Why Is My GMAT Score Not Improving?

Let’s start with the good news: if your GMAT score has stalled, or even looks like it’s going backwards with more studying, your skills aren’t regressing. There are a handful of reasons this happens, and I’ll start with the minor ones before we get to the most likely culprits.

Start by Checking Your Data

Before you panic, take a look at the data you’re pulling that conclusion from.

“My score is dropping” moments might just be a result of bad data. If you’re working from non-official practice tests or pulling questions from multiple sources, your results are going to bounce around, because those sets aren’t designed to be comparable. You might think, “I was getting 90% of my reading comp right, and now I’m only getting 75%,” and you figure you’re slipping. But if you were doing question sets from completely different resources, that might just be a measurement problem.

This is worth ruling out off the bat. It’s also why we so heavily advocate for official material, because only real, retired questions from GMAC behave like the real test. Take a look to see if cleaning up your data source helps address why you feel your score isn’t improving. Click here if you’d like a refresher on what your numbers actually mean.

One added nuance: sometimes, even if you use official guide questions, you’ll run into this issue. This happens because the difficulty of the questions fluctuates (often very unevenly) as you move through the books. A decline in accuracy when using official questions might be more a reflection of difficulty than anything else.

You Might Be Studying Yourself Into a Corner

Here’s a sneakier one that happens more than people think: sometimes, the harder you study, the more rigid you get.

If your prep turns into memorizing piles of rules, formulas, and little acronyms invented by a prep company, you can actually get worse at the thing this test is really measuring, which is your ability to reason. We see this often in quant: a student decides to memorize their way to a great score, then grinds probability and combinatorics for weeks – meanwhile, their verbal and Data Insights results are quietly atrophying. 

The worst part? Often, quant isn’t even improving, because the student is training recall instead of reasoning.

So if you’ve been piling on content and your score won’t budge, be honest with yourself: are you actually reasoning through problems, or just trying to remember which rule to apply?

Most of the Time, the Real Problem is Execution

But usually, when scores stall, the culprit is execution.

Students often study, study, then study some more, focusing entirely on content. Their mental checklist goes something like this:

“I learned assumption questions.”

“Now I’ve learned Two-Part Analysis.”

“I picked up this acronym for Multi-Source Reasoning that will help me solve them on the test.”

“I drilled a ton of probability, now I’ve got that down pat.”

This feels great, but there’s one thing missing from this: they’re not paying any attention at all to how they perform once the clock is running, and that’s how they lose points.

The majority of execution problems fit into three main categories:

1. Poor time management. You could know every topic on the GMAT like the back of your hand, but it unfortunately means very little if you’re not able to complete each section in a timely manner. Either you run out of time, or you’re having to rush to keep up with the clock, both of which lead to mistakes. If this is an issue, check out our time management strategies for the quant and verbal sections of the exam. We also have a video on GMAT time management.
2. Careless errors. It’s one thing to know how to do a question, it’s another to be able to do it under time pressure on an actual exam. This is where careless errors start to creep in, and those are punished disproportionately on an adaptive exam like the GMAT.
3. Test anxiety. Interestingly, test anxiety gets worse over time if left unaddressed, not better. The closer test day gets, the bigger it all feels. If this sounds like you, take our free test anxiety quiz, which helps you identify and understand underlying causes of your anxiety.

Any one of these can make it look like you’re getting worse when you aren’t. Your content knowledge is fine, and might even be improving. It’s the execution that’s costing you points on the exam. It’s both the most common problem, and also a very solvable one if you’re willing to change your habits and mindset.

So What Do You Do About It?

First, ignore any inconsistent or unreliable data. Ease off of the rigid formulas and processes and look at the exam with some flexibility. And start treating timing, careless mistakes, and test-day nerves as things you actively train, not stuff you’ll “figure out on test day”.