Hi, Wanted to write this post for quite sometime now. A little background about myself - An engineer from India, 24 yrs, 1.5 Yrs work exp as a Risk Analyst at a MNC bank. I started my preparation in August. As I was not a natural in Verbal,…
Hi,
Wanted to write this post for quite sometime now. A little background about myself - An engineer from India, 24 yrs, 1.5 Yrs work exp as a Risk Analyst at a MNC bank.
I started my preparation in August. As I was not a natural in Verbal, concentrated much of my time practising and reviewing verbal. I used OG 12 and Manhattan Sentence correction. I hardly spent any time on quant. I took the GMAT Practice tests and almost always scored between 700-730 with a quant score of 50-51 and verbal score fluctuating between 33 - 38. I felt comfortable with that score range and decided to take the GMAT(big mistake!!). I bombed. Scored 660(Q50, V28!!!)
I was naturally shocked and devastated. Later, I sat back and thought what went wrong and realised that even though I was scoring 33-38 in verbal in practice tests, I was not very clear on why I chose the answer option that I did. After practising and reviewing OG, I was able to feel the difference in my approach, but was not consciously clear of how I was solving the problems. I was going with my instinct instead of following logic and rules most of the time.
I decided to take the GMAT again. This time, I decided to take some professional help as I didn't know what to do to improve my verbal score. I enrolled to CrackVerbal, Bangalore. I love the way verbal is taught there. Arun made it fun and interesting. Within no time I had my confidence back. I went through OG 12 and Manhattan Sentence correction, in addition to the CrackVerbal material. I started scoring in the 730-780 range in GMAT practise tests and Manhattan Tests, with verbal score ranging from 38-44! I was now much more clear on what I was doing, and was able to eliminate the wrong options with much ease.
After I consistently scored around 750, I decided to take GMAT again. I scored 700(Q51, V33) this time. Even though I touched the milestone 700, I am slightly disappointed with the score. Think, I can do better. If I take GMAT again, I'll be taking it for the 3rd time. Not sure how adcoms will perceive it. Any thoughts?
- Prashanth
Congrats on the score!
700 is actually a very good score and i would suggest you retake only if you are very confident about scoring higher 'coz if it goes down then it won't look too good. I would suggest you concentrate on apps and not bother with a retake.
I think you should retake it. Considering you have consistently scored above 750 on your mock tests, perhaps you just had a bad day and ended up scoring a 700. If you're applying for schools next year, then you have some time to retake the GMAT before you get down to working on your apps.
But all that said, 700 is a pretty good score, so congrats! 😃
Hi Prashant,
Saw the post now. I think you deserve more than a 33 considering the way you were peforming. This is more of a worst-case scenario for you. Having said that you are better off focusing on other aspects of your application such as CFA. You can always think about it in July-Aug since you are anyways applying for R1 2012.
We can always talk 
Arun