GMAT Verbal Underperformance
UPDATED FOR THE NEW GMAT IN 2024
Disclaimer: this article contains several stories about some of our previous students. These students took the “old” version of the GMAT, so the scores referred to do not match the scoring system on the GMAT Focus Edition, which was introduced in November 2023. However, the punchlines from these stories still hold true, so we decided to leave them intact in the hope they’ll help inspire you to achieve your GMAT goals. As appropriate, we’ve included percentile scores to help you contextualize the magnitude of these improvements.
Some time ago, I received an email from a lovely mother of three who did an absolutely heroic job of raising her GMAT quantitative score on the “old” GMAT exam from 18 to 36 in just a few months. That’s an amazing jump of roughly 40 percentile points, and her GMAT quant tutor deserves a cookie.
Unfortunately, the poor woman saw her GMAT verbal score move in the opposite direction: she went from a 33 to a 26 to a 24 on verbal – enough of a drop to keep her composite score far from her goals. If you were her, you probably would have been pretty upset, too.
Sadly, she’s absolutely not alone. Roughly 20-30% of the students we meet have experienced some sort of hard-to-explain verbal calamity on the GMAT before they begin tutoring with us. By “calamity,” I just mean that their official GMAT verbal scores don’t match their practice test scores – and sometimes the scores aren’t even close.
We have quite a bit to say about why test-takers experience huge score declines from their practice GMAT tests to their actual exams. But these disappointments seem to happen more often on the GMAT verbal than on GMAT quant. Here’s why.
How official GMAT verbal practice questions can contribute to test-day letdowns
First of all, the GMAT official guides don’t always give you a perfect sense of what “real” verbal questions feel like, especially if your goal is to score in the 90th percentile or above on the verbal section.
The GMAT official guides feature questions of varying difficulty levels – so in theory, everything from “205-level” verbal questions (if such things exist) to the very hardest “805-level” questions. That variety is a good thing, but if you’re hoping for an elite GMAT Focus Edition score, then it’s possible that you’ll only get a good workout from a small subset of GMAT official guide questions.
Of course, if your skills truly are strong on verbal, then when you take the actual, adaptive GMAT exam, the majority of the questions you see will be difficult – probably quite a bit tougher than most of the verbal practice questions in the official guides. And if you’ve practiced with easier questions, you might find the test-day experience jarring.
The bottom line: in some cases, test-takers who rely primarily on the GMAT Official Guides can be thrown off by the surprisingly difficult verbal questions on the actual exam.
How non-official GMAT verbal practice questions can hurt your score
Worse yet, some students rely far too heavily on "knockoff" test-prep material, and that can definitely send your GMAT verbal score spiraling in the wrong direction.
The creators of the GMAT spend literally thousands of dollars developing and refining every official verbal question, and it’s unreasonable to expect test-prep companies to invest more than a tiny fraction of that amount into their questions. As a result, non-official GMAT verbal practice questions often bear little resemblance to their official brethren.
Sadly, using non-official GMAT verbal questions isn’t just a waste of time – those knockoff questions can do more harm than good. Test-takers can easily grow accustomed to the question-writing style of their chosen test-prep firm, and then suffer mightily when they take the actual GMAT exam. The best test-prep firms certainly offer some good techniques for tackling the verbal section, but it’s a mistake to rely on their practice verbal questions.
So if you want to avoid a test-day drop in your score, stick exclusively to official GMAT (and LSAT) practice questions for verbal.
Are you too “amped” on the GMAT verbal section?
We could argue that the most important reason for verbal underperformance has nothing to do with study habits: many test-takers are simply way too “amped” when they start the GMAT verbal section.
Interestingly, GMAT quant scores on the “old” GMAT exam inflated quite a bit in the first two decades of the 2000s, while verbal scores remained basically unchanged. This has given the verbal section the reputation of being a nightmare experience, and a large subset of GMAT test-takers feel far more pressure on the verbal section than on quant. Tons of GMAT students feel an extra dose of adrenaline hit them when they see their first verbal question on test day.
In their haste to power through the GMAT verbal section, many test-students start to get a little bit TOO intense, and that can lead them to skip a word here or there. And if you miss even one key word on every other question, you can do massive damage to your overall GMAT score.
For example, an unusually brilliant JD/MBA applicant once hired us for a two-week GMAT tutoring crash-course. At the time, he attended an Ivy League law school, and he's a ridiculously smart fellow, even when compared to other Ivy League lawyer types. He hired a GMAT tutor just to help him to shake off some math rust, and he needed basically no help on verbal.
On the “old” practice test he took on MBA.com before his first tutoring session with us, our student scored a 37 on quant – which was close to the 50th percentile at the time – but came within two questions of a perfect GMAT verbal score. So we focused on quant, and brought his actual GMAT quant score to an Ivy-worthy level after just a couple of weeks.
Awesome, right? But hold on: on test day, our student was so amped after the quant section that he raced through the GMAT verbal section at breakneck speed, and finished with 20 minutes (!!) to spare. His verbal score dropped from the 99th percentile to the 90th percentile. That was still enough for a 710 composite, but if he'd taken a few more deep breaths, he could have easily gotten a 750 or 760.
This particular fellow was fortunate: a 710 was good enough, and he was admitted to his first-choice MBA program. But his story is a great illustration of how an overaggressive approach to verbal can sabotage your GMAT score – even if you’re wildly talented.
The takeaway: it can be far too easy to get really, really excited on verbal, especially if you perceive it as your weaker section.
How to develop a great mindset for the GMAT verbal section
After decades of tutoring, we’re convinced that stress and haste are the biggest culprits for most students whose real GMAT verbal score doesn’t match their practice test scores. If you have a tendency to race too much on the verbal, taking a few deep breaths might be more important than any studying you could possibly do. Even if you're a slow reader, you'll gain much more from being calm, focused, and accurate than you'll lose from having to guess on a small handful of the 23 verbal questions.
So if you feel even the slightest fluttering of butterflies in your stomach before taking an exam, check out our test anxiety articles or our performance series videos for advice on how to stay calm and focused during the GMAT verbal section. And remember that you’re not alone if you feel some test-day jitters: sometimes even great GMAT tutors struggle to stay focused on the GMAT verbal section.
Want to learn more about GMAT verbal?
Our beginner’s guides to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning
7 reasons why your practice GMAT scores are lower than your actual scores
Complete, free video courses for GMAT Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning