GMAT scores

[gustavoreis]

Hi!

I am transaction lawyer from Brazil. Starting an MBA next year would be an important and decisive step towards fulfilling with solitude my career change goals.

In the first GMAT I took on Sept. 27, 2010, my score was:

Scaled Score Percentile

Quant 42 61
Verbal 37 80
Total 650 79

I was confident that I could get a better score in the quant section and also that I could pump up my verbal score. Verbal has always been my strongest section - which is actually expected from a lawyer.

Today I took the test again and I got a good result in quant but a catastrophic result in verbal. As low as I had never got before, not even doing mocks or previous practices:

Scaled Score Percentile

Quant 48 82
Verbal 21 23
Total 570 55

I am not really sure what happened. Maybe I went to the Verbal section too confident about my quant performance. I knew right after I finished that my result would definitely not be the best one I'd ever gotten, but did not expect it to be so low. I actually did some decent previous study and sometimes I think that studying for the verbal section was actually worse than not having studied at all.

I am quite confused and would be glad to hear your comments and suggestions .

Many thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry you had such a rough experience on test day. (Though congratulations on your improvement in quant.)

Please read the below article and do the analysis described, then come back here and post a summary:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/a/2009/10/26 ... went-wrong

That will give us some ideas about why your score may have dropped. Once we know that, we can start figuring out what to do about those things.

In addition, we could use some additional data about your practice performance. If you took practice exams, please give us the results and please tell us whether you took the practice exams under 100% official conditions, including the essays. (If you did not, please tell us how you deviated from official conditions.)

If you took an MGMAT CAT, then you can use the below article to help analyze your strengths and weaknesses. Please also do that and let us know.

http://www.manhattangmat.com/articles/e ... -part1.cfm