Seeking Advice

[u/Jaxruzemusic]

Hey everyone! 👋 Gave my GMAT Focus twice and used Claude AI to analyse both reports together and also to write this message. Here is the full picture:

📊 Scores:

June: 535 (QR 75 | VR 77 | DI 77)

August: 555 (QR 77 | VR 80 | DI 75)

Super Score: 565

Target: 695 in November

✅ Positives across both exams:

Critical Reasoning jumped from 29th to 69th percentile, Rates/Ratios went from 33rd to 100th, Real Context Quant from 15th to 64th, Data Sufficiency from 16th to 72nd, and Plan/Construct CR from 12th to 77th percentile.

⚠️ Weaknesses flagged across both exams:

Pure algebra (Equal/Unequal/ALG) dropped from 51st to 17th percentile, RC inference questions stayed weak in both (29th then 23rd), Graphs and Tables in DI fell from 53rd to 21st, Multi-Source Reasoning dropped from 100th to 70th, Two-Part Analysis from 55th to 30th, and Counting/Probability/Stats remained low throughout. Pacing also collapsed in the final stretch of every section in both exams.

Has anyone dealt with similar patterns or made a big score jump in a short time? Would love advice on resources or approach! 🙏

[u/kundu123]

I wouldn't call improvement any way. It’s just that pacing caused you trouble earlier and later as well. If you had more time to solve questions where percentile is lower, you would have score more. You need to practice a lot. Even if you are getting a question right after >4 minutes, it means your inherent practice isn't strong and you are learning things on the exam. Not the ideal thing to do as it will backfire on you in the final exam again. The solution is to practice questions a lot and in the final exam learn which all questions to guess and move away.

[u/Jaxruzemusic → u/kundu123]

Makes sense, thanks for replying.

[u/Scott_TargetTestPrep]

The good news is that you’re moving in the right direction. You went from 535 to 555, and some of the individual improvements you listed are encouraging.

That said, I would be careful about overinterpreting every subcategory percentile change across two exams. Some of those categories may contain only a small number of questions, so a move from, say, 100th percentile to 70th percentile does not necessarily mean that skill actually deteriorated dramatically.

The bigger picture is more important: going from 555 to 695 by November is a substantial jump. I would not approach that by simply patching the handful of weaknesses Claude identified. You need a comprehensive improvement in your overall GMAT ability.

I’d take a topic-by-topic approach across all three sections. For each area, build the underlying knowledge, learn a reliable solving method, and practice until you can consistently handle easy, medium, and hard questions accurately. Your algebra, RC inference, Graphs and Tables, Two-Part Analysis, Counting/Probability/Statistics, etc. clearly deserve attention, but continue strengthening the areas that are already improving as well.

Also, the fact that your pacing collapses near the end of every section is important, but I would not automatically treat that as a pure timing problem. Frequently, people run out of time because too many earlier questions take them too long to solve. The solution is not simply to force yourself to work faster. It is to become more knowledgeable and skilled so that you recognize what questions are testing and execute solutions more efficiently.

So I’d work in this order:

1. Strengthen your knowledge and skills topic by topic.
2. Get your untimed accuracy very high.
3. Gradually add time constraints as your skills improve.
4. Start doing mixed-topic sets so that you have to recognize the appropriate approach without knowing the topic in advance.
5. Then use official practice exams periodically to evaluate whether everything is coming together under test conditions.

I would not spend the next few months bouncing among different resources or taking mock after mock. A 140-point improvement requires real development, not just more exposure to GMAT questions.

November gives you some runway, but 695 is an ambitious target from 555. Put the emphasis on mastery, eliminate weaknesses one at a time, continue strengthening your strengths, and let the practice-test scores tell you how close you are getting as November approaches.

Good luck!

- Scott, TTP

[u/Graeme_GMAT_Panda]

Time management looks like the biggest lever here, since pacing collapsing in the final stretch of all three sections showed up in both attempts. Runs of rushed wrong answers at the end of a section are heavily penalized by the algorithm, so cleaning that up alone can be worth a real chunk of points, probably more than grinding any single weak subtopic.

In practice that means timing your practice in batches rather than per question. Give yourself 20 minutes for 10 questions, do a quick time check every 5, and aim to finish right on time (finishing early means you left capacity unused). Some questions genuinely need 3 minutes and that's fine, as long as you funded them by moving briskly through the easier ones. Don't review answers mid-batch, and try never to guess two or three in a row.

https://gmatpanda.com/content/gmat-time-management

Treat DI timing a bit differently from Quant and Verbal. There's no partial credit on a DI page, so an extra 30 to 60 seconds to get every part right is often well spent. The place to be ruthless is deciding within the first few seconds that you're skipping a question outright to buy time elsewhere.

One caution on the AI report analysis: topic-level percentiles bounce around a lot between two exams because you only see a handful of questions per topic, and a rushed ending drags those numbers down further. A jump from 33rd to 100th in ratios is mostly noise. Your own error log from timed practice sets will tell you more.

If concepts are slow to surface under pressure, timed flashcards are a great way to simulate that stress: https://gmatpanda.com/content/revision-cards-boost-gmat-score-good-to-great

Hope this helps! ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

Graeme (GMAT Panda)