Help! My score hasn't improved at all!

[NinaM212]

Hi! I completed the Manhattan Prep Course which ended in Feb. and took the official test at the end of March. I have finished the syllabus and have spent weeks studying for the GMAT. After learning so much material and strategies, I find it hard to believe that my score hasn't improved at all since I took my first practice test without studying. I'm not sure what to do. I've purchased both the official quant review and verbal review books for extra problems and have take the post course assessment. I have taken 3 Manhattan Exams and 1 official guide exam and 1 real exam and all of the scores were within 30 points of each other. Please help!

[StaceyKoprince]

Welcome to the forums! I'm sorry you're having a tough time with this test.

There could be a few different things going on—we have to figure out which. I'm happy to help you here but also email our student services team (gmat@manhattanprep.com) to sign up for your Post Exam Assessment (PEA)—this is a one-on-one meeting with an instructor to debrief and figure out what's going on and what to do. (It comes with the course.)

What did you score on the official practice test and the real test? (Include Total, Q, and V scores.) Also, tell me the dates.

From your 3 MPrep tests:
Quant: went from 36 to 37 to 41, so this section does show a steady increase (on our tests)
Verbal: went from 32 to 35 to 31. So there was a jump from test 1 to test 2...but then a drop on test 3.

I'd like to know your other two test scores to get a better sense of the overall pattern / trend.

One of the most common causes of what you're describing is this: You learn a lot and do actually get better, but you are proceeding through the test in a way that doesn't translate into a score increase. The GMAT is what's called a "Where you end is what you get" test. I'm looking at the V section of your third exam and here's your "trajectory": You answered the first 4 questions in a row correctly, which put you in the stratosphere as far as difficulty level. The good news: You were roughly on time through those first 4 questions, too. The neutral news: You likely got yourself up to a level that wasn't really sustainable.

Here's what I often see at this point: You're about to get some seriously hard questions, and then you spend too much time on them. You get a lot wrong (because they were really hard) and so another 5 to 8 questions later, your score has come down (which is to be expected—you were at an unsustainable level) BUT you're also now behind on time and have to rush. That's the thing that then really kills your score later in the section.

So, looking at your test, that's pretty much what happened. From Q5 to Q13, you had a roughly even mix of right and wrong (which is normal for this test). Your score came down but was still at a *very* good level (high 30s). The problem: You were now nearly 5 minutes behind on time.

I don't know whether you noticed that at some point in this next sequence—but that's the kind of thing that distracts / panics people...and then that causes you to make mistakes on things you do know how to do. From Q14 to Q29, your ratio of right to wrong changed drastically—you got 4 right and 12 wrong. That of course seriously brought your score down. You actually did start to recover at the end (5 of the last 7 right), and so you lifted your score back up a bit (to 31), but you didn't have enough questions left to get yourself back up into the high 30s.

So the question is what happened with that sequence in the middle where you missed such a high proportion of questions. Did you notice that you were behind and did that affect your concentration? You went seriously quickly on the first question for the RC passage about the Moon (which means you didn't spend much time reading the passage)...was that why? In general, you also spent more time on SC earlier in the section and started doing them much faster later in the section.

There's also another possible complication—on this test, you did Q first, then V (on your two prior tests, you did V first), so you may have been getting mentally fatigued by that point. Did you notice anything like that during the V section of this test? It may be the case that you need to work on mental stamina overall.

On the Q side, your score is moving in the right direction on our 3 tests, so I want to know the dates and scores for your other 2 tests to see whether that's still true or what. I will point out one thing on Q: It looks like there are some time management issues there, too. On your last test, your 5 longest Q questions took nearly 17 minutes (7 minutes longer than the 2m-per-question average) and you got 1 right. The GMAT is a multiple-choice test—if you guess on 5 questions, you have a 20% chance of getting lucky and getting one of them right. So if you had cut off all of those questions at the 2m mark, you'd have saved 7 minutes to spend elsewhere. Are there any careless mistakes elsewhere or problems you might have been able to get right if you'd had another 30 to 60 seconds?

At the very least, if we combine your highest Q (41) and highest V (35), that's a 630, or 60 points higher than your starting test score. But from what I see in the V section of your last MPrep CAT, I think you can score in the high 30s (if not higher) on V if we can work out the time management and mental stamina stuff, so that's at least a 650.

Read this or watch the webinar linked at the beginning:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... -the-gmat/

But most important, go sign up for your PEA.

[NinaM212]

Thank you so much for the detailed response! Here are all of my scores and the date of each exam.
Date: 12/1/2019 - Cat #1 – Verbal 32 / Quant 36 – 570
Date: 2/28/2019 – Cat #2 – Verbal 35 / Quant 37 – 600
Date: 3/23/2019 – Cat #3 – Verbal N/A / Quant 39 – 530 (My computer froze on the Verbal section and I only finished half of that section so I had Manhattan reset it)
Date: 3/30/2019 – Real Official Exam – Verbal 27 / Quant 42 – 590 (on the official exam I was in the 5% for critical reasoning)
Date: 4/14/2019 – Cat #3 – Verbal 31 / Quant 41 – 590
Date 5/5/2019 – Official GMAT Online Practice Exam – Verbal 32 / Quant 39 – 590


I do think that what you are describing is maybe what is happening and that is why my score isn’t improving? If it’s a timing issue in the middle and then I’m not able to spend enough time on problems on the second half, what do you recommend I do to fix this problem? I would say sentence correction is by far the absolute hardest for me and I’ve spent a lot of time studying this topic. Towards the end I probably started to spend less time on them because I typically get them wrong anyways.

In the test you are describing where I began to be behind and then missed a lot of questions in the middle, is this just one test or a pattern in all of my tests? Do you recommend that I also do the same sequence, always verbal first?

I will definitely sign up for the post test assessment. Is it possible to do it with you since you have reviewed my scores? Thank you for your advice!

[StaceyKoprince]

I was looking at your most recent test—I didn't look at your earlier ones. (Also, I no longer do PEAs—too busy!—but all of our PEA instructors have been trained in the same way, so whoever you're paired with will dig into the data even deeper than I did to figure out what's going on.)

That's interesting. On your first official, your V dropped but your Q was even higher than on your practice tests. But on your second official test, your Q dropped, so your increase in V didn't lead to a higher overall score, unfortunately.

On CR: If your ESR shows that you scored at the lowest possible percentile or subscore for a particular question type but your overall score is higher than maybe 450 to 500, it doesn't actually mean that you really scored at that percentile for that question type—that is, if I gave you the easiest possible CR questions, that doesn't mean you'd get them wrong. You were offered CR questions that were at similar levels to the RC and SC questions—the issue is just that you got all or most of them wrong. So that does mean that CR is the weakest of the three question types for you, but it's not quite as bad as that data point makes it seem.

In what order did you take the two official tests? (Q-V or V-Q) Make sure to give all of this test data (including order) to your PEA instructor.

I'm not sure whether you should do Q first or V first—that's something to discuss with your PEA instructor—but, in general, you do want to figure out which order is better for you and then stick with that. In general, we tell people to put their stronger section first so that you do it while your brain is fresh and so that you build good momentum leading into your weaker section. But, if you're so nervous about your weaker section that you'd just be dreading it / thinking about it throughout the stronger section, then do your weaker section first to get it over with.

The article that I linked at the end of my post discusses the overall idea that you need to bail (guess quickly) on a number of questions in each section. (Maybe you didn't read that before you replied?) Basically, because this is an adaptive test, you are going to have to guess on some questions. The only choice you have is which questions—if you don't choose, then you'll run out of time and have to rush / guess at the end. So the better choice is to try to identify the ones that you think are hardest all throughout, so that oyu can bail on those.

After you read the article I linked in my last post, read this series:
http://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/2016/08/19/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gmat-time-management-part-1-of-3/

That time management series was also assigned to you as homework in Atlas, so you may have read it before—but, if so, you still have work to do since you're still having timing issues.

That's just to get you started. During your PEA, you'll dive more into what to do to improve your time management. After you've had that meeting, if you'd like to discuss any of the advice with me or ask questions about anything, let me know!