Improve Your GMAT Scores

Many students while appearing for their practice tests on GMAT keep asking how to attain a better score on the test. They feel they are stuck in a score range and are unable to breakout and achieve their optimal score. The question then, most often raised is “What is a good enough score?”

750 – 700 – 650… Each of these can be a good score on the GMAT depending on your profile and the intended programs. Higher the better. However, as the application deadlines loom, there might not be enough time to prepare again for the high score. Applying abroad requires a lot more than your GMAT score. Your knowledge of who you are, what your achievements have meant and how does abroad education fit into your overall career plan need to be thought out well and presented to the admissions board. You need time to do that and hence you need to get the GMAT out of the way, with a good score.

My advise to the students is not to try and redo the entire syllabus in the quest for a dream score. Instead, try to focus on the weak areas. Cliché? Maybe, but very relevant. Most often you will hear the same advise – focus on weak areas. But how do you know what are the weak areas? We have a general sense of difficulty with a certain topic or certain chapter from the GMAT syllabus. For example, students are generally aware which sub-section in Verbal – Sentence Correction (SC), Critical Reasoning (CR) or Reading Comprehension (RC) they are most uncomfortable with. Some might even have a vague sense of the topics that trouble them the most. However, my advice to students is to have a very detailed analysis.

I generally advice making an excel sheet with the questions tagged by topic. Once a student has practiced enough problems from the material, there is data available for analysis. Below is a sample of the summary of analysis done for a student who had practiced 70 questions of SC.

A similar analysis can be done by consolidating the practice test scores in a single file. In a time crunch, such an analysis can help to increase your scores in the following ways

1. Improve: In the case of above example table, the student can work on verbs and identify smaller topics within verbs that the student gets wrong repeatedly. GMAT is a rule based exam and most of the answers lie in knowing the application of rules. Exercises on Subject Verb Agreement and Tenses from standard grammar textbooks can be good way to improve on these fundamental topics.

2. Discern: Some students have a mental block in certain areas. For example, most often in CR students end up having abysmal accuracy in Inference based questions. Despite best efforts, students are unable to get those right. Knowing this weakness area can help to discern which question to attempt and give time to. GMAT is a time bound exam and there is a heavy penalty involved in not completing the test. Sometimes knowing a weakness area can help you to decide when to skip and move to the next question (despite negative consequences). The saved time can help to improve accuracy in the subsequent questions.

Such an analysis should be done at two stages – first once you have practiced nearly 100 questions from each sub-section and second when you are halfway through your practice tests (6 – 7 full length tests). You can then decide on a strategy to plan and study better. You can also experiment with the test taking strategy in the remaining mocks. A properly planned strategy and a detailed analysis can lift your score by at least 40 points.