Scored a 690...want to reach a 700+

[JessicaW320]

Hi Manhattan Prep Team!

I recently took the GMAT for the third time and got a 690. I took it for the first time last November and got a 620 (37 Verbal / 38 Quant) and was pretty discouraged. I then took it again in June after about a 3 month hiatus and got a 620 again, cancelled my score, and was devastated. I spent the summer really focusing on quant, which is my weak area, and received a score of 690 (46 Verbal / 38 Quant.) I am really proud of raising my score as much as I have, but I really believe I can get over the 700 hump, so I scheduled my 4th exam for November 2nd and plan to do one last study sprint.

As I mentioned, I have really been focusing on my quant score and have spent very little time in the last 6 months trying to exercise and strengthen my verbal skillset. This is an area that I really believe I can improve upon. I just purchased my ESR and would love some guidance on what to do next, specifically for Verbal. Any guidance would be so appreciated!

On my last test, I was extremely stretched for time at the end of the exam:

AVG TIMES:
CR: 1:57
RC: 2:06
SC: 1:24

% CORRECT/INCORRECT:
FIRST: 75%/25%
SECOND: 100%/0%
THIRD: 71%/29%
FOURTH: 25%/75%

AVG TIME SPENT PER QUESTION:
FIRST: 2:06
SECOND: 2:11
THIRD: 1:53
FOURTH: 0:58

QUESTION: How do I improve my time management? It seems like I need to come out of the gate a lot faster than I am. I use the yellow-pad technique, but really didn't realize that i was behind until the last 15 questions.

Next, i would love some guidance on WHAT to study. Below are my results on my fundamental skills:

CR:
ANALYSIS/CRITIQUE: 50%
CONSTRUCTION/PLAN: 100%
RC:
IDENTIFY INFERRED IDEA: 80%
IDENTIFY STATED IDEA: 60%
SC:
GRAMMAR:50%
COMMUNICATION: 66%

For CR, are analysis/critique and construction/plan directly tied to the different question types you teach us? Wondering which types of questions to focus on in the next month.

Again, any guidance would be so appreciated. Please let me know if there is any further information I can provide you to help me prepare over this next month.

Thank you!
Jessica

[StaceyKoprince]

You have done an excellent job so far—congratulations on getting yourself to 690!

I want to double-check something: the numbers that you gave me for your Q and V subscores are correct?
620 test: V37, Q38
690 test: V46, Q38

Yes? If that's correct, then you improved V a great deal between the two tests but Q stayed the same.

And if correct, your focus at this point really needs to be on the Q, not the V, for two reasons.

First, from a practical perspective, you have a lot more opportunity on the Q side, since that score is lower.

Second, from a what-the-schools-want perspective. If you plan to apply to the kind of school for which you need a 7xx kind of score to be competitive, then those schools are going to be very concerned about a Q score of 38. Those kinds of schools want to see a quant score starting with a 4, at a minimum (and the top-10-type schools really want to see something in the mid-40s or higher).

But given everything you describe, I'm wondering whether you might have mixed up the two scores for the 690 test? Was it actually Q46 and V38?

Since I'm not sure (and since my answer will obviously depend on which it is!), I'll wait for your reply before giving study advice.

[JessicaW320]

Hi Stacey -

Thank you so much for your response!!

So sorry...those numbers should be swapped it should be 38V / 46Q.

Thank you!

[StaceyKoprince]

Ok, that makes more sense.

You have excellent subscores for both sections. On Q, you're 5 points below the top score (51). On V, you're 7 points below what I'll call the top practical score of 45—it's very unusual to score higher than 45 on the V section.

So there is slightly more room for growth on the V side, though it wouldn't hurt to keep trying to improve Q a bit too. Especially because you spent the summer focused on Q and it totally worked (38 --> 46)!

But, yes, from what you show in your ESR, your V is not yet maxed out. Given the (limited) scoring trajectory that the ESR shows, there's a good chance you were scoring in the 40s on verbal until that fourth quadrant of the test. If you can hit V40, you should hit 700. If you can eke out something like V42, your score would hit ~720. (This assumes your Q stays the same.)

So let's say that you're going to spend about 60% of your time on V and 40% on Q.

The goal on Q will be to maintain or maybe even pick up 1 point. Focus on low-hanging fruit only—careless mistakes, things you know how to do but take a little too long / could do them more efficiently, etc.

On V, the overall avg time needs to be about 1m48s in order to answer 36 questions in 65 minutes. so for the first half of the test, you lost an average of about 20 seconds per problem, or about 6 minutes overall. The yellow pad would have showed that you were only behind by about 3m at the end of the first quadrant, and that's within the realm of normal—but it would have showed that you were about 6m behind at the end of the second quadrant. You said you didn't notice, so that's something to work on (actually knowing that you are too far behind at a certain point).

Next, the way you deal with that is the same as on quant: You're going to bail on a small number of questions as you go. You save more time by bailing on CR or RC (since those are longer question types), so it's ideal to bail there unless your CR/RC is considerably better than your SC. What were your percentile rankings for SC, CR, and RC from your ESR? (This is earlier in the report than the data that you gave me.)

And, just qualitatively, how do you feel about the three types? What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are?

The V details by question type given in the ESR are...pretty vague, unfortunately. Taking all of the questions of one type and splitting them into just two categories isn't enough to formulate a plan. Hopefully they'll be able to provide more detail in future (but that doesn't help us right now). So we need to use your practice tests to figure out what to do on a detailed basis. What have you seen in the data from your practice tests?

Take a look at this article to help analyze the data from MPrep exams:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... ts-part-1/

Once we have a better idea of specific strengths and weaknesses, we can figure out:
(1) which question sub-types should be "bail fast" questions for you, and
(2) which areas should be your focus to lift V over the next month

I will finish by saying: You did a great job to lift Q, so in general, try to follow the same principles as you work on V. What really worked for you when you were lifting Q?

[JessicaW320]

Hi Stacey!

Thank you SO much for your response. Just now reading this; wish I had seen it a week ago! I am now just under a week away from my test. I believe my weaknesses are as follows for each of the question types:

CR
Strengthen
Weaken

RC
Inference
Specific Detail

SC
SV Agreement
Parallelism
Concision
Idioms

I am strongest in CR, weakest in RC, and think that I can see the most improvement in SC.

Given that I have just under a week before my test, what do you recommend I focus on over these next couple of days? Want to make sure i am utilizing my time as wisely as possible. Open to any suggestions.

If you could get back to me ASAP i would SO appreciate it, and thank you again!!

-Jess

[JessicaW320]

Hi Stacey -

I have honed in on questions that I am getting wrong/spending a lot of time on and here is what I have learned:

On CR, I spend a lot of time and often get wrong the questions where I can not clearly identify what the prompt is asking for...i.e.:
- For there to be a market for Micro-Mechanics's chip as a result of the apparent advantage described above, each of the following would have to be true EXCEPT:
- Which of the following, if true, would serve the same function in the argument as the statement in boldface?

I am thinking that on the exam, if i come across questions where I am not totally clear what they are asking for, i should skip and move on (I'm thinking 1-2 on CR)

On RC, I struggle with the inference questions on heavy science passages. I am thinking that I skip one infer question on a passage where I feel a bit wobbly. (1 question.)

I have improved my timing since my last exam but think I could better position myself to if I had an extra 2-3 minutes? Thoughts?

For Quant, I am performing pretty steadily and am comfortable where I am but i have noticed that on almost all of my exams, I do pretty poorly right at the beginning of the quant section (i.e. on the practice test i took yesterday, i got a total of 8 wrong on the section, 3 of which were in the first 4 questions.) I think it just takes me a little warming up to get into a flow of things but am not sure how to combat this. Because timing is an issue for me, I don't want to spend too much time at the front of the exam and feel like I'm playing catch up for the rest of the exam. Do you have any thoughts/recommendations as to how I can improve my performance right from the get-go?

Again, my exam is Friday morning so I am in crunch time. If you could get back to me ASAP I would really appreciate it!!!

[StaceyKoprince]

Hi! Yes to everything you said on when to bail on CR/RC. I would also say: Don't even limit yourself. If you get two science passages, each with a really annoying Inference, bail on both. It's fine! And then, yes, that will give you the time you need on the rest of the section.

Have you been doing Q first or V first for the test?

Before you go into the testing center, spend about 5-10 minutes doing some easy OG quant problems—basically, do your Q warm-up before the test starts, not during the test.

If you're doing Q first, that should definitely help because you'll be warming up about 20 minutes before you really start the section.

If you're doing V first, then this is a little harder because you can't do anything on the break between sections. It may be the case that you're having some issues transitioning from V to Q. Doing a little Q in advance of the whole thing can help, but you'll likely also need to do some visualization around Q topics / thinking about math during the break between V and Q so that you can get your brain starting to move over before the section starts.

Thoughts? Comments?

[StaceyKoprince]

p.s.

I also think it would be fine to take an extra 2 minutes spread across the first 4 problems to help you with warming your brain up and then just bail on one extra problem later in the test!

[JessicaW320]

Super helpful - thank you! Is there a "sweet spot" in terms of number of questions I should be skipping?

I am doing essay, IR, Quant, Verbal and I have found that works best for me. Will definitely do some practice problems before I go in and "visualize" problems during my break before Quant.

Any last-minute practice recommendations? I think i might just re-do a verbal section of one of my old practice tests (that I haven't reviewed in a long time) using the new CR/RC skipping-strategy we came up and see how that feels. Thoughts?

Also, I wanted to get your input on score cancelling/keeping strategy.

As a recap, I got a 620 on my first exam (kept it), a 620 on my second exam (cancelled it), and a 690 on my third exam (kept it.)

In the event that I score less than or equal to a 690, what would you recommend I do? Cancel or keep?

Thank you SO much again!!! I really appreciate the support.

[StaceyKoprince]

On your weaker section, I would aim for 4-5. Note that I'm talking "I bail within 30 seconds / guess randomly / don't get into this at all." There will be others you try and it doesn't work out for whatever reason and you have to guess. Don't count those (at all, for any reason, actually!)

The ~4-5 bails are really just the "fast bails" where you deliberately get out and save time.

In your stronger section, it'll be like 2-5, depending on exactly how strong you are.

I like the idea of just practicing with an old test section. It's not about seeing what score you get at this point, just getting some practice in with the strategy itself.

Re: score, if you are going for a master's / MBA / EMBA / that kind of program, you don't need to cancel anything. They really do care only about your highest score. If you get a score that you personally just feel uncomfortable leaving on record, you can cancel—but that's really just for you. They won't care.

If you're going for a PhD program or something similar, then some schools do look at all of your scores—if you know that's the case, I would keep any higher score of course—just note that that could include a lower total but a higher Q score, say—or anything that's in the ballpark of your previous high, 690. I'd call within 20-30 points in the ballpark.

Good luck! Let us know how it goes!