Hi everyone,
I know my score is likely not high enough or inspirational to many of you, especially when I compare it to all the folks who have scored in the mid 700s but I feel like I need to give something back to this community that I have benefited from significantly over the past year and this is my way of doing it.
In my first attempt at GMAT, I scored a 600 (Q42 V31). I was very disappointed since my average on exams had been around 680. My main disappointment came from the fact that I scored so low in verbal, which was my strong area as I had been scoring consistently above 42 in my practice exams. I knew if I could maintain my performance in verbal on the actual test day my score would improve drastically. Also, given my target schools' average I knew I needed 700+ to be considered seriously. My main problem in my first attempt at GMAT was the fact that I totally ignored verbal in my preparation after scoring well on the
MGMAT CATs. Also, as stupid as this sounds, I drank half a bottle of Gatorade during my break so halfway through verbal I really had to go. I was so confident in my verbal abilities that I felt like I could power through those question quickly. However, this was a huge mistake as the verbal section is filled with traps and you need to pay significant attention to each question if you want to score well. Also,
MGMAT verbal is easier than actual GMAT while their quant is tougher. So don't feel confident about your ability in verbal until you have done enough verbal question from
OG and GMAT Prerp.
In any case, I decided to tackle the GMAT again after giving it a break for about 7 months and thinking about whether I could really improve my score. This time around I started to focus on quant as I thought most of my score improvement would come from boosting my low quant score, besides the fact that I needed to prove my quant abilities to business schools to get into a competitive program. These are the resources I used for which I believe helped me significantly.
1.
MGMAT books -word problems, algebra, number properties and sentence correction. In my first time around, I went through all the
MGMAT books and felt comfortable in other areas such as Geometry which is my strong area. So the key was to focus on my weak areas which was mainly problem solving in quant and this is why I started with word problems.
2. Grockit - I subscribed for a grockit account and practiced my quant at work on a daily basis. The nice thing about grockit is it shows you your weak areas so you can target those areas by specifically practicing questions from your weak areas. This helped me significantly as I did so many questions in my weak areas such as sequences that I finally understood the concepts.
3. GMAT club - I also practiced quiz questions in sets of 5 whenever I had 10 minutes on my hand at work. The key was that I only practiced the 600 level questions. The 700 level questions on GMAT club are way too hard compared to the actual GMAT and I learned this from other people posting their debriefs. In order to score 700+ in GMAT, you don't need to know how to do the hard questions but make sure you get all the easy and medium questions right. This strategy helped me significantly and taught me my limits. If you can recognize a hard question on the exam, learn to skip it, and instead focus on the intermediate level questions, your score will improve significantly.
4. GMAT Prep - I bought the additional question pack along with 2 more GMAT prep exams as I had pretty much used all those during my first attempt. I went through these questions in my last week of preparation as they are easier than GMAT club questions and very representative of the exam. So after doing a couple weeks of GMAT club questions, they can serve as a great confidence booster. The hard SC questions on GMAT Prep are also a great resource and one that contributed to my success in SC significantly.
5.
OG - Everyday after work I spent about 1.5-2 hours practicing a mixture of quant and verbal questions from this book. This helped me get used to the style of questions that are on the GMAT and helped me realize that I wasn't as good as I thought I was in sentence correction. So I went through the entire
MGMAT sentence correction book which I believe helped me significantly.
When I wrote the GMAT my second time, I scored 48 in quant and 38 in verbal. I still think I fell in the same trap of focusing too much on quant and ignoring verbal but I think part of the problem is that verbal is at the end of the exam, so by the time I get to the last half of quant my brain is fried causing me to make careless mistakes.
The key to quant is to approach each problem as if it is totally doable. By the time I wrote the GMAT, I had done so much quant that I felt comfortable with every type of question. Whereas in my first time around I panicked every time I saw a quant question and was never confident in my responses.
Overall, my advice would be to take bits and pieces from everyone's debriefs on this forum. There is not a one size fits all approach when it comes to GMAT preparation. For example, when I saw guys sharing their stories about getting 740 when they had consistently been scoring around 760-780, I took their advice with a grain of salt as I wasn't the type of guy who was scoring that high on my practice exams. Same goes with people from technical background such as engineers or actuaries. I realized that the way the approach quant is totally different to the way I do it so right off the bat I knew their advice was likely not that practical for me.
Anyways, that's all I can think of right now. If you guys have any other questions,feel free to message me and I'll be happy to share my experience.