hoping to get some advice.

My quest for 740 and above is not just vanity, I am an Indian working in Europe and schools back home are very score focused (One has a GMAT average of 760) so I have a legitimate need to cross a barrier.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards.

[digvijayk]

You can actually score higher for sure. I think verbal can improve. I wouldn't focus on improving quant that much. Besides, 720 is locked down and this was your first attempt.

I can tell you from experience that if you're "Indian IT Male" you will find a 720 to be not so competitive for the top 5 schools. But, if you're in some other field, even the 720 works fine.

For improvement in verbal, you don't need practice. Google "thursdays with ron", and get up to speed with the verbal concepts given by him.

ATB

[akhilsuhag]

Thanks for your reply bro. I will give it another go- since the gmat lets you see the score and cancel it anyways.

Hopefully can push my verbal to about 42.. fingers crossed!

[MartyMurray]

I just reviewed your situation with fresh eyes and a little more experience and so I have some more thoughts.

One of them is that you could get that verbal score up to maybe even 44 or above just by hitting the verbal section of the Veritas question bank. Yes, it's their way of testing questions. So sometimes there are issues with a question here and there, but for the most part there are some really nice questions there that you can use to hone your skills.

The other is that the more I look at RC and CR the more I wonder how people who have a decent command of English and score high on quant get more than one or two those wrong. In other words, by just really taking the time to CAREFULLY look them over, one can generally get them right just by applying logic, along with a few key GMAT rules such as inferences need to be necessarily true based on the prompt. Even SC is largely about being logical and noticing details.

In other words, by getting some more practice and then when taking the test using up the full 1.8 minutes per question to really be sure you are seeing what's going on with verbal questions, you should be able to drive that verbal sub score significantly higher.

Who knows, maybe with just a change in perception of verbal you could raise your score to 46 or something.

[akhilsuhag]

Hey Marty,

Thanks for getting back again. That was exactly what my strategy was- Get not more than 1 RC/CR wrong. In my last two practice tets I had just 1 CR wrong. And this is what I will be striving for during my retake.

I had another question- somehow the Veritas question bank CR's don't go down well with me. I tried them yesterday and my hit rate dramatically went down- so before losing all confidence I closed them down. Is that normal? How closely do you think they are to official questions and is there some other practice source you might recommend. For now I downloaded all GMATPrep 1 and 2 questions for verbal and plan on using them as my principal practice material- let it resemble the real language and structure as closely as possible.

Regards.

[MartyMurray]

That's tough.

Not aware that you were already pretty much rocking CR and RC, I figured the Veritas question bank questions would be helpful. Truth is the CR questions there are often a little different from official CR and on top of that they are not always tight, meaning that regularly the right answer is not so right. One thing this means is that I too get right a percentage of their CR that is lower than the percentage I get right on the official tests.

The SC questions are similarly somewhat different and sometimes flawed. The RC, while sometimes flawed, I personally found very helpful.

My reaction to any weaknesses or flaws has been to see them for what they are and get what I can out of the questions. Of course that can maybe put one into a mindset that is not optimal for taking the real test.

The thing is I have used other verbal question banks which were much worse and sometimes amazingly inaccurate and misleading. This seems to be due to issues inherent to creating verbal questions, which is in many ways more difficult than creating quant questions, which at least have a clear answer.

If you need more questions in addition to what you already have, maybe you could drop 30 bucks and get the Question Pack add on to GMAT Prep. That doesn't have so many questions though. Maybe someone else such as Magoosh has a sizable set of relatively tight verbal questions. If you find something good maybe let me know.

For what it's worth, just by learning a few key rules and by using the OG some and the Veritas bank a lot, I hit V50 on the actual test and scored V51 on one of my Powerprep CATs, and when I took the actual test I was not in an optimal state. Possibly my verbal strategy is to use a combination of rules, logic, careful reading and, possibly most importantly, sheer determination to get them right.

How often one looks back at a verbal question one got wrong and immediately one sees exactly what one had missed before. So that indicates that much of what's going on is a detail thing, a careful reading thing, and something that one can pretty much solve with some practice.

For SC, be clear about parallelism, placement of modifiers, use of tenses and some other key rules. If you know some idioms and other stuff on top of that, even better. Then see how well you can do just by being super observant and determined, and by being really organized about how you go through the choices. Maybe you can relatively quickly get to the point of getting almost all SC right.

As Brian Galvin at Veritas said, "Sentence Correction is to an extent about "what do you know" but to really excel it also has to be about "what do you do."