Down, but not out just yet! How do I pick up the pieces?

[jgpb410]

Hi Everyone,

I took the GMAT in July and scored a 40 on Verbal and a 36 on quant for an overall score of a 630. This was very surprising and disappointing to me because as I was doing the quantitative section of the test and thought to myself "if the quant is this easy, then I've got this thing on lock". Clearly I was wrong.

I also was scoring much higher on my practice exams. On my last two practice tests I scored a 47 and 41 on the quant sections; these were both official practice tests too. It wasn't a timing issue either, I finished with an extra 2 minutes to spare.

After a lot of reflection, I still don't know what went wrong. I'm just trying to pick up the pieces and help formulate a strategy to master GMAT math such that there is little chance for failure. Any thoughts on what went wrong or how to study moving forward would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[[email protected]]

Hi jgpb410,

I'm sorry to hear that Test Day didn't go as well as planned. When these types of score drops occur, the two likely "causes" involve either something that was unrealistic during practice or something that was surprising (or not accounted for) on Test Day.

If you can answer a few questions, then we should be able to figure this out:

When you took your CATs:
1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)?
2) Did you take them at home?
3) Did you take them at the same time of day as your Official GMAT?
4) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, skip sections, take longer breaks, etc.)?
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once?

It's possible that you just had a "bad day"; but if we can figure all of this out quickly, then you shouldn't wait too long to retest.

What is your goal score?
When are you planning to apply to Business School?

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

[jgpb410]

Thank you Rich for offering to help.

1. I took the entire CAT on my last two practices.
2. I took them at home
3. Same time (8AM) as my actual test, but for obvious reasons I did not sleep that well the night before the test.
4. I was very disciplined about making my practice tests as realistic as possible
5. I never repeated a CAT. In fact, I purchased the GMAT exam pack 1 to avoid this.

Agreed on taking a retest soon. My thinking is that I should be consistently scoring over my goal score of 700 before this next test.

I'm not planning on applying to business school this year, so I have plenty of time to hone my craft.

[Jim@StratusPrep]

Usually when the quant 'feels easy' it is because you are getting relatively easy questions wrong. A lot of times this if from oversight of details and basic math errors. To get to the score you want, it sounds like you need some quality practice to hone these skills.

Remember that there is a lot of statistical variance in your exam scores, so 2 data points of 41 and 47 don't give a ton of information. Accounting for nerves that can come into play on exam day, this does not seem like an unrealistic score for you.

Studying going forward, look to see which content areas you are struggling with (obviously). But the way to do that is look at the easy questions that you get wrong and spend a good amount of time on. This is an indication that you are weak. You may 'understand' the content, but practice will tighten up your mastery and allow you to perform well on test day.

[[email protected]]

Hi jgpb410,

From the information you've provided, there's only one minor 'red flag' in how you took your CATs (taking them at home is not realistic). So I have a few questions about Test Day itself:

On Test Day:
1) How long was the ride to the Test Center from your home?
2) Were there any distractions at the facility or during the Test?
3) What did you do during the two 8-minute breaks?
4) Did you finish any sections early?
5) Did you have to rush to finish any sections (and guess on questions just to finish on time)?

You've mentioned that your goal score is 700+, but you didn't provide any information about your overall scores on your practice CATs. Can you list out each of your practice CAT scores (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for each)?

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

[MartyMurray]

Obviously you can rock this test. You just didn't quite get your quant skills sharp enough, and maybe you made some silly errors on the day of the test, partly because you got things but maybe didn't really get them that well.

One thing you could do for starters is read this post on careless mistakes and levels of understanding and consider what your levels of understanding of various quant topics are.

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/careless-m ... gmat-math/

Then you could go over your practice questions and practice tests and look for quant areas your level of understanding of which could be better.

As you do that, you can go to the GMAT section here, https://bellcurves.com/, and set up a practice account. In the question bank that comes with that account, there are thousands of categorized quant questions. For any area which you have identified as needing work, you can go to the related category and do practice questions until you are an expert in that area.

Then go to the next and become an expert there too.

You can be sure that if you do this for every category that you are not sure about at this point and via using those questions and other resources achieve a high level of understanding of each type of quant question, you will get very tight with GMAT quant, and you will see your quant score stabilize at a rather high level.

Also, why not keep working on verbal some and get your hit rate and score higher there too. Just for an example, Q46 and V43 generates something along the lines of 720, which is right on for any school, and actually if you really go at quant in the way I described, there's a good chance that within a reasonable time frame you will score even higher than 46.

[mindovergmat]

It seems like you can really do well on the GMAT the next time around. We all tend to discount the value of the context in which we prepare (environment, time of day, hunger levels, anxiety, etc). Don't just DO practice problems and tests, reflect on them to understand where your mind may be seeing patterns that are not there and why you are not seeing the patterns that are there.

Consistency, structure, and practicing in similar context to the actual test is very important. I just messaged you as well.

[jgpb410]

Thanks for the reply and support everyone! I've decided that I'm going to retake the exam in ~3 months. To answer some of the questions:

1) the ride was 12 minutes
2) No distractions except it was really hot that day and the ac shut off at some point
3) Ate a little bit, drank some water, and went to the bathroom
4) I finished math slightly early
5) Did not have to rush

I agree that what I need is a boat load of practice and strategic refreshing on certain subjects. Any thoughts on building a study plan? What resources should I use? My Manhattan Gmat account expired and I have OG12, OG13 (went through most of this), quant 2, verbal 2, and all of the MGMAT books. This may be blasphemy on this site but a friend who scored a 47 on Quant suggested the gmatclub.com question bank. If anyone else has a compelling reason why another resource is better than that, I'm all ears.

In terms of the actual plan, I'm thinking that Jim and Marty's plan of mastering each section one at a time might be appropriate for me. I'll start with one topic and keep doing practice questions until I master it then move on to the next. If I am getting hung up on one particular subject (e.g. geometry is a weakness of mine), then I'll go back and read the respective MGAT section.

Thoughts?

[DavidG@VeritasPrep]

In terms of the actual plan, I'm thinking that Jim and Marty's plan of mastering each section one at a time might be appropriate for me.

I think subject by subject mastery is a good starting point for most test-takers. As you master each individual topic, consider assembling a summary sheet distilling the most important points from that topic. Once you finish geometry, for example, your summary sheet will contain the most important identities that show up: Pythagorean triples, central vs inscribed angles in circles, etc. Of course, at some point, you'll have to be able to deal with questions coming at your from all angles, so once you've absorbed the fundamentals, you'll want to incorporate some fresh material that will allow you to hit a variety of topics for each study session you do. Here's our free question bank if you're interested: https://www.veritasprep.com/gmat-question-bank/

This may be blasphemy on this site but a friend who scored a 47 on Quant suggested the gmatclub.com question bank. If anyone else has a compelling reason why another resource is better than that, I'm all ears.

Hardly blasphemy. The nice thing about this community is that there really is a genuine emphasis on trying to provide advice about which resources will work best for which test-taker. As far as GMATclub goes, my feeling is that their tests are quite good for those trying to make the jump from a solid quant score to an elite one. That is to say, they are engineered to be very difficult. For test-takers who are in the earlier phase of their studying, these tests can be somewhat demoralizing because of their difficulty level. Like most sites, they offer a couple of free practice quizzes, so I'd suggest working to develop your quant fundamentals first; get to the point where you're consistently at, say, 44 quant on your practice exams, then maybe consider checking out more advanced material to see if you think it can get you over the hump.

[MartyMurray]

The quant part of the BellCurves question bank is in some ways better than the quant part of the GMAT Club question bank. The geometry at BellCurves is gorgeous, as are many of the combinatorics and probability questions, even if some of the explanations are not that good. If you use both BellCurves and GMAT Club, you will get two different perspectives. If I had to use only one of the two, I would probably use BellCurves. Recently I saw a guy in around a month or less go from around Q44 to Q48, mostly by using BellCurves. We went over some topics, and he went to that question bank and took his time doing the questions, looking to achieve a hit rate around 90%, or higher. That way he really learned to get right answers, and then, as it made sense to, he sped up. Worked like a charm. So check it out.

The Veritas Question Bank has many very cool questions too, both quant and verbal, though other than at basic levels it does not have a way to categorize them.

Also, search engines can be your friends. If, for instance, you wanted to do 10 more coin flip questions, you could just search on "GMAT coin flip questions" or just "coin toss probability math" and you could find many more questions all over the internet.

This is your project. Don't be locked into any particular box. Do whatever it takes to get good at what you need to get good at.