Why Isn’t My GMAT Score Going Up?
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So, you took your first practice GMAT a couple of months ago, and you immediately knew that you could do better. You spent the last month or two studying—maybe you even enrolled in our 9-week complete GMAT course. You’re feeling much more comfortable with the test, and you know you’ve learned a lot. But when you took your second practice test, you got a nasty surprise: your GMAT score hadn’t improved at all. What’s going on?
You’re not alone. Far from it. In fact, I’d be more surprised if your GMAT score had gone up a lot between your first and second practice tests. What happened to you happens to so many people that it even has a name: the “second practice test effect.” Let’s dive in to some GMAT theory and learning science and see why it happens.
The first part of the answer has to do with guessing and timing. If you want to succeed on the GMAT, you have to guess. You also have to finish the whole test without running out of time. If you don’t guess, or if you run out of time or have to rush, your GMAT score won’t be as high as it could be. The surprising thing is, it’s much harder to handle your timing on your second practice test than it was on the first one!
When you took your first practice test, there were a lot of topics you just didn’t know or didn’t remember. It might have been ten or fifteen years since you last studied math or grammar. When you saw a question that you didn’t understand at all, what did you do? You took a guess and moved on. You knew that you weren’t going to get it, so there was no reason to waste time.
Now that you’ve been studying for a while, and you’ve seen most of the topics on the GMAT, it’s going to be much harder to tell when you’re supposed to guess. You no longer have that “I’m totally clueless about this problem” feeling to guide you. On your second practice test, this may have caused you to commit your time and energy to problems that you shouldn’t have attempted. You understood the problem, but you couldn’t quite follow through—but you didn’t realize that until it was too late! Weak timing and strategy can really hold back your GMAT score.
Check out this series of articles for more info about how and when to guess, and keep practicing. Remember that you don’t have to be totally clueless about a problem in order to guess on it. Sometimes, guessing is the right choice even on a problem that you know you could solve. It’s all about spending your limited time and energy on the right problems, to maximize your overall GMAT score.
Here’s the other part of the “second practice test effect”: content mastery. The GMAT doesn’t test very many different topics. Your understanding of each of those topics exists on a spectrum, from ‘completely clueless’ to ‘100% mastery.’ As you study, you’ll go through a number of different stages:
- You might know what the topic looks like but not really understand the rules.
- You might understand the rules when someone explains them to you, but not be able to do most problems on your own.
- You might be able to do problems with a bit of help or guidance (for instance, from your GMAT instructor or from a written explanation), but not be able to do them completely blind.
- You might be able to do problems totally on your own when you’re practicing, but not when you’re stressed out and under pressure on test day.
The problem is, the test doesn’t know how well you understand fractions or verb tense; it only knows whether you got a problem right or wrong. When it comes to your GMAT score, there’s no difference between “getting a problem wrong because you have no idea what to do,” and “getting a problem wrong because you almost got it right, but missed one tiny thing.” But in the greater scheme of things, there’s a huge difference! You’re probably much better at math and English now than you were a few months ago. But it won’t necessarily be reflected in your score until you’ve really spent time reviewing topics you’ve already looked at, and practicing the basic skills until they become automatic. Don’t settle for simply understanding a topic. Keep practicing the topics you already understand until you can do them in your sleep.
If your second practice test score wasn’t higher than your first one, you might be wondering what you’re doing wrong. Well, you might not be doing anything wrong at all. When you study for the GMAT, you’re not just memorizing a bunch of facts so you can repeat them back on test day. You’re actually trying to become smarter, more creative, and better at executive reasoning. That’s more possible than you might think. But it does take time and patience. Hang in there! Review the work you’ve done so far, keep practicing, and take another practice test in a few weeks—the next one will probably go better. ?
Want more guidance from our GMAT gurus? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. Check out our upcoming courses here.
Chelsey Cooley
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170/170 on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.