No improvement in Verbal score

[soumya_165]

Hi Stacey, I had asked you the same question during the session on GMAT vs GRE that was held today.

I have given GMAT 3 times and the verbal score has been 25, 27, and 27 During the mocks I score more than 34 but I seriously find it difficult to understand what goes wrong during the actual exam.

I usually face the following issues:
1. During the actual exam, SC questions seems to me some questions that I have not yet prepared. I just struggle to find the errors, whereas during the mocks I find the errors pretty easily.
2. Mental Fatigue: My brain becomes so tired that I feel bored going through the lengthy passages. If an RC passage comes at the end then I find it difficult to concentrate and as a result I would have marked them incorrectly, leading to my scores getting dropped substantially.

I feel if I can overcome the above 2 problems then I will be able to do well in Verbal. If you have some ways that you can suggest then please do so.

Thanks in advance.

[StaceyKoprince]

Thanks for coming to the session!

Why do you think that you suffer more from mental fatigue on the real thing than on practice tests? Are you doing the essay and IR sections (and taking them just as seriously) on practice tests? Are you limiting yourself to two 8-minute breaks on practice tests?

Are you more likely to hang on and spend too much brain energy on really hard IR or quant questions on the real thing because you know it counts this time?

What kinds of anxiety symptoms do you experience? (We all have at least some anxiety during the test, but some people have stronger symptoms that can affect them more as the test goes on.)

The answer likely lies somewhere in the combination of the above. I'm going to guess that you do let yourself get sucked into some IR and quant questions that, in hindsight, were not worth the mental energy *even if you answered the question correctly.*

You really do have to think of this test as a test of your ability to manage two scarce resources: time and mental energy. There are times when I let a quant question go not because I can't do it (I can), but because the mental energy that that one question would require is too much - I'm not willing to spend it.

In order to manage that well, you have to know that this is what you're trying to do and you have to have the discipline to do it. You also have to know your strengths and weaknesses. I know if they give me something like 3-D geometry (where I'd have to visualize) or a really hard combinatorics, those are going to take more mental energy for me to do - probably too much to be worth it.

What you describe for #1 (SC), by the way, could be one of two things:
(1) This could be another symptom of mental fatigue; your brain is too tired to recognize stuff.
(2) It could also be that you haven't done a good job of studying the kinds of questions that don't contain obvious splits or differences.

This article can help with #2:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... orrection/