2nd Attempt

[alyssapremji]

Hi Stacey

I took the GMAT over a month ago and scored a 680 (M 47, V 38, AWA 6.0). I plan on retaking the exam within the next couple months aiming for 720+ but I am not too sure as to how to go about forming a solid game plan.

During the exam I felt the math was extremely difficult but I scored decently on that portion compared to how I felt during the exam. I thought the verbal was extremely easy and felt very confident about my answers throughout and was very disappointed to see my verbal score. I have been working on brushing up on particular weaknesses I have in the math, but I do not quite know how to go about studying for the verbal again as I have exhausted nearly all of the OG guide, GMAT Prep, and MGMAT CAT exams. Do you have any advice as to how I can improve my verbal score at this point?

Thank you very much. I would really appreciate your advice.

Alyssa

[rajeevtenneti]

Hi stacey and Alyssa,
I have a similar issue .My scores were less compared to Alyssa(Q 48 V 27 ) , i felt i did better(compared to GMAT Prep tests) in verbal during the exam i expected my verbal score to be in the range of 30-32 that didnt happen.
I am planning to give a second attempt , i am confident that i can bring up my Quant score to more than 50,But i dont know how to prepare for the verbal .
As is the case with Alyssa i prepared OG and verbal review ,in addition to that went throgh MGMAT Sentence correction book .I have no idea now on what to prepare to get a respectable score in Verbal .
Kindly, suggest on what kind of preparation is required,what books to study and on how i can score above 40 in verbal.

Best Regards,
Rajeev

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm mostly going to address Alyssa's question here; Rajeev, if you'd like to have an in-depth conversation about your specific issue, please start a separate thread. (Right now, you two have similar issues, but things will get more complicated as we discuss. It becomes too confusing to discuss two separate people in one thread.)

First, this is a pretty typical situation for a CAT: the better you do, the harder you feel the test is. That's not how paper tests works, so it feels weird, but it's normal for a CAT.

Second, if either of you took the course, then you're eligible for a free Post-Exam Assessment. This is a phone call with an instructor to figure out what went wrong and come up with a plan to re-take the test. If this applies to you, please send an email to studentservices@manhattangmat.com ASAP and request the Post-Exam Assessment. Let me know whether this applies to you - I'll give you some things to get started with below, but if you can do a PEA, you'll get a much more comprehensive review and game plan.

Third, can you give me some more detail as to what you'd been scoring on your practice tests, so that we can see how that compares to your real test scores? Also please let me know whether you took the practice tests under full official conditions (includings essays and 8-minute breaks). If you didn't, then part of it could be simple stamina: you weren't fully prepared for the length of time, the lack of mental breaks, etc, and your performance on the verbal (the last part of the test) suffered as a result.

As a general rule, most of our learning comes from review and analysis of problems we've already tried. I'd say maybe 15-20% of our learning comes from trying problems for the first time, and the rest comes from the 5-10 minutes we spend reviewing the problems afterwards. If you took the course, the "how to review" lesson was during session 2 and you can download the handout from the Course Downloads section of your student center. Here are the questions:

Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique?
Did I make a CONNECTION to previous experience? Or did I have to do it all from scratch?
Did I COMPREHEND the symbols, text, questions, statements, and answer choices?
Did I understand the CONTENT being tested?
Did I choose the best APPROACH?
Did I have the SKILLS to follow through?
Am I comfortable with OTHER STRATEGIES that would have worked, at least partially? How should I have made an educated guess?
Do I understand every TRAP & TRICK that the writer built into the question, including wrong answers?
Have I MASTERED this problem? Could I explain every aspect, fully, to someone else?
How will I RECOGNIZE similar problems in the future?

So - it actually doesn't matter that you've already done lots of these problems once (OG, etc). You're not done with them, because you haven't learned everything you could've learned from them - which doesn't come from just doing them in the first place. Make sense? :)

By the way, excellent job on the essays - you may want to "go for a 5" next time to reduce the amount of brain energy you use. That will help you increase your mental stamina for the verbal section. And if you didn't do the essays on practice tests, start doing them. I know you'll be fine on the score, but you also need to practice that stamina.

[rajeevtenneti]

Hi Stacey,
Thank you for your reply.I almost got my answer ,so i am just replying here instead of a separate thread ,even I felt that i need to spend more time analyzing mistakes but didn't get that chance,i went short of time before the exam,i didn't know which methodology to choose,whether to do more questions or to analyze the mistakes i made ,i chose the former(clearly wrong choice,i feel it now).
No i didn't take the course you were mentioning .In the GMAT prep practice tests i scored 560 and 590.I made lot of silly mistakes in quant ,Yes i did attempt tests under actual test conditions and i made sure that i am prepared for the length of the exam.My problem as per my analysis lies clearly in hurried preparation towards verbal .I didn't have much time to contemplate on the wrong answers during my practice before the exam, i feel .
In verbal i made 21 mistakes in 2nd Prep test(I just remember this test results as i noted the result down to evaluate) ,didn't get much time to check the answers explanations for these questions as i took this 2nd Prep test a day before my actual GMAT exam.I made 13 mistakes in Sentence correction alone.6 mistakes in CR(yes this also needs improvement ) and 3 wrong answers in Reading Comprehension. So my weakness is clear it is SC .In the actual test i felt that verbal was easier compared to the GMAT Prep test 2 may be because i made mistakes i got relatively easier questions ?.
Ok i will go thru OG and Verbal review again carefully analysing Answers,but any other material that i can use to check my progress because i think answers to the SC and CR questions in OG and Verbal review are fresh in my mind? Do i need to attempt more tests ?

Also during my practice exams i felt i was able to narrow down to 2 options in CR or sentence correction.Always i found the other option was correct .( I felt that i should use a strategy ,by which once i narrowed down to 2 options i would choose the option which i would least prefer ,which obviously had greater probability of being the correct Answer. :D - I didn't use this method in actual exam anyways :D )

Best Regards,
Rajeev.

[StaceyKoprince]

any other material that i can use to check my progress because i think answers to the SC and CR questions in OG and Verbal review are fresh in my mind?

It doesn't matter that you already know the answers. You don't know why the right answers are right, why the wrong ones are wrong, why someone would choose one of the wrong answers, why someone would eliminate the right answer, etc. So you haven't really learned what you needed to learn from those questions - and, until you do that analysis, it's a waste to go do a bunch of new questions, because you haven't yet learned what you needed to learn.

So, that's where you start. Once you think you've actually learned what you should have been learning, you can start to do new problems and test yourself to see if you really did learn it! Ditto on practice tests - except even more so. You don't learn while you're taking a practice test - you're just doing the test, trying to remember and apply everything you learned before the test started. Focus on learning first. Then you can worry about testing yourself via individual problems or full tests.

Also during my practice exams i felt i was able to narrow down to 2 options in CR or sentence correction.Always i found the other option was correct.

Use your logic skills to understand what's happening. You noticed the ones you got wrong because you got them wrong. The times when you narrowed to 2 and did guess right - well, you got them right, so you didn't notice. :)

This is where you need to analyze the right vs. wrong answers (and on the ones that you got right too - that was still a guess!). Ask yourself:
- why was the wrong answer so tempting? why did it look like it might be right? (be as explicit as possible)
- why was it actually wrong? what specific words indicate that it is wrong and how did I overlook those clues the first time?
- why did the right answer seem wrong? what made it so tempting to cross off the right answer? why were those things actually okay; what was my error in thinking that they were wrong?
- why was it actually right?