In my years as a GMAT tutor I have had many students come to me complaining that although they have done a lot of prep for the test, their scores just are not increasing. There are many reasons that this could be the case, but in this post I would like to discuss what, in my experience, is by far the most common cause and also the easiest one to solve: a reliance on non-official resources!
This may seem over-simplistic, but I really can’t even begin to count the number of times that I have been contacted by someone who BELIEVES that they have not been improving when in fact they have. In fact, I just began tutoring someone who came to me by googling the exact title of this blog post (she was the motivation for this blog post). When I found out what she had been doing (essentially using third party resources without using the official questions and tests released by GMAC) I said what I say to all the people in this situation: “you don’t even know if you have been improving or not because you are not using official questions or taking official practice tests.” And so I had her do what I have all people in this situation do: take an official practice test.
What was the result? The apparent lack progress after months of studying and 6 “non-official” practice tests was revealed to be actual progress. She believed that she had gone from a 530 to a 540 (not a very impressive increase after all of the work that she had put in) when in fact she had improved to a 670!!! The truth is that it’s not even clear how much of that was actual “improvement” since her initial diagnostic was from the same prep company that all her subsequent tests were from (I don’t want to name the company but it is one of the major players). It’s quite possible that her initial GMAT diagnostic score might have been a 600 had she taken an official test!
I have written other posts about the need to use official GMAT resources, but I thought that it would be worthwhile to write one devoted specifically to how harmful it can be to rely on 3rd party resources, especially in trying to measure one’s own progress. Let me enumerate the reasons why it can be so detrimental to gauging one’s improvement…
The most obvious and most damaging issue is that 3rd party practice tests do not use the actual scoring algorithm used on the GMAT. Test prep companies certainly aim to approximate the algorithm but they do it with varying degrees of success ranging from ok to not even close! Seriously, not even close!!! So when you rely on these tests you really may have absolutely no idea where you are actually scoring. The tests may be telling you that you are at a 550 when you are really closer to 700 or even the other way around. The aforementioned girl who I just began tutoring received Verbal scores no higher than 34 on the non-official tests she was taking but got a 44 on her first official GMAT Prep test! 44! That is a ridiculous Verbal score (almost 99th percentile) whereas the 34 Verbal was just ok.
Furthermore, the questions themselves are not that accurate. When I do official GMAT practice tests, I usually get 0 to 1 Verbal question wrong on the whole section. On 3rd party practice tests, however, I may get 4 or 5 Verbal questions wrong. Why would that be the case? It is not that the questions are just harder – it’s that they are ambiguous or just not well-vetted, well-written questions and so the kind of reasoning than can and should be applied on real GMAT verbal questions often can’t be applied. So not only does one risk having an inaccurate representation of their score when using 3rd party practice tests, one also risks not learning how, exactly, to approach real GMAT questions.
So if your GMAT score SEEMS to not be increasing, the first thing that you need to do is get an accurate understanding of where your GMAT score actually is. It might be that your score IS quite a bit higher than you think (this is often the case for people who come to me complaining that their score is not increasing). Using 3rd party resources is not necessarily bad, but as you get deeper into your GMAT journey you must turn increasingly if not entirely to official resources and of course to get an accurate gauge of where your score really is you need to do an official GMAT Prep test.
If indeed you determine that your score really is not increasing then of course there are reasons why this might be the case. In my next post I will examine some of the other factors that can contribute to the lack of progress and will discuss what can can be done about it.