750 - Q50, V41. Burnout: Believe me, it happens for real!

[UjjawalC718]

Hi MGMAT tutors (special shoutout to Ron and Stacey),

I would like to thank you all for the wonderful work that MGMAT community has done in this forum. MGMAT forums are invaluable gems for all the students. I spent hours reading up posts on GPrep Verbal SC questions, and this 750 is surely attributable to your continued excellence and help here.

I'm from India and thus, rightfully so, a non-native English speaker. I took my GMAT exam today, and it was my first attempt at it. Although 750 (Q50, V41, IR7) can be considered a respectable score, I'll share my case. Given the amount of effort I'd put in the process (I spent last three months preparing for the exam, and countless hours in total!), I've nonetheless been very disappointed with the score. I'd been expecting a 770, but seems like the 30 point deviation took its toll over me. You'd wonder why?

There were mainly two reasons why I wanted a super-high score : get into an incredible business school with less work experience and move to US (I happen to have a good profile and have just graduated from college), and improve myself. I covered a lot of ground for the latter of the two, and I have improved significantly in my writing and speaking (accurate grammar always helps!) ability since I started preparing (crediting it to MGMAT Forums and GMAT itself). I'm expecting a 6 in AWA knowing that I've learnt how to play with modifiers, extend sentences and increase argument persuasiveness while maintaining complexity, a skill that MGMAT has helped me at ;)

I'd worked too hard for the exam, and ended up with a burn-out. So as I was writing my exam today, my mind eventually just shut itself, and I was barely able to process much of the information right in front of me. In fact, very simple things were taking too long for me to process, all of these things adding to my anxiety and stress during the exam. I'd prepared well, but I lacked the strategy to optimize my performance on exam day: I never wrote practice exams during the same time of the day before, and never took breaks whenever I wrote practice exams at home.

I'm still uncertain about writing the exam again. I had (over)prepared with LSAT CR questions (achieving accuracy of over 92% with 1 min 40 seconds on average), LSAT RC (again 90+% accuracy, reading each 400 word passage in less than 2:15) and SC (95+% accuracy within a minute towards the last phase of my preparation), all these things while solving over 5000 questions in total (including the LSATs, OGs, Manhattan Books, repeats and practice tests). But in the exam today, something snapped, and I couldn't do simple things.I just couldn't focus on any RC passage, and each passage seemed to be too difficult and I'm sure to have made most mistakes in RC section; even each CR question's logic somehow eluded me.

Here were my practice scores :

Aug.30 GMATPrep1 730 (Q50V38) Wrong: Q(6),CR(1),RC(1),SC(9)
Oct.12 GMATPrep2 780 (Q51V46) Wrong: Q(4),CR(2),RC(0),SC(2)
Oct.19 GMATPrep ExamPack1-1 770 (Q50V44) Wrong: Q(3),CR(4),RC(1),SC(2)
Oct.22 GMATPrep ExamPack1-2 780 (Q51V47) Wrong: Q(1),CR(0),RC(1),SC(0)
Oct.26 GMATPrep 1(Repeat) 770 (Q51V45) Wrong: Q(5),RC(5) - I wanted to fall off to sleep in RC
Oct.26 GMATPrep 2(Repeat) 770 (Q50V45) Wrong: Q(4),CR(2),RC(1)

I'm confused whether I should write my exam again, and do that immediately in the near future, or whether it will be better for me to take time off , relax, and come back after sometime (though this way would essentially make all I've learnt attenuate exponentially with time).

Moreover, will business schools see me retaking after a 750 as a snob? Because if I get a higher score, it'll invariably be very insignificant to vary my chances (given how admission consultants say that scores matter only to a point), and if I end up getting a lower score, it will make my score report blotched instead! Any help or guidance will be helpful.

I was also seriously considering taking up the GMAT to teach (think MGMAT - my wishful thinking) part-time to students who're likewise non-native speakers (in verbal section, our thought process sometimes runs tangential to native speakers'). But, it seems like I messed up the day today!

[StaceyKoprince]

Wow, amazing! Great job. You should not be even slightly disappointed with that score - give yourself a break! Only 2% of people score that well!! :)

Now, the not so great news: Getting a higher score will not make up less work experience. The GMAT is used as a "threshold" marker: once you hit a certain threshold, they know you can handle the work in their program. They make the real decision on other factors - and one of those very important factors is work experience. Getting a good GMAT score does not in any way take the place of solid real-life experience.

Literally the ONLY reason, at this point, that you'd want to take the test again is if you really do want to teach for us. I have to warn you: we only hire people with prior teaching experience (minimum 2-3 years), and even then, we hire less than 10% of applicants (people who DO have both the test scores and the teaching experience). It's a real job, even if part-time, and we have very strict standards.

That's not to say that you shouldn't go for it, of course - just know what you're getting yourself into. :)

Anyway, if I were you, I'd now turn my attention to a job! The top US b-schools typically require a minimum of 2 years of work experience (and the average for admitted applicants is typically 4 to 6 years). I'd definitely recommend putting that GMAT score on your resume; depending on your field, that may catch an employer's eye. Or, if you already have a job, then turn your attention to learning as much as possible and progressing as far as possible - show that that you're ambitious and want to go far!