Mahtab wrote:
Wow congrats on 11 point increase in verbal...please share your strategies to improve verbal!!
To be honest I really didn't do that much the second time around. I had a crazy work schedule and couldn't squeeze in much prep time. Also, while I did get an 11 point increase, I felt that the actual increase was only around 4-5 points. This is because that when I wrote the GMAT for the first time I was expecting a Verbal score of around 41-42. This would have been in line with my practice exams. However, as pointed out in my debrief earlier, I ran out of time on Verbal. This had really hurt my score and compelled me to write the GMAT again.
However, I did do a few things for my PREP and I believe they were really instrumental in raising my score.
Quant:I just did a couple of gmatclub practice exams and did the questions posted by Brunel. I didn't really do these questions properly in the sense that I just rushed through them once and did not maintain an
error log or did not try to learn from my mistakes. I guess I was just too worried about Verbal. Lack of practice hurt me in Quant as I feel that my skills became a little rusty and I struggled on the real exam. End result was a 1 point drop in my Quant Score but I feel that compared to last time, I would have gotten at least 3-4 questions more wrong this time.
Verbal:Learned from my mistake of the first time around and did not let my ego get the better of me by not staying on one question for more than two minutes. If I couldn't solve the question, I would just take a guess and move on! This is easier said than done and I literally had to keep reminding myself about this during the whole exam! Its alright if you guess or get 3-4 questions wrong in the middle of the exam.
Last time around I had only done the SC questions from
OG one week before the exam. I felt that this had not given me enough time to get familiar with the GMAT question style. This time around I downloaded the SC GMATprep document from this very forum and went through all the questions in detail. I also did re-did the questions I had initially gotten wrong on the
OG 12 and the Verbal 2nd edition. Whenever, I wouldn't understand any question I would search for that question on google and look up the responses offered on different forums. I found the forums of
MGMAT especially useful in this regard as the explanations offered by one of their instructors Ron are extremely HELPFUL! I cannot really quantify how helpful his posts are!! Whichever questions I got wrong, I did them again and again until I would get them right. All this helped me in getting familiar with the 'GMAT writing style'. Once you are able to get in the GMAT zone (by practicing) you will notice that GMAT has a distinct writing style and SC questions would seem easy from that point onwards. I repeated the same exercise for CR by going through the GMATPREP CR document available on this website.
Main takeaway for Verbal: There is no substitute for practicing with the real GMAT questions and its better to focus more on them rather than on questions from other sources. While other questions have their value, if you are short of time then just focus on the real questions. Don't worry about re-doing the same questions again and again, it will help you get familiar with the GMAT writing/question style and that is really helpful.
Main takeaway for Quant: Stay in touch and keep practicing some questions daily. Again there is no substitute for the real questions but the
gmatclub tests are really helpful. Moreover,
MGMAT CAT questions are also very good for practice.
Hope this helps!