Retake Study Plan AdviseImprove from 420 to 600 in 1 month?

[nsuen]

Dear all,

I took the gmat today and got a disappointing 420 Q 30 and V 18, which I feel so ashamed of even saying. I studied for 3 1/2 months with Kaplan and a private tutor. Got a 570 on Kaplan CAT and 520 on gmat prep test. Although going into the exam, I knew the chance of getting a 600 is slight but still try to think positively. I thought I would at least get to 500 range according to the practice test and with the effort I put in. When I was taking the exam, I felt like I did not know any of the math questions but I thought verbal was okay. However, looking at the score, I did worse on verbal. I am disappointed, but I am determined to improve. Therefore, I want to ask for advise as to how to study in the next month. The reason that I want to retake in a month is that the business school I already applied requires a 600.

I did Kaplan private tutor for 12 hours, Kaplan premier, verbal and math work book. I am not very sure how should I revise my study plan or even getting from a 420 to 600 in a month is possible?

Thank you very much for any advise.

[ceilidh.erickson]

When I see a large discrepancy between practice tests and your real test score, I have a few questions:

- did you struggle with anxiety during the test? You frame of mind matters a great deal. If you felt like you were panicking, that would impede your ability to think clearly.

- how was your timing? Did you run out of time, or finish ahead of time?

- did you take all of your practice tests under realistic timing conditions, including the essay and Integrated Reasoning? If you were practicing with unrealistic conditions, then it would be very difficult to balance your time well on the real test.

- did you only take those 2 practice tests? If so, that's not enough practice.

[[email protected]]

Hi nsuen,

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?

Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Test, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. Unfortunately, raising a 420 to a 600+ in just a month's time will be somewhat difficult.

1) What is the latest that you can send in a GMAT score to the School that you applied to?

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

[Jennifer@Kaplan]

Hi nsuen,

Have you tried reaching out to your Kaplan tutor? That person has worked with you and could use that familiarity to talk through the experience with you and help you try to figure out why you saw such a difference in performance between practice and your official test day. Your tutor would also be familiar with what Kaplan online resources you have already used and what you may not have tried yet, which would be useful in helping you revise your study plan.

Best,
Jennifer Kindy

[nsuen]

Hi Jennifer, Ceilidh, and Rich,

Thank you for your reply. I took two days off from everything related to Gmat to give myself a break. Below are my answers and I hope it will help to create a better plan for my coming studying.

Re: Jennifer, no i did not, being quite honest, I am not sure I want to talk to him again as he was not very helpful. However, I will try to as maybe he can give me some advises. I am not trying to make an excuse but 420 was exactly the same score when I took the diagnosis, before I even started having the private tutoring. Every time when I asked him for advise, he will say, don't be so nervous and you will be okay.


Re Rich:
When you took your CATs:
1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)? Yes I took the entire CAT
2) Did you take them at home? Yes I took them at home.
3) Did you take them at the same time of day as your Official GMAT? No. I took them during the day when my official gmat was at 9:00am
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.)? No.
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once? Yes, i took two.

Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Test, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. Unfortunately, raising a 420 to a 600+ in just a month's time will be somewhat difficult.

They said before the deadline, which is April 21. With the current Gmat score, I am thinking about to wait for another year. ( I guess I may have to since I got such a low score) What is a time frame you would suggest? Is it okay if I take a week off now? As i try to study again yesterday after the test and my mind is just now taking it in.

Re Ceilidh
did you struggle with anxiety during the test? You frame of mind matters a great deal. If you felt like you were panicking, that would impede your ability to think clearly. I think I was nervous, when I took the quant, my mind went blank many times, and I couldn't think of any of the concept that I learned. However, when I did the verbal, I was okay, I thought I did okay.

- how was your timing? Did you run out of time, or finish ahead of time? i barely finished the quant and did not finish verbal

- did you take all of your practice tests under realistic timing conditions, including the essay and Integrated Reasoning? If you were practicing with unrealistic conditions, then it would be very difficult to balance your time well on the real test. Yes, I took it when the timing conditions.

- did you only take those 2 practice tests? If so, that's not enough practice. Oh. Yes I only took two

Thank you very much and any strategy will be helpful!
I really appreciate having someone to share my feelings. I wont give up!

[[email protected]]

Hi nsuen,

Test Day is a rather specific 'event' - the details are specific and they matter, so you have to train as best as you can for all of them. The more realistic you can make your CATs, the more likely the score results are to be accurate. The more you deviate, the more "inflated" your practice scores can become - and that's what happened here. By retaking CATs, taking the CATs at home, taking them at a different time of day, etc., you weren't properly training for the FULL GMAT 'experience.'

Thankfully, this is a relatively easy set of problems to fix. The big question now is "how long will it take you to properly get 'used to' taking the full GMAT?" You'll certainly need a new set of practice CATs to work with and you have to put in the necessary time to train your brain (and body) for the FULL GMAT. Given what you've already described, I think that you would need another 2-3 months of consistent, guided study to score 600+.

From your post, it sounds like you've already realized that you might have to wait to apply next year. While I'm sure that that idea doesn't make you happy, it's the logical way to look at this whole situation. As such, you can absolutely take a week 'off' from studying. When you're ready to restart your studies, I have some suggestions about how you can proceed.

I do have one more pair of questions about your Official GMAT:
1) When you said you 'barely finished' the Quant section, do you remember how many questions you had to rush through at the end?
2) In the Verbal section, how many questions did you leave unanswered?

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

[Brent@GMATPrepNow]

When I was taking the exam, I felt like I did not know any of the math questions but I thought verbal was okay. However, looking at the score, I did worse on verbal.

One of the paradoxical features of the GMAT is that feeling that the questions are easy can sometimes mean that things are going poorly.

Here's what I mean: if, for example, you got the first 2 questions wrong, the GMAT scoring algorithm would have presented you with an easier question for question #3. One of the problems with easier questions is that we may sometimes answer them a little too quickly (since they seem easy, we don't really focus on the question) and sometimes, in our haste, make careless mistakes or miss key pieces of information. If this happened to you on question 3 and you got it wrong, question 4 would have been even easier, and so on.

I'm not certain that this is what happened to you, but I have heard very similar stories from other students.

The good thing is that you have already demonstrated that your GMAT skills are better than 420, so achieving a higher score (even 600) on your next attempt is a reasonable expectation.

I suggest that you take more practice tests to work on your test-taking skills AND help identify remaining areas of weakness. While CAREFULLY analyzing your practice tests, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:

1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options.

If your test-taking skills are holding you back, then you need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... video/1244

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/articles/avo ... teaks-gmat

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Brent

[nsuen]

Dear Rich,

Sorry for the late reply as I took a week off from anything related to GMAT as a break. Thank you for your kind encouragement. It really means a lot to have experts to try to help me! I ordered the enhanced score report from GMAT and after reviewing it. I found out the following:

I do have one more pair of questions about your Official GMAT:
1) When you said you 'barely finished' the Quant section, do you remember how many questions you had to rush through at the end? I finished all of the questions in quant section, but I felt like I had to rush the last 5-6 questions.
2) In the Verbal section, how many questions did you leave unanswered? I finished 38 out of 41 questions.

My enhanced report said that I did worst in sentence correction(6%), which surprised me as I was confident that I did most of them right. I used an average of 1.6 mins to finish. I did best in reading comprehension ( 69%). For my quant, I did worse in data sufficiency. I am best at arithmetic (32%) and worst at algebra/geometry( 14%)

I am ready to restart my studies, and I look forward to your suggestions to start again. I have the Kaplan 2016 text and practice books and wondering what other books or way to redo this time in a strategic way.

Dear Brent,
Thank you so much for your advice. I think with Verbal, I definitely had the problems you described. I was doing ok in practice question in sentence correction and did not expect I would do worst in it. I will read all the links you provided.

As I am going to restart, I have a question: Do I relearn and reread the material I did or should I start fresh and try a different approach? I know I need to be more strategic this time.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Nicole

[Jennifer@Kaplan]

Hi Nicole,

One resource that I would like to recommend to you is to use the Higher Score Guarantee to regain access to your Kaplan materials for 6 months. It sounds from earlier posts as though you only took one or two of the 9 CATs available to you in the online resources, so the additional CATs that you have not yet taken would be valuable for practice moving forward.

Also, the online resources include video workshops on areas like sentence correction and algebra, for example, which will give you a new look at the material and at strategies for different question types. After watching a workshop, you can complete the accompanying quiz to put your skills into practice. There is also a quiz bank that you can use to create personalized quizzes on specific topics at varying difficulty levels, along with explanations to use for review afterwards. You will also be able to see the amount of time spent on each question, which will help you evaluate and work on your pacing. Improving your performance on the GMAT will require a combination of studying topics, practicing with questions, and learning from your review of that practice what you need to do differently on similar questions in the future.

Best,
Jennifer Kindy

[nsuen]

Dear all,

After reading all of your advises, I planned my restudy and decided to spend 3 months instead of 1 month: Scheduled exam date is June 23 2016.

2nd time study: ( Things I do different from 1st time)
1) Took the Manhattan prep self study course
( I read all the books, did OG question with time constraint)
2) Use OG
3) Create Error log
4) Made flash card
5) Reviewed all the wrong questions and make sure I understand them
6) Create more a study life balance, not just study for long hours, take breaks to keep my mind fresh

CAT 4 530 ( Q 37 V 26) CAT 5 530 ( Q 33 V 31) CAT 6 590 ( Q 37 V 34) took on May 28 ( MPrep)
CAT 7 480 ( Q 36 V 20) GMAT Prep

I was very excited to get the 590 and see improvement in verbal because I feel like my quant is not going too much up and verbal will be my area to improve in order to get 600. Also, after using Mprep, i really feel like i understand the test, the strategy, and the material more. Then after May 28, I got sick but still try to study a bit each day.

I am so disappointed at myself, how can I got worse after restudy for 3 months and got back to 480? I just really start to wonder am I not smart enough to do this? I have been trying to remain cheerful and work hard in this process but I just dont really know what to do anymore. For all my CAT, i finished all the problems and made guess here and there instead of rushing at the end. However, I found that I took too long to do SC and have to skip more CR. RC was usually my strength but on my CAT 7 RC was definitely a lot harder compare to the other tests. It took me a lot of courage to write down all my scores here as I know most people are in there 600 trying to improve to 700, so I feel dumbed to share my stories but my confidence has dropped after seeing the GMAT prep score

My questions are
1) should I postponed my exam again? ( I am still on medication but i dont want to use this as excuse)
2) Even if i do, what else can I do to improve?
3) Why do my verbal score go up an down so much ?

Thank you very much