6 months for poor results

[jean-baptiste]

Hello,

My name is Jean-Baptiste, and I am a french student currently in exchange in NYC.

In May 2013, I decided to start studying for the GMAT. I bought these books :
- Numbers properties
- Geometry
- Sentence correction

I studied them for 1 month, and then went to NY in order to start preparing for my academic exchange year there. I figured it was a good opportunity to take a full prep course at MGMAT (25th street NYC).

I did the full prep, and the full syllabus.

My first CAT, after 1 week of prep was not that awful considering the fact that I was just beginning the prep
- CAT 1 : 620 (Quant 39, Verbal 35)

My CAT 2, after the full prep, was a disaster, and the CAT 2 weeks later was not better :
- CAT 2 : 570 (Quant 36, Verbal 31)
- CAT 3 : 570. (quant 37, verbal 31)

I asked what was going on to my professor, and he replied that it was normal that my score dropped: I was learning new things and took too much time to apply them. According to him, I just had to work more on the concepts I learned and my score would eventually increase.

After the prep, I took 1 month to focus on my biggest weakness : Problem solving. I did the whole OG 13 on PS, and reviewed every single problem.

After this period, I took my CAT 4, and got 660 (Quant : 42, verb : 38). I was so happy at this time ! I had only 1 month left for the exam, but I thought that focusing on the Verbal to get above 40 was the best strategy.

Therefore, I focused on verbal, and did almost every question of CR in OG13, and all the RC questions of the Verbal Supplement.
It took me two weeks to do so, and at the end I took my first Gmat Prep test.

I got 580 (Quant 43, Verbal 27).

- I had only 14 questions wrong over 42 questions total, how can it be possible that I have 27 ? (my timing was perfect, so that is not the issue)
- How can you explain the fact that my Verbal score dropped from 38 at my last CAT, to 27 in this test ?
- More generally speaking, WHY do I have a score (580) that is worse than my first CAT (620), after 5 months of preparation ?

I feel like the prep did not help me at all in improving my score.

Because 580 is way too low, I was forced to push the exam date in one month. My strategy is to focus on verbal, but how can I do so if I already did so much work with MGMAT prep material, without any results ?

I am considering subscribing for e-gmat, but I don't even know if it is a good idea.

I have one month to go from 580 to 680, how can I handle that ? I'm clueless.

[StaceyKoprince]

Bonjour! (J'habite à Montréal.) Je suis désolée que vous rencontrez des difficultés avec le GMAT.

Hmm, I do wonder whether you're having issues with timing - that's the most common cause of a big score drop. (It's incredibly rare to have "perfect" timing - even people scoring in the 99th percentile struggle with timing at times! I talk to students every day who aren't aware of their timing issues, but I rarely talk to someone who really does have perfect timing. :)

Use this article to analyze your most recent MGMAT CAT:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... ice-tests/

Did you take all of your practice tests under full official conditions? (30m essay, 30 min IR, 8m break, 75m quant, 8m break, 75m verbal)

For any tests on which you skipped a section (essay or IR, for example), your Q and V scores might have been artificially inflated. A lot of people skip the essay and IR on their first practice tests - that's another reason why the next practice test often doesn't increase. You have actually gotten better, but now you are also doing the essay and IR sections, which tire you out and hurt your performance on Q and V.

Also, you mentioned that you took our course. Did you do your Post-Course Assessment? (This is a free 30-minute phone call with a teacher to discuss your practice test results and figure out your plan to get ready for the test.) If not, sign up for this ASAP.

This service is only officially offered for 1 month after the last day of your course, but if you call up the office and tell them how much you're struggling, and ask really nicely, they'll probably let you still sign up. :)

Re: your scoring question, the test is not scored based upon percentage correct - the algorithm is very complicated. Most people answer approximately 60% of their questions correctly, regardless of their final score.

If you have already done your PCA (or if you sign up for a PCA and also want my advice), then use that article I linked above to analyze your most recent MGMAT tests. Also, look at your GMATPrep test and tell me:
- How many questions did you answer incorrectly among the last 10 questions? Among the last 5?
- Did you have any strings of 4 or more wrong answers? At which point in the section?

Unfortunately, GMATPrep does not show us difficulty levels, so we can't analyze whether you were missing too many lower-ranked questions. You can, though, look through the questions themselves and ask yourself whether you think any fall into the category of "careless mistakes." It's okay to have a couple of those, but if you have a lot, then your score can really drop.

Note: the rate of careless mistakes increases when you are tired or burned out. If you hadn't been doing essay and IR before but did them on this test, then that might explain why your verbal score dropped - you were a lot more tired than you usually were because normally you finished your practice tests at the same time that you were starting the verbal section on this test. Same thing if you had some other reason why you were particularly mentally fatigued when you took that test.

If you go through all of this analysis but still can't figure out what might have happened, then you've got one more thing to try: take another official practice test and see what happens. If your score jumps up again, then that one test might have been a fluke. If your score is low again, then you'll have more information to help you figure out why.

You can re-take one of the free GMATPrep tests but you might see some of the same questions. If you think you won't remember most of them, though, that's okay.

Alternatively, if you want to do another official practice test, you can buy 2 more practice tests from GMAC for $40. (They still don't give you any performance data or explanations, unfortunately.)

Either way, TIME yourself. If you have a smart phone, it should have a Lap timer: you start the timer and then just keep pushing the button every time you finish a problem. The timer keeps running and just records every time you push the button. When you're done, you have a record of how much time you spent on each problem.

Laissez-moi savoir - on va trouver la solution.

[jean-baptiste]

Dear Mrs. Koprince,

Thank you for your answer.

- Obviously my timing was homogeneous :
- Average PS : 2 min
- Average SC : 1min30
- Average DS = 1min50
- Average CR = 2min 10
- Average RC = 1min50
I strongly follow the manhattan gmat timing table (at what question you should be every 15 minutes), which I found really useful.

- Except the first CAT, I took all my CATs and GMat prep under official conditions

- I did the PCA. The instructor told me that my results were quite homogenous (no major discrepancy). He told me that I may have to work on RC more, and weaken the argument. I did work a lot on RC (I did all the verbal 2 passages).

The following is the analysis of my last CAT (660) in verbal :
- SC : 67% accuracy
- CR : 64% accuracy (0% describe the role (2 questions), 0% weaken the argument (2 questions))
- RC : 58% accuracy

The following is my analysis of my last GMAT prep test (that I took 2 weeks after my 660 CAT). I will only focus on verbal as it is my main weakness (I had Q43 in both tests, which is sufficient to me).

Sentence correction : 70.59 accuracy (17 questions)
Critical reasoning : 41.7 accuracy (12 questions)
Reading comprehension : 83.3 accuracy (12 questions)

On CR, the questions I got wrong were :
- 2 weaken
- 1 strengten
- 3 complete the passage
- 1 conclusion

Finally, the structure of my test regarding Wrong and right questions in order is :

1 : W 22 : W
2 : C 23 : C
3 : C 24 : C
4 : C 25 : W
5 : W 26 : W
6 : W 27 : W
7 : W 28 : C
8 : C 29 : C
9 : C 30 : C
10 : C 31 : W
11 : C 32 : W
12 : C 33 : C
13 : C 34 : W
14 : C 35 : C
15 : C 36 : C
16 : C 37 : C
17 : C 38 : W
18 : W 39 : C
19 : C 40 : C
20 : W 41 : C
21 : C

- I don't understand why I had some many CR questions wrong.


Thank you for your time and consideration,
Jean-Baptiste

[StaceyKoprince]

Go and pull up your most recent GMAT test. Click on the quant problem list (so that you're looking at all of the quant problems from that test).

Click on the column labeled Time.

Scroll down to the bottom - these are the questions on which you took the most amount of time. Notice anything?

Do this before you keep reading and see what you can figure out.

Then keep reading.

You had 11 questions over 2m30s (your longest question was 4 minutes). Of those questions, you answered 3 correctly and 8 incorrectly. All but two of those questions are PS questions - so you are much more likely to spend too long on problem solving, not on data sufficiency.

What do you think that data is telling you?

This is the kind of analysis I was talking about when I asked you to analyze your tests in my last post. :)

First, you do have timing problems. Second, you are making poor decisions about where to spend extra time. This is very common - many people do this. This extra time is not helping you because you are mostly answering those questions incorrectly anyway. You also have other, faster questions that are wrong. How many were careless mistakes? Those mistakes might have been caused by rushing because you spent too much time on other problems.

You can probably get better at quant - but you will struggle to do so if you are not even aware that you have a timing problem in the first place! So what do you need to do in order to get better at cutting yourself off on certain problems? You already "know" intellectually that you shouldn't spend so much time on problems that are too hard for you anyway, but you're still doing so. You're going to need to retrain yourself:

http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... -to-do-it/

Next, your verbal score has consistently been higher than your quant score on all of your MGMAT tests (the percentile rankings tell you how "good" the score is). On your last test, for example, your verbal score of 38 put you in the 84th percentile for verbal. Your quant score of 42 put you in the 57th percentile for quant. In other words, if you want to lift your score higher than 660, you will also need to focus on quant (you only have so much further that you can go with verbal, and the higher you try to go, the harder it gets).

Your verbal score dropped on your GMATPrep test. Your SC and RC performance was quite good, but your CR performance really hurt you. Complete the Argument structures are just a way of writing the question - the question type is still one of the normal question types, usually Find the Assumption or Strengthen. Go look at those questions and try to figure out what types they really are. (This is a skill you should have for the test!)

3 of the 7 incorrect questions were Strengthen or Weaken. In addition, we know that Complete the Argument usually fall into the category of Find the Assumption or Strengthen. In other words, it's likely that 6 of the 7 incorrect CRs are in the Assumption Family of questions - so you need some work in this area:

https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... reasoning/

Use the above to learn what you should be doing on the Assumption Family questions. Use that knowledge to review the GMATPrep CR questions to try to figure out why you got them wrong. Were you having trouble identifying the question type? Deconstructing the argument? Finding the conclusion? Understanding the assumptions? Evaluating the answer choices?

You can find solutions to many GMATPrep problems here in the forums (in the GMATPrep Verbal and GMATPrep Quant) folders. Read what the teachers have to say about the answers. Where does your thinking differ or deviate from what the teachers say?

On your MGMAT tests, your verbal timing has typically been better than your timing on quant (as has your performance in general), though you do sometimes tend to have clusters of wrong answers - you may be having some mental stamina issues in the verbal section. Possibly this contributed to the verbal score drop on your GMATPrep test.

Finally, you said that Q43 is an acceptable score for you. What is your goal on the verbal side? Is it acceptable to return to the 38 level (84th percentile) for an overall score of ~660?

Pushing verbal to 40+ means pushing your skills to the 90th percentile or higher - that's a VERY high score. Are you confident that you can achieve your desired score increase by working only on verbal? You may need to work on quant as well.

One more thing - you took our course, so you worked with a specific instructor. Have you spoken to / emailed with him or her at all? Your teacher may have some good ideas for you based upon observing your strengths and weaknesses during the course.