Official GMAT: 640. Target Score: 720. Need advice

[AdityaV486]

Hi MGMAT staff,

I am Aditya from India. I have completed my GMAT exam and scored a lowly 640 and am now looking to revamp my entire strategy, formulate a new action plan (if required) for my next attempt. I seek the support of this forum to guide / advise me.
My target score is 720 but first a few pointers about by test prep.

I started prep in Oct'15 and had completed the following resources prior to the actual GMAT.

1. Complete 8 strategy guide set of MGMAT - Oct / Nov'15
2. Verbal & Quantz Official Guides - Completed them along with the MGMAT - Oct / Nov'15
3. Official Guide - 13th Edition - Dec'15
4. Redid the problems that i got wrong initially on the OG 13th edition. Now i know all these questions and its answers.
5. MGMAT 6 tests + GMAT prep 1 & 2

Didnt do : Use an elaborate error log (started it, didn't follow through) , didn't make or refer flashcards, GMAT Navigator

Below is the list of all my scores, from the tests that i had taken until the official exam.

http://imgur.com/nrv3gKa

Now a brief of the official exam and an analysis of the errors i made.

Overall: 640 - 71 Percentile

AWA: Fairly OK, dont see a concern here.
IR: 4 (31 percentile)
Not good at all. I struggled with lack of time. This has been a weak area but i am confident i can improve here once i complete the MGMAT IR questions as well as the 50 free OG questions (wiley). I feel i may have taken a gamble with this one with minimum prep before the exam.

Quant: 48 - 73 Percentile
I was flummoxed by the first question (Ratios) , got it wrong after 3 mins (should have earlier) but then i felt i got into my groove for the next 20 questions and do believe that it went smooth. Then i was stuck again.
For Q21-Q26 i felt all the questions were hard and that i was missing something. I spent a little more time on these questions.
These were my weak areas - Inequality , Statistics and the dreaded probability. But i did try to motor through and made sure i wasn't spending more than 2.5 to 3 mins on questions i wasn't sure about / or wasn't reaching a conclusive answer.
A few more easy questions later i realized that i had breezed through the section (with 4 mins left).
But I knew i messed up around 10-12 questions of the total 37 questions.
I took the 8 min break and got down to Verbal to fix the mess.

Verbal: 28 - 50 Percentile
This was my worst performance ever (including the diagnostic test i had taken 6 months ago).
I was stuck on the first RC passage. Went absolutely blank. My mind did not function. I read , re-read the passage and then may have even got the answers wrong. Decided to forget about it and move on.
There was some disturbance in the hall (the guy beside me was talking to himself during the test / reciting the answers). Although this did not bother me during Quantz, it got to me during the verbal section and completely threw me off my game. I tried putting on the headset , felt it way "too quite" , finally the guy moved to a different location and i moved on. (may be lost a good 3 minutes here)
Lots of lost ground to catch on, i guess i got a few hard CR questions. I think i got them right.
I motored through the next few SC questions, purely answering through my "gut feeling". The rules, they didn't matter at this point.
Some sense prevailed a few questions later and i felt i was getting back to my rhythm.
I was hoping to get, by some miracle, a boldface question (that would give me confidence that i was doing good) but it never happened. I completed the test eventually with 4 minutes left, extremely dejected / embarrassed.

I right away knew that my areas to improve were:
1. Focus more on difficult RC passages.
Inference questions were always my weakness. I need to improve that area right away.
2. Hard drill the SC concepts. I cannot afford to go blank on the rules and start relying on my gut. I felt that was a huge blunder.
3. I'm not quite sure if there is something that needs to be done on CR, as i felt i did fine there but i may have been wrong.

An important question here, as i am not 100% sure about all the areas that i had messed up, would you guys advice me to get the GMAT enhanced report.
I have now bought the MGMAT roadmap book, to understand if there was something fundamentally wrong with my prep.
I plan to read this book in the next 3-4 days and then do the following.

1. Reset my MGMAT 6 tests and then take 1 test (as a diagnostic) for the next attempt.
I will complete the CAT analysis mentioned by Stacey (Part 1 & 2) for this test and would know exactly what i need to improve (as i dont have the enhanced GMAT report yet)
The reason i havent done a CAT analysis for my last CAT (MGMAT 6) is that i was "too slow" on it and was on one extreme end of time management on it. But on the official GMAT, i ended up being on the other end: "Too fast". Contrasting results in 10 days.
So i feel i need to get a new , fresh report , new perspective.

2. I have zeroed in on some of the areas i need to improve on Quantz : Inequalities, Formula, Probability, Co ordinate.
I will redo the MGMAT guides that cover these topics, redo OG questions and maintain an error log to track progress.
On verbal i plan to redo (from scratch) the entire MGMAT SC book (i did this thoroughly earlier, so i thought) and also read all the strategies on the MGMAT RC (i did this too, apparently it wasnt enough)
For practice, i will do the retired GMAT or GMAT level (questions from the MGMAT forum - as i may have exhausted most of the official questions).

I intend to take a CAT test every week , starting 2 weeks from now - after i have worked on the quantz & verbal issues.

I will add on to this post, my actual CAT analysis (or GMAT enhanced report shortly) to get / give a better insight about my problem areas.
Could you please let me know if my approach seems fine so far or are there some glaring strategy errors that i am making once again that need to be fixed right away!

Thanks a lot for the patience. This was a really really long post and i appreciate the effort you folks have shown to reach the end

Aditya
640 (Q48 V28)

[StaceyKoprince]

The sense that I get reading through your preparation is that you focused very much on doing a bunch of questions but you didn't focus very much on analyzing afterwards - in order to learn how to think your way through new questions in future.

The GMAT is not a test of academic skill. It's a test of how you think. Read this:
http://tinyurl.com/2ndlevelofgmat

Does that describe how you were approaching your studies after you learned all of the basic rules, formulas, etc? If not, then this is what you need to do to get to the next level on the exam.

Next, read this:
http://tinyurl.com/executivereasoning

That's ultimately what the GMAT is really testing. You've got to train yourself to approach the test as a series of business or investment decisions - and you're not going to say "yes" to everything. Read this too:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... -the-gmat/

And now you may begin to see why this isn't the right metric:

Now i know all these questions and its answers.

Knowing certain problems backwards and forwards (including the answers) by itself doesn't help, because you'll never see those specific questions on the real test. The question is whether you have extracted the kinds of thinking that you would need to apply to new, different (but similar in some way) questions on the real GMAT. (And that's back to the 2nd Level analysis.)

Now, given what I've said so far, what is wrong with this statement?

i did try to motor through and made sure i wasn't spending more than 2.5 to 3 mins on questions i wasn't sure about / or wasn't reaching a conclusive answer.

If I have a limited amount of money to invest in certain new products for my division at work...am I going to choose to spend 50% to 100% more than the average on things that I'm not sure are going to work? On things that I already know are weaknesses (as you described in your post)?

Not unless I want to get fired. This is where you have to choose to let go - and a lot faster than 2.5 to 3m. You've got to change that mindset that you're trying to get everything (or most things) right.

You still did really well on quant - but if you want a 720, you need to get quant up to 50-ish (because quant is your stronger area).

My mind did not function. I read , re-read

I recognize this - it's a classic symptom of mental fatigue and stress. On the mental fatigue side of things, this can be made better by making better decisions about what NOT to do during quant and IR. You'll come into verbal with more mental energy.

On the stress / nerves side of things, try this:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/

For next time, do you want to practice using headsets or earplugs so that if outside noise starts bothering you, you're okay using one of the available remedies? (It's also the case that this was bothering you more during verbal because you were more mentally tired and stressed - so just expect that you are going to have less patience / tolerance the later you go in the test.)

I do think you should consider the Enhanced Score Report for the reasons you stated. See here for more info on what's included in that report:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... re-report/

Now, note that what you need to work on is not the hardest of the hard questions. You ended up in the 50th percentile on verbal, so the questions that you're trying to get right next time are in the 50th to 70th percentile range - that is, NOT the hardest questions out there. There's no great way to know the precise range that any practice question falls into, but just be aware that your goal at this point is not to seek out the hardest material and try to master that.

Next, for your plan:
1. You don't need to take a new CAT (and you took too many before - more on that below). Use the data from your 2 most recent practice CATs that did NOT include repeated questions. That is still recent enough to be directionally accurate. Still analyze that CAT 6. You swung over to "too fast" on the real test because you knew you had been too slow on CAT 6. You need to learn what you were doing so that you can find a good balance between too fast and too slow.

Read this:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... many-cats/

Next, just so you have everything in one place, here's the article for the CAT analysis:
http://tinyurl.com/analyzeyourcats

2. Probability is not very common - 0 or 1 on the real test. I wouldn't spend much time (if any) there. Just get those wrong fast if you know they're already a weakness. Coordinate plane is similar - often 1, maybe 2.

Don't just re-do entire guides, entire topics, questions, etc. Use the 2nd Level analysis above to drive the specific lessons, drills, etc, that you need to do. Start from your analysis of already-completed OG problems and work from there.

Eventually, you can get some new official problems via OG2016 (about 25% of the questions are different compared with OG13). There's also the GMAT Prep Question Pack add-on. BUT! Don't go get those now. You aren't actually learning what you need to learn from OG questions. Learn how to learn first, using the problems you've already done. THEN you can try new problems.

Okay. I said a lot. Read through everything and then tell me what you think and how you think you need to adjust your approach accordingly.