Should I take the GMAT the third time?

[RidhimaR926]

The first time I had taken classes from an institute "Princeton Review" and practised all their tests. I scored a 640 on the final exam. (Q-49 V-28 IR-4 AWA-5)
For the second attempt, I decided to study on my own and gave the Manhattan mock tests.

These are my scores:
Test 1 - 680
Test 2 - 640
Test 3 - 670
Test 4 - 680
Test 5 - 700
Test 6 - 740

GMAT Prep 1- 750
GMAT Prep 2- 740

(All done in the same order : Verbal, Quant, IR, AWA)

I still ended up getting a 650 on the final exam (Q-48 V-32, IR-7 AWA-5). I really want to score atleast a 700. For the second time around, my concepts were much clearer and I studied really hard on weekdays and weekends an gave all the mocks at the same time as the actual exam with the actual setup and breaks.
I'm not sure of why I messed up the final exam and how should I improve it? I really want to improve my score this year and apply in universities this year itself. Also, since a lot of University deadlines are approaching, I'm not sure if I have enough time to give the exam.
Even if I'm sure of giving the exam again, I don't know what to change in my strategy to score better in the final exam. Though, in both the exams I thought that I found the actual GMAT a little tougher than all the practise questions that I had done. I don't remember feeling any unsual anxiety on the day of the final exam.
Also during my second attempt we lost internet connection in the center for about an hour while we were in betweeen the maths section ,which I also think affected my Quant score.
So, I'm actually clueless about whether I can actually give the test in such a short span before the application deadlines this year and how do I start studying? What strategy to follow? What extra study material/ external help/ mock tests do I need to give?

Can someone please help me out her. Thanks in advance!!

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry that you had a disruptive official test experience! I would file a request for review and ask for a discount to retake the exam—if the interruption were only a few minutes, that wouldn't be as big of a deal, but an hour is a long time.

Your V score did go up by 4 points from test 1 to test 2. And your IR score also went up by 3 points—nice work there. I know you want more, but it's good to acknowledge to yourself the progress that you made. You're going in the right direction!

On your practice tests: Did you take these all under 100% official conditions? You didn't pause the exams, you didn't give yourself longer breaks than allowed on the real thing, you didn't have something to eat or drink during the exam sections, etc?

Did you see any questions that you had seen / studied before?

I'm trying to figure out whether there was some way that you were giving yourself an artificial advantage and that could have led to inflated practice test scores. If that wasn't the case, then you legitimately scored 700+ four times—so we should be able to figure out how to get you to that same level on the real test, too.

Did you order the Enhanced Score Report from the official test? The report costs $30 and provides additional data from your real test. It's not always useful, but it can often help us to figure out what the issues were during the test. For instance, it would show us if your performance on one question type was much lower than the other two. Or it would show us if you had a really slow start or, on the other hand, dropped a lot at the end of the section. Then we would know if there are specific question types or content areas that need work, or whether time management or mental stamina were issues, and so on.

Oh, and one more question: Was there anything about your routine before or during a practice test that you couldn't replicate for the real test? Or anything that felt at all different on the real thing compared to practice?

One idea: You do verbal first. You're of course going to be more nervous when you first start the real test, so that nervousness could have led you to underperform a bit during the first section. Some people will do some very light / easy warm-up problems about 15 minutes before going into the test center—that way, you're warming up before you start the exam.

[RidhimaR926]

Hi Stacey.

Thank you for your reply. Sorry my response is delayed. I had posted my reply a week ago but seems like due to some technical issues, my reply did not posted.

I have posted my responses in bold below:

I'm sorry that you had a disruptive official test experience! I would file a request for review and ask for a discount to retake the exam—if the interruption were only a few minutes, that wouldn't be as big of a deal, but an hour is a long time.
- I wasn't aware that we could get the test reviewed or could re-take the exam at a discount. I will definitely file a complaint, not sure how much of a difference would it make considering the amount of time passed since then.



On your practice tests: Did you take these all under 100% official conditions? You didn't pause the exams, you didn't give yourself longer breaks than allowed on the real thing, you didn't have something to eat or drink during the exam sections, etc?
- I found a library near my place where I would give the mock tests regularly and under official conditions. The breaks were for 8 minutes or shorter and I kept the food and drinks the same as the final day.

Did you see any questions that you had seen / studied before?
- I did all my basics from the Manhattan books. (Specially for Verbal). I did see a few familiar concepts but I do get surprised by some questions where I always get stuck between 2 options.
For quant - I was confident and was able to solve all the questions until we lost internet connection (I was probably on the 15th question by then). After we resumed the test after an hour, I didn't feel like I was able to solve a lot of questions and I was getting stuck on a lot of them.


Did you order the Enhanced Score Report from the official test? The report costs $30 and provides additional data from your real test. It's not always useful, but it can often help us to figure out what the issues were during the test. For instance, it would show us if your performance on one question type was much lower than the other two. Or it would show us if you had a really slow start or, on the other hand, dropped a lot at the end of the section. Then we would know if there are specific question types or content areas that need work, or whether time management or mental stamina were issues, and so on.
- Haven't ordered it yet. But if you say, I can order it. I wasn't sure how much help it would provide.

Oh, and one more question: Was there anything about your routine before or during a practice test that you couldn't replicate for the real test? Or anything that felt at all different on the real thing compared to practice?
- I tried to maintain the same schedule for at least the last few mock tests. I just feel a little more nervous on the final day (which is natural I guess) and I am not able to identify the concepts of a few questions on the final day. (but that is probably 4-5 questions). Also I've always felt that on the final exam day my focus is more on what kind of question I'm attempting, whether it's easy or hard and does this mean that I'm doing well or not. I don't seem to have any such distractions during my mock tests.


One idea: You do verbal first. You're of course going to be more nervous when you first start the real test, so that nervousness could have led you to underperform a bit during the first section. Some people will do some very light / easy warm-up problems about 15 minutes before going into the test center—that way, you're warming up before you start the exam.
- When I was giving the first attempt, I had always done quant first and then verbal. But I thought that since I did not want to be exhausted by the time I reached verbal, I started doing the verbal section first. Not sure how much difference that has made, for the better or for the worse. Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely try doing this even for my mock tests.


Also, I know that GMAT prep tests are the most accurate indicator of the final exam day scores. But I do not heavily rely on them since I have always scored 730+ on these tests (even during my first time preparation) and I find their questions to be too easy as compared to the final exam. Also, I bought a pack of 2 more tests and I find atleast 70% of the questions repeated in the second test of the pack.
So that is why this time I went with Manhattan mock tests, also because the explanations are really good and I've heard that they are a bit harder than the actual tests.

Can you also suggest a good question bank from where I can practise a lot good quality questions? (both verbal and quant). I have a lof of PDFs but I'm not sure whether they are really good or not. I want to start studying again and practise authenticated questions so that I'm better prepared for mocks this time.

[StaceyKoprince]

Ah, if something happens to disrupt the testing experience, you do have to file a complaint pretty quickly. How long has it been? If it has been more than a few weeks, maybe up to a month, it's a lot less likely that you'll be able to get any kind of remedy from the testing center. But you can always try and say that you weren't aware before that you could apply for a review.

You report having distracting or intrusive thoughts during the real test. It is of course normal to feel more nervous on the real test, but if you are noticing that you spend a lot of time thinking about how the test is going rather than just focusing on answering the question on the screen right now, that can certainly impact your ability to perform. That could be enough to drop you 20 to 50 points on the real test.

On the 2nd test, do you think that the delay on quant after losing Internet might have caused you to think too much about the test and make you even more nervous once you were able to start working again? You said that you felt good for the first part but that you struggled after you came back from the "break."

This article talks about Mindfulness practices—a way to help you manage intrusive thoughts and keep your mind focused on the test.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/

The article links to a UCLA website that has some free and paid resources around mindfulness training. There's also this program:
http://www.10percenthappier.com/mindful ... he-basics/
It has a free 1-week trial and is then paid, but I've had several students who have really liked it, so that's another option.

It's also the case that most people don't cut themselves off as much as they should on certain questions on the test. People will keep pushing on questions that are really draining their mental energy—it's important to recognize that you need to decide to bail on certain things not just to make sure that you have enough time for other questions in this same section but also to make sure that you still have enough mental energy for the later sections. So this might be something that you need to work on as well, especially if you decide to do Q first again.

(But, just a note: I think I'd recommend that you stick with V first. When you did Q second, you still scored a 48! And you jumped 4 points when you did V first.)

For the ESR, you'll have to decide whether you think it's worth $30 to you. The data sometimes helps someone to understand what they need to do to get better, but it's not always helpful. If you think that most of the problem might be the distracted thinking, then I would try the mindfulness training. But if you think that there might be something else happening too, and you aren't sure what it is, then it's possible that the ESR will help us to figure out what else is going on. (But there is still a risk that even that data won't tell us much. So it is possible that you could spend the $30 but it turns out that the data isn't really helpful in your case.)

Finally, you mention having a lot of PDFs to study from. Most reputable companies don't sell their problems via PDF, nor do the official test makers, so my guess is that you're using questions that someone has put together from various sources and then they're just getting shared on forums and that kind of thing. The quality of these sources is very up and down. I once came across a forum thread in which people were debating a particular SC question from one of these PDFs. The person who posted it said the official answer was (B) and so everyone was trying to explain why (B) was right and why the other four answers were wrong. It turned out that the problem had been transcribed incorrectly into the PDF in two ways. First, the correct answer was actually not (B)—it was something else. Second, and even worse, the answer that was supposed to be the correct one had been pasted incorrectly into the document—so actually all 5 answers were incorrect. So I would just be really careful about using that kind of material. After we saw a few things like that happening, we actually banned all of those kinds of sources from our own forums. (We also saw that lots of the problems in these kinds of sources were just lower-quality in general.)

The best source for practice problems is the official material. There are the Official Guide books. The most recent edition is 2019. Our Navigator program only has solutions through 2018, though, so if you have access to Navigator, I would get the 2018 edition of the Official Guide.

They also do have online resources—they have a 400-problem Question Bank that they sell on their website (about 200 each of Q and V).

They also have a product called GMAT Focus (quant only), which I think is their best product. It's a question bank of 24 questions that is adaptive, just like the real test—so it pushes you like the real test. Unlike GMATPrep, the questions can get very hard and they are in my opinion the highest quality of all of the published official questions. You pay per use, so you pay to do one set of 24 questions. In that sense, it's expensive (on a per-question basis), but these are the best official quant questions out there. If you decide that you want to try to push Q to 50+, I would look into this product. (I wish they had it for V too but they don't.)

Finally, you referenced getting stuck between two options on verbal. Yes, this is when you narrow it down to the right one and the most tempting wrong one. These are the hardest ones to answer!

You can learn to get better in those situations by analyzing verbal problems in this way:
(1) Why was the wrong answer so tempting? Why did it look like it might be right? (be as explicit as possible; also, now you know this is not a good reason to pick an answer)
(2) Why was it actually wrong? What specific words indicate that it is wrong and how did I overlook those clues the first time?
(3) Why did the right answer seem wrong? What made it so tempting to cross off the right answer? Why were those things actually okay; what was my error in thinking that they were wrong? (also, now you know that this is not a good reason to eliminate an answer)
(4) Why was it actually right?

[RidhimaR926]

Ah, if something happens to disrupt the testing experience, you do have to file a complaint pretty quickly. How long has it been? If it has been more than a few weeks, maybe up to a month, it's a lot less likely that you'll be able to get any kind of remedy from the testing center. But you can always try and say that you weren't aware before that you could apply for a review.
- Thanks Stacey. I have filed a complaint. Still awaiting their response.

On the 2nd test, do you think that the delay on quant after losing Internet might have caused you to think too much about the test and make you even more nervous once you were able to start working again? You said that you felt good for the first part but that you struggled after you came back from the "break."
- Yes I definitely felt a significant change in my focus and concentration after the internet connection was restored.
But apart from that I also feel a focus only on the timer and the difficulty level of the questions throughout the test, which does not happen with me in the mocks.

This article talks about Mindfulness practices—a way to help you manage intrusive thoughts and keep your mind focused on the test.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/
The article links to a UCLA website that has some free and paid resources around mindfulness training. There's also this program:
http://www.10percenthappier.com/mindful ... he-basics/
It has a free 1-week trial and is then paid, but I've had several students who have really liked it, so that's another option.
- Thank you. I will definitely go through this.


I had a few concerns regarding the study material and mock tests.

Issue 1:
I bought the official verbal review and practised questions from that book. I didn't do too well in RC. But I think SC and CR were quite easy compared to the actual questions in the exam. I got around 10 questions wrong out of 120 questions in each of the sections. And I honestly don't think that the questions are so easy on the actual exam. Isn't there a manhattan question bank from where I could practise the kind of questions that actually appear on the manhattan mock tests?

Issue 2:
I started giving the manhattan mock tests all over again. I scored a 720 on the first 2 tests that I gave. (I did not give the first one under official test conditions since I paused it multiple times in between). But I did give the second one seriously. The issue is that a lot of questions are repeated from my first attempt on these tests a couple of months ago. At that time I had scored around 680 marking the tough questions incorrectly. But since this time the tough questions are repeated and since I remember the solutions from last time, I think that my score is inflated by atleast 30 points. I'm pretty sure that if I would see these questions for the first time during this attempt, I would have marked them incorrectly this time as well. Is there a solution to this problem of repeated questions?

[StaceyKoprince]

Okay, let me know what happens with the official review of the test.

It's not unusual to be focused more on trying to figure out how you're doing when you take the official test—because you know that it is actually the real test now.

The problem with that, of course, is that it distracts you from concentrating on the problems themselves. So, first, do use that mindfulness material that I gave you last time. It's designed to help you deal with what are called "intrusive" thoughts—basically, things that you don't want to be thinking right now because they're distracting you from something else.

Also, when you do find yourself thinking "How hard is this question? How am I doing on the exam?" I want you to remember me telling you the following. It's impossible to look at a question and gauge how hard it is...and this is true even if you're just doing an OG question / it isn't an actual testing situation (which just makes it even harder). First of all, the difficulty level is based on the entire population of test-takers, not just you, with your very specific strengths and weaknesses. You might find something easy that is hard for the general population and vice versa.

I have done this professionally for 20 years and have seen aggregate data for thousands of students for OG problems (because we collect the data via our Navigator program) and even with the benefit of that experience, I can only give you a very vague idea (this is on the easier end vs. this other one is on the harder end). And I have to ignore my own preconceived ideas based on my own strengths and weaknesses. There are still times I look at a problem and think it's really easy, but the aggregate data tells me it's quite hard (and sometimes the opposite is true—I think it's harder only to be surprised when the data says it's easier for the population).

If I tried to do that while also taking the exam—forget it. My own stress would skew my perception of how hard or easy something is.

I'll also point out that, in order for a problem to be able to be used for real on the official test, the test makers have to first insert the problem as an experimental one just to gather the data to know how to set its difficulty level. And these are the people writing the problems in the first place!

So it's really not even possible to tell how hard a problem is across the entire population just by one person looking at / doing it. When you find yourself speculating about that, remember my last sentence and shrug your shoulders and forget about trying to figure that out.

Next, re: the Official Verbal Review, you're referring to the verbal-only OG book, yes? I agree—based on our older Navigator data, those problems skew more toward the easier to medium side. (Same for the Quant-only OG.) If someone is looking for harder material, I would go more for the online material that I mentioned last time.

We do have online problem banks associated with our strategy guides—one problem bank of 25 questions per guide. So if you have our strategy guides for SC, CR, and RC, you can get access to those banks on our website.

Re: repeated questions on practice tests, if one does come up, first try the problem completely—work through the whole solution even if you already know the answer. (Do every step; don't give yourself an artificial time advantage by doing it really quickly.)

When you're done, ask yourself whether you honestly think you would get it right this time if you were seeing it for the first time. If not, then get it wrong on purpose. If you take both of those steps, then you won't be giving yourself an artificial time advantage or an artificial score advantage.

If you are only remembering a few questions, then this is fine. If you are remembering more than a few, then you are also gaining an advantage in terms of not having to use as much mental energy as you normally would. In that case, you would want to look at alternative exams. I assume you have already done the two free official practice tests. They also have 4 paid ones—check those out if you haven't done them yet (and if you are seeing too many repeats on ours).

[RidhimaR926]

Hi Stacey

I did complain to gmac about the test center experience. Somehow they just keep replying asking me to wait for 2-3 days, but it's been around 2-3 weeks and I haven't got any meaningful response from them in spite of following up many times.

I have booked my exam date for 20th September (only 10 more days!!) .. since I wanted to start applying to Universities and I haven't started the application process yet. I took a couple of mock test in between, these are my scores: ( I attempted AWA in all of the exams)

Test Name Total Score Quant Verbal IR
Manhattan test 1 720 47 41 4.5
Manhattan test 2 720 49 39 5.9
Manhattan test 3 720 49 39 5.9
Princeton Free Test 730 51 40 4
Veritas Free test 690 51 35 5

I stopped giving the Manhattan tests in between since I was remembering around 6-7 of the repeated questions in verbal due to which I think my scores are a bit inflated. I am aiming for 700 and I'm planning to give the 2 more mocks before the exam.

One area that I find consistently weak in the last couple of tests are CR and RC. I have improved in CR but my performance in RC seems to be dropping with every test. I have watched a lot of online videos on how to ace the RC and I'm practicing a lot of material, but someone my accuracy just seems to be dropping. I wasn't really happy with the Veritas test performance I gave a few hours ago. I'm yet to analyse my mistakes. But I got 8 questions in RC wrong!!. Thought their RCs were really long, one of them had 5 paragraphs!!

For the remaining 10 days. I'm thinking of revising my concepts and test mistakes , apart from giving 2 more mock tests. (I plan to keep GmatPrep as one of them). Somehow I do not feel too confident of my performance, though I'm not sure why. This is my third attempt and I really want to score a minimum of 700 this time. Do you think my scores are decent enough for a 700? Or should I postpone my exam and put in more effort and do more practice? Do you think that I should buy the 400 official GMAT question bank and start practicing from there? I'm not sure since I don't have a lot of time left.

Thanks
Ridhima

[StaceyKoprince]

Ok, I'm sorry that you haven't gotten a response from them yet. But good that you chose a new test date and are moving forward anyway.

In Q, you scored 48 and 49 on the official exam. You don't have a lot of room for improvement there (the top score is a 51)—so, while it would be nice to pick up a couple more points there, that won't get you all the way to 700+. For that, V needs to go up. Even if you get a perfect 51 on the quant, V would still need to go up at least 2 points (from your top V score of 32) to have a chance to hit 700.

Also, just a note: Your V score did go up from 28 to 32 from your first to second exams, so you are moving in the right direction overall. Take confidence in that.

If you can get 49 again on Q, you would need a V score of ~36 to hit in the 700 range. That's a lift of 4 points—which you did manage to do between your first and second exams, so this is possible, though it's also true that the higher you go, the harder it becomes to go even higher. I don't know whether Sep 20th will be enough time, but if you have deadlines soon after that you still want to try to hit, then just go for it. If it doesn't work out, you can postpone your applications to the next round and try again—you don't have to apply this round. In an ideal world, you would, but lots of things happen in this world on a different timeframe than we'd originally planned.

You mention feeling like CR is getting better but RC is getting worse. When you analyze those RC questions afterwards, what have you learned about why you're making the mistakes you're making? Did you not understand something in the passage? Or did you think you understood it but you'd actually misinterpreted it? Did you struggle to understand the question itself? Or did you think the question was talking about a different part of the passage than it was actually talking about (so you were looking in the wrong place for the information you needed to answer the question)?

Or did you understand both the passage and the question but get pulled into a tempting trap answer in the answer choices? If so, for some reason you thought the wrong answer was better than the right answer. Why? Also, there was some reason you discarded the right answer—why? If you can understand the errors you made, you will be less likely to make those same kind of errors next time. I suggest doing that kind of analysis on the RC problems you've done recently to try to diagnose what's going wrong. (Note: Start with any official problems first. RC has a lot to do with the writers who are writing the material, and only the official practice problems are written by the people who will write the ones on your real exam, too!)

Finally: If you do have a deadline that you would like to try to keep if possible, then I would keep the test on the 20th and tell yourself that you're going to try your best and just see what happens. You're taking a chance, but if the chance works, then you can apply this round. In the 10 days you have, do what I described above for RC to try to diagnose why your performance is suffering. (And practice everything, of course.)

If you don't have a deadline soon, then yes, you might want to give yourself more than 10 days to figure out what's going on with RC and to address it—and to do the same more broadly for all of V in order to try to lift your score more there. If that's the case, let me know and we'll talk more about what else to do.