Great Practice Test Scores, Poor Showing on Actual Test

[ajafari]

Hi Stacy,

I felt great the past two months leading up to my test day yesterday. My practice test (which were about once a week in test conditions i.e. breaks and AWA's) were as follows, 690 mgmat, 670 mgmat, 710 mgmat, 700 mgmat, 720(gmatprep), 700(gmat prep). In the last month all my scores were 700+.

On test day yesterday I got a 640 Q44 V34, my average breakdown in the 700 score tests had been ~Q47 ~V40.

I will be doing a post-exam assessment but I wanted your "diagnosis" as well as to see what I should do from here.

After perusing this forum I stumbled upon your article "http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2009/10/26/my-score-dropped-figuring-out-what-went-wrong"

In regards to #1 Official Test conditions I can honestly say that wasn't a factor. But I think that #2-#4 (stamina, timing, and anxiety) all played a little factor each.

Stamina
Getting tired midway through sections (mainly verbal) and wanting it to end or wanting to move on to the next problem. In a couple instances on verbal I felt the fatigue kick in, in these cases i looked away from the screen for 5 seconds to try to re-focus. Also, I didn't experience the "excited" "ready to challenge any problem" type of feeling I think I needed. Instead, I was wary and just hoping I was doing well.

Timing
I felt more rushed especially in verbal than I had ever felt on a practice exam. Probably due to test anxiety.
Good pace throughout quant, finished with under 1 min. felt rushed on verbal in questions ~30-35, but i picked up the pace and realized i was in good shape for #36-41. Finished verbal with 1:30 left.

Test Anxiety
This played into stamina and timing as indicated above. Again, this was not profound and maybe only moderately higher than my practice tests.
I also did experience some anxiety during the test in the quant in the first 2 questions, but then felt fine with quant after that. On verbal it was a little bit worse i.e. (mostly feeling the rush of the time, but also thinking about finding out my overall score in a couple instances).

In conclusion for these 3 factors, it was hard for me to diagnose since none of these 3 areas was a red flag coming out of the test. Meaning I knew I didn't totally mess up on any of these 3 criterias. However, I think all 3 of these in low to moderate degrees combined to make me perform worse than I did on my practice tests.

Interestingly enough, I felt good about quant as I could "see" how to do the problem and more importantly the traps built into the problem. I thought I would get at least a 47 on quant. Also since my timing in quant was good and I felt good about it I wonder why I scored lower than usual. Any thoughts?

I felt worse off in verbal but always kept the notion that "the test is going to be hard for everyone regardless of your skill level" in the back of my mind.

I believe my "gmat knowledge" at the moment is at the 700 level, but my test taking performance that day brought it down. By the way this was my first attempt.

So what's next from here, I've done all the OG problems at least twice but it seems at this point it's more about feeling comfortable with the timing and the jitters. Having done it once already I feel like the next time would be almost flawless. I was thinking of re-doing the MGMAT's (1 per week per your advice).

I was thinking of giving myself a 1.5 weeks off to rejuvenate and get re-motivated since I’ve experienced the burnout of 4 months of studying. Is that too much time off? How long should I give myself until my next test?

Also, since Ron lives in my area I will probably do a couple hrs of private tutoring with him. But is there any area I should focus on? I think at this point its mostly strategy and maybe fine tuning on some of the 700 level problems.


Thanks!

[RonPurewal]

Stamina
Getting tired midway through sections (mainly verbal) and wanting it to end or wanting to move on to the next problem. In a couple instances on verbal I felt the fatigue kick in, in these cases i looked away from the screen for 5 seconds to try to re-focus. Also, I didn't experience the "excited" "ready to challenge any problem" type of feeling I think I needed. Instead, I was wary and just hoping I was doing well.

here are a couple of relevant tips regarding the above:

* do not, EVER, think about how your performance is going during the test.
remember that the adaptive nature of the test means, among other things, that you WILL NOT be able to determine the level of your performance with any degree of accuracy.

you may know this already - at least in the back of your head - but your comment about "hoping you were doing well" seems to indicate that you were still thinking about performance levels during the exam.

Timing
I felt more rushed especially in verbal than I had ever felt on a practice exam. Probably due to test anxiety.
Good pace throughout quant, finished with under 1 min. felt rushed on verbal in questions ~30-35, but i picked up the pace and realized i was in good shape for #36-41. Finished verbal with 1:30 left.

these sound like good timings.

how did you get caught back up? did you just try to speed up the average pace per question?
if so, that's usually not the best way to proceed. the best way to get back on time is to throw away problems (i.e., just guess on them) in areas that are traditionally weak for you.

this is usually a difficult thing for most people to do - they are understandably resistant to this advice - but it's almost always better than trying to rush everything.

Test Anxiety
This played into stamina and timing as indicated above. Again, this was not profound and maybe only moderately higher than my practice tests.
I also did experience some anxiety during the test in the quant in the first 2 questions, but then felt fine with quant after that. On verbal it was a little bit worse i.e. (mostly feeling the rush of the time, but also thinking about finding out my overall score in a couple instances).

NEVER think about your score.
NEVER think about difficulty levels of questions.

these two things are easy for me to say, but difficult for you to implement. still, they are two of the most important things that i could possibly tell you about this exam.

In conclusion for these 3 factors, it was hard for me to diagnose since none of these 3 areas was a red flag coming out of the test. Meaning I knew I didn't totally mess up on any of these 3 criterias. However, I think all 3 of these in low to moderate degrees combined to make me perform worse than I did on my practice tests.

that's quite possible. i think the above factors may have played a bigger role than you might think.

especially if you had to play hurry-up offense to get caught back up with time on the verbal!
even though you may not actually have been behind for too long, you still almost certainly lost some additional points when you "played catch-up".

Interestingly enough, I felt good about quant as I could "see" how to do the problem and more importantly the traps built into the problem. I thought I would get at least a 47 on quant. Also since my timing in quant was good and I felt good about it I wonder why I scored lower than usual. Any thoughts?

this could be good, or this could be bad.

if this means "i could see the general protocol for solving the problems", then that's good. in fact, that's what you should strive for: coming up with general approaches.
at the beginning, you don't have to - and, indeed, shouldn't - figure out anything more than how to start the problem. the rest of the problem should come along as you proceed.

if this means "could see all the way through the problem, from start to finish", then you're probably being suckered.
if there is one thing that the gmat problem writers are good at, it's writing problems that you CAN'T "see all the way through" from start to finish.
so, if you think you can just chart your whole course through a problem with a single glance or two, then something is almost certainly wrong.

So what's next from here, I've done all the OG problems at least twice but it seems at this point it's more about feeling comfortable with the timing and the jitters. Having done it once already I feel like the next time would be almost flawless. I was thinking of re-doing the MGMAT's (1 per week per your advice).

hmm.

when you say "i've done all the OG problems", are you getting takeaways that you can apply to other problems?

if all you're doing is solving the problem, checking what went wrong (if anything), and then going and doing another problem, then you are basically deriving zero benefit from the practice.

you should be able to fill in STIMULUS and RESPONSE in the following statement:
"if i see (STIMULUS) on future problems, i should (RESPONSE)."
if you can't fill in this statement in at least one way for each problem, then you're not deriving any benefit from the problems for which you can't.

I was thinking of giving myself a 1.5 weeks off to rejuvenate and get re-motivated since I’ve experienced the burnout of 4 months of studying. Is that too much time off? How long should I give myself until my next test?

nah, that's not a lot of time off. not much forgetting is going to occur in a period of less than a month or so.

[ajafari]

how did you get caught back up? did you just try to speed up the average pace per question?
if so, that's usually not the best way to proceed. the best way to get back on time is to throw away problems (i.e., just guess on them) in areas that are traditionally weak for you.

Yes, I rushed through 5-7 problems including 3-4 RC questions. After which I slowed down to a normal pace.

if this means "could see all the way through the problem, from start to finish", then you're probably being suckered.
if there is one thing that the gmat problem writers are good at, it's writing problems that you CAN'T "see all the way through" from start to finish.
so, if you think you can just chart your whole course through a problem with a single glance or two, then something is almost certainly wrong.

For the most part I was able to identify and proceed with each question rather than being able to see until the finish.

when you say "i've done all the OG problems", are you getting takeaways that you can apply to other problems?

if all you're doing is solving the problem, checking what went wrong (if anything), and then going and doing another problem, then you are basically deriving zero benefit from the practice.

you should be able to fill in STIMULUS and RESPONSE in the following statement:
"if i see (STIMULUS) on future problems, i should (RESPONSE)."
if you can't fill in this statement in at least one way for each problem, then you're not deriving any benefit from the problems for which you can't.

This is what I have been doing for the past 2 months, and I believe the reason for the spike in my practice scores (along with better time mgmt). I will definitely keep to this strategy for this 2nd go around. Just not sure whether I should still continue on the OG or use other sources.

I definitely feel I have room to learn from the OG S.C. and a little more room from Quant, but not much for RC and CR since I can almost remember the right answers at this point. My other resources are 1000s for RC, CR, SC, GMATClub which I already have access to, prior paper tests, etc.

[StaceyKoprince]

Yes, I rushed through 5-7 problems including 3-4 RC questions. After which I slowed down to a normal pace.

Okay, so if you find yourself in trouble on timing again, don't do what you did last time. What you did was give yourself a chance to miss 5-7 problems. Bad idea. Instead, the next time you see a hard question in your area of weakness (let's say you hate CR assumption questions and one pops up), make a random guess and move on immediately. You've sacrificed one question, yes, but now you have saved almost 2 minutes. More importantly, you aren't putting yourself in a position to have 4+ questions wrong in a row, which is REALLY bad for your score.

Re: what to use to study, yes, continue to use OG. The issue isn't whether you can tell me what the right answer is. The issue is whether you can explain to me how to recognize the problem type, why the right answer is right (and, on verbal, why the wrong answers are wrong), the best approach to the problem for you, what the traps are, what mistakes people would have to make to fall into those traps, how to avoid the traps, how to make an educated guess, how to use what you learned on the problem to answer some future problem more efficiently, etc. Until you can do those things, you're not done studying the problem. :)

I would go back to older OG sources before I would use the 1000 stuff or paper tests. We've got OG 12, OG11, and OG10, verbal supplement 2 and verbal supplement 1. There's a lot of overlap, yes, but there are a LOT of unique questions in those 5 books.