Location: Paris, France
Starting GMAT Score: 410
Final GMAT Score: 670
School Attended: NYU
Louis is a non-native English speaker and came to me with no experience whatsoever with the GMAT. Normally I would have a new student take a diagnostic before meeting with me, but I don’t always suggest it and when I think the student is going to get killed on the first attempt or if I think they will be really devastated by the score that they might get. So in Louis’s case we agreed that he should wait and do a little light prep first. Nevertheless the first practice test score was not good – 410.
Louis’s biggest weakness was Sentence Correction (which is often the case for non-native English speakers for obvious reasons). With SC, I typically focus almost exclusively on the strategy aspects of the question type, but when a person’s grammar is really bad and that is clearly effecting them on SC I usually spend more time on the hard grammar rules and issues that appear on the GMAT. But when I did this with Louis, it became clear that it was just too much for him and that we were spending so much time on it with only limited improvement. So we decided to more or less leave SC behind and focus on the lower hanging fruit. And when we did come back to SC I kept the discussion almost exclusively about high level strategy because this was what had the biggest effect on Louis and because it was clear that no amount of time spent on the grammar specifics was ever going lead to a great result.
Louis’s practice test scores were in the mid-600’s with Verbal scores in the high 30’s (high 30’s for a non-native English speaker is really impressive and in Louis’s case it was due to the fact that he was very good at CR, that he was pretty good at RC, and that we had made good progress with the strategy-only focus on SC). But when he took the test he accomplished something that most people don’t accomplish on their first attempt at the GMAT: he actually scored higher than all of his practice tests – 670 with a 42Q and 40V!!!
This was one of the largest score increases that I have ever had (nearly 300 points). This is not common, so I don’t want to suggest that this is what happens with most of my students, but it can happen and sometimes does happen, so hopefully that gives people hope about how high their score might ultimately rise.