Timingal & Verbal Score

[saumil.shrivastava]

Hi Stacey,

I appeared for MGMAT CAT 2 yesterday and got - 640 ( 47Q, 31V). Test was in 100% exam condition, no pause. A month ago my verbal score used to be around 26, so no doubt it has improved but I guess with this verbal score, 700+ is not possible. I usually get 50% of the questions wrong in verbal. Is it very high number? (I understand GMAT is not about number of correct questions but the difficulty of questions) But is there any ball-par number?

Analysis of MGMAT Verbal:

1> In 1st 10 questions - 5q were wrong. This includes 2nd and 3rd question. What do you suggest on this? Was this major contributor in low score?

2> Wrong Questions in a row: a> 9, 10, 11 b> 24,25 c> (RC) 27,28,29 - 3 questions were from RC. Is it too bad that all questions in any particular RC are wrong? d> 39,40

3> I got stuck in Q2 & Q3. They were CR questions and I thought I should be able to solve them. As a result I ended up spending 8 min on these two questions. Above all I found that both of them were incorrect. Basically, I thought since they are initial questions then I should try to solve them correctly as a result ended up losing time. Can you suggest what I should have done ideally?


My target score is 710+ and I feel my verbal score is too low. I don't think there is any issue in terms of Knowledge. But yes implementing strategies during the test and time management are the major issues.

Please suggest how I should proceed and also share your thoughts on the verbal section analysis shared above.

[messi10]

Hi Saumil,

Stacey will probably give you more info on this. My suggestion is to run the report generator on the CAT and get some stats on what areas you struggled with.

Getting a number of questions wrong in a row does affect your score but I don't see how analyzing it so specifically will help you improve on the next one. You must work on your weaker areas and try and improve those. You don't have control over the order of questions. Lets say you struggle with CR assumption questions, SC parallelism and RC. On a test, you could see questions on those topics together or spread out.

Timing is another issue. You say that you spent 8 minutes on 2 CR questions. This means that you were already behind by at least 3 minutes as per the timing benchmarks. Unfortunately, you didn't even get them right after spending the extra time. It would have been wiser to spend 2 minutes each, guess and move on. Please check these blogs by Stacey in the order presented:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/06/ ... ent-part-1
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/06/ ... ent-part-2

Regards

Sunil

[StaceyKoprince]

Thanks for linking those two articles, Sunil - yes, use those to analyze your test results.

You got 5 of the first 10 wrong but you also mention that you got about half wrong overall... so that's the same pattern. If what you're actually asking is whether it hurts you more to get questions wrong at the beginning of the test, no - it's a myth that the early questions are worth more.

The thing that really killed you was the 8 min on 2 questions. You then had to catch up on other questions, and you probably did that by trying to rush on a bunch of questions, which would then have caused you to make mistakes that you might not have made if you weren't rushing... and the problem would just get worse.

Read this article:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... anagement/

And then start doing what it says. :) Note: it typically takes people a minimum of 4 weeks to fix serious timing problems - and often longer.

Now, for your scoring question: no, you cannot hit a 700 with a 31 Verbal even if you have a perfect quant score. You've made a lot of progress in the last month. The other piece of good news is that you have more progress to be made just on the timing alone - if your timing is that far off, then your score is below what your actual verbal ability is right now, so you want to work on both the timing and the content.

Re: # / % wrong, most people answer about 50-60% of the questions correctly - so, getting about half wrong is entirely normal. You may be able to get that closer to the 60% end if you work on your timing problems and continue in general to improve your content and technical knowledge.