What Got You Here Won't Get You There - The Reason Your Score Has Plateaued

This article attempts to answer one of the biggest conundrums GMAT aspirants face:

Why is my GMAT score not improving even though I am doing the ‘right’ things?

To begin, let’s meet Tom, Joe, and Mary. Like you, they are GMAT aspirants.

Tom thinks, “Since time management strategies have helped boost my score by 50 points, a few more of these strategies should help me get to my target score, which is another 50 points away.”

Joe thinks, “Since shortcuts, tricks, and techniques have helped increase my score by 60 points, a few more of them should help me get to my target score, which is another 60 points away.”

Mary thinks, “Since memorizing certain rules and formulae has lifted up my score by 40 points, memorizing a few more of them should help me get to my target score, which is another 40 points away.”

In other words, if something has helped me get to x, more of that thing should help me get to 2x.

Isn’t it logical to deduce that?

Well, if logic is what works in real life, it’s not logical. Because it doesn’t work many a time in real life.

There are examples galore.

If you dress badly, dressing well would help in your career. Till a point. Once you are dressing decently enough, dressing even better won’t help. You’ll need to pay attention to other important aspects such as hard work, discipline, and commitment.

If you don’t smile enough, smiling more often would help in your personal and professional life. Till a point. You’ll eventually need to pay attention to other aspects of your behavior such as what you think of others, how you see your relationships, whether you try to help others etc.

If you have been asking for help the wrong way, changing the way you ask for help will show results immediately. Improving your way of asking will help you. Till a point. You’ll eventually need to help others and care for their welfare. Otherwise, your better and more sophisticated ways of asking for help would start seeming manipulative to others.

What you need to succeed in GMAT is a combination of test-taking strategies, knowledge, concepts, intellectual or hard skills, attitude, and psychological skills.

So, if you learn some test-taking strategies, read some knowledge, memorize some shortcuts or tricks, or understand some techniques, you are expected to see improvement in your GMAT score. Reading and learning more of these will help increase your score. Till a point. After that, you may need to work on other aspects such as your reasoning or comprehension skills, attitude, or even your psychological skills (how you handle yourself on the test day depends a lot on how you handle yourself in any important situation in which you can fail).

Quite obviously, learning test-taking strategies and memorizing tricks and shortcuts are much easier than building skills or changing your attitude. Therefore, it is quite natural that most test-takers first focus on test-taking strategies and tricks and shortcuts. They are easier to grasp and show immediate results. The test-takers are bewitched: “It works, and it works fast. Let’s have more of it”.

And then, unfortunately, many test-takers spend months and months learning more techniques, shortcuts, and strategies. And See No Improvement In Their Scores. And then they wonder, “why am I not improving? Must be something wrong with me since these techniques and strategies work. I have seen them work”. What these test-takers don’t realize is that these techniques and strategies work till a point.

Beyond that point, they need to do the hard work of building their skills and changing their whole attitude towards learning and preparing for the test. Between the skills and the attitude, the attitude needs to change first. It needs to change from “I need to get my target score fast by hook or crook” to “I want to deserve my target score. Let me build the required skills”. Unless this attitudinal shift happens, people will keep looking for things that produce immediate results i.e. things that cannot help more. Unless this attitudinal shift happens, people may not be willing to invest a tremendous amount of time and effort that goes into building intellectual or psychological skills.

An obvious question here is what skills are being tested. I believe the verbal section tests comprehension, reasoning, and communication skills w.r.t. English language. The quant section tests comprehension w.r.t. English language (required to understand any word problem) and numerical, conceptual, and reasoning skills w.r.t. Math.

How to build these skills?

The way you build your skills for any intellectual field. By being interested in learning. By questioning. By organizing, paying attention to, and learning from mistakes.

To summarize at the end the answer to the question that began this article: The reason your GMAT score is not improving is that you are not doing the right things. The things that produced immediate results could help ONLY to an extent. The next jump in your score will probably come from building your intellectual and psychological skills and changing your attitude.