GMAT 730 Q49 V42 IR5 AWA 5.5

Today I took the GMAT for the first time and scored a 730 (V42 Q49 IR 5).

I have been more of a lurker than a participant in this forum, however at the outset I would like to thank GMATClub and its founders for starting such an amazing forum which is invaluable to thousands of GMAT test takers like me. Every question I wanted an explanation for was there, apart from invaluable resources, tips and tricks. Founders - If you believe in karma, then you have a lot of good karma coming your way. More power to you. This debrief is a bit long as I see it as my way of contributing to somebody’s GMAT experience. I have read a lot of debriefs and they helped me during the test taking process immensely. I would also like to thank the folks at CrackVerbal, particularly Saikiran, Gowri, Arun and Suresh for their invaluable help during my GMAT journey. Now that my Oscar acceptance speech is over, if you are not interested in my rather long story, and want to read the learnings directly, jump to the ‘learnings’ heading.

Materials used:

VA: Manhattan SC Guide, OG13, Verbal Guide
QA: Jeff Sackman’s Math Bible, OG13, Quant Guide

Story:
First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I’m (yet another) Indian, with a base degree in Engineering (this is the Indian equivalent of K-12 now I think), and a PGDM (that’s a story for another day) in Marketing from a Top 20 University in India. I have been working in the Consumer Products industry as a Marketing Manager with a Top 3 player. I did take the CAT (the highly competitive Indian version of the GMAT) precisely 5.5 years ago and scored a 98.xx percentile, however this was due to an extremely high verbal percentile. Also, CAT verbal is nowhere close in structure and form to the GMAT, so I sort of started off with a clean slate. An engineering degree did not help me with quant – have never been good at quant, scraping through it during my undergrad as well.
I decided to take the GMAT somewhere around January this year, but kept putting it off for a couple of months before finally getting down to it in March this year. I took a diagnostic, scored somewhere in the early 600’s, and was quite shocked as I had always thought I’d rock the GMAT since I’d done reasonably well at the CAT and overconfidence and narcissism is my middle name. Over my preparation my admiration for this exam and the way it is structured has only increased and I realized that underestimating the exam is a cardinal sin. One big shocker for me in this exam was my verbal score – I considered this section to be my strength – I had got almost all my SC’s and CR’s wrong. Over the next few days, I tried to study for at least an hour everyday but failed miserably. I work long hours (9 am to 9 pm usually) and by the time I got home beer and bed or both seemed rather tempting. I realized the only way I would actually get some studying done was to join a class – there would be peer pressure as well as homework – and started scouting. On most of the forums, I read rave reviews of e-GMAT and CrackVerbal (based out of Bangalore) and decided to go with CrackVerbal.

April and May I trudged along with my prep, I was travelling a lot and could not manage to devote time everyday to preparation. I did, however, attend the classes whenever possible and if I missed a class, I used to watch the recording. I also did the homework about 50% of the time. End of May is when I decided to push myself into top gear, and started studying regularly (2 hrs a day for 3 weekdays and 4 hours a day over the weekend) and discovered that there was a mountain of material to cover, not all of which was useful as I would discover later. I took my first mock (Veritas) and discovered that I was at a 670 level. Not to be disheartened, I continued with my prep and took my first GMAT Prep test in early June – got a 670 again  I was pretty upset as according to my ‘plan’ (I’m a sucker for plans) I should have crossed 700, and I had also promised myself to take a date for the test as soon as that happens. I called up CrackVerbal support, and they insisted I take a date so that I move with a ‘do or die’ attitude. I took a date for 31st July.
For the next month and a half, I prepared like a mad man. I realized how to maximize my time – I spent 2 hours in the legendary Bombay traffic everyday, so I decided to prep in the cab. I also made it a point to study from 11-1 am every night, irrespective of what happened. I stopped partying/drinking, meeting people, basically I banished myself from my life and spent time like a hermit. Doing all of this, I used to manage 2-2.5 hours of quality time out of the 4 hours that I actually allotted to the GMAT from my day.
At this point, my accuracy levels were as follows:
SC – 30 to 40%, RC-80 to 90%, CR 80 to 90%
PS – 70 to 80%, DS- 50 to 60%

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I needed to work on Sentence Correction, so I started doing exclusively that. I went through the Manhattan SC guide (worth its weight in gold, that book), attended the CrackVerbal SC module and solved almost every SC question that I laid my hands on. I solved a total of 1624 SC questions (I maintained an error log, more on this in the ‘learnings’ section). I took another mock towards the end of June, this time an MGMAT – I got a 670. I wanted to bang my head on the wall, till I realized that in this particular mock my SC accuracy was 70-80%. I had actually bombed RC and CR! I was shocked – what is this sorcery? Is this an exam or some devils charm? You improve on one section, you fault on another resulting in the same score! I realized that this is more of a mind game, and my stress was pulling me down – I basically took every mock as if I was taking the final exam and this was affecting my performance. This is also when I started appreciating/respecting the GMAT (again, refer to the ‘learnings’ section for dope on this).

Next week, I studied a bit of math, continued with my SC, and solved 4-5 700+ level CR’s and RC’s to make sure that my head was indeed screwed on the right way and SC study had not made me forget my RC and CR. All was well. That Sunday, I kid you not, I had a shot of good whisky to calm my nerves, watched my standard motivation speech (‘Inch by Inch’ from Any Given Sunday – check it out here), said god’s name and started the exam (MGMAT). I went calmly, was a bit short on time in the Quant and IR section but managed well overall. Got a 730 (V45 Q45). All was well in the world – I had proved to myself that I had the ability to get a 730. This also happened to be my target score – it is the median, or a little more than the median in most of the schools I want to go to and it is honestly what I wanted to GMAT. This understanding played a huge part in my journey, and I have Suresh from CrackVerbal to thank for explaining this. The GMAT is as difficult as you want it to be – I wanted a 730-740 so I backward engineered my V and Q score and once I had attained that the task was to maintain the performance on the real exam.
Once this was done, I went full force ahead. I took leave for 10 days towards the end of July, and continued prep . By this time I had finished the OG, Manhattan SC guide, Jeff Sackman’s Math Bible (HIGHLY recommended for math dummies like me) and moved on to the Verbal and Quant guide. By the time my holiday started towards the end of July, I had moved on to the CrackVerbal advanced documents. This is basically a collection of retired GMAC questions from various sources, and hence the quality (and the rather large quantity!) of questions was awesome. I took a few more mock tests during this period, and oscillated between a 690, 730 and 740 (Of course, the whisky was a one time thing).
In the last ten days, I realized that endurance was the issue as I was tiring out towards the end of the 4 hour exam, and to counter this Saikiran at CrackVerbal suggested that I do 4 sets (1 set = 37QA+41VA) everyday, to build stamina. It was difficult, but I did it for a few days and my score stabilized at 730-740. I also realized the subtypes that I was getting wrong (Assumption in CR and number comparisons in SC) and Saikiran helped me overcome this by scheduling a phone tutoring session (Thank you!)

Test Day:
I had planned everything in advance, visited the centre the day before, bought Red Bull, Vitamin Water, Assorted Nuts and an apple for the exam. Went to the Pune centre, there was a super helpful test admin who signed me in and the exam started. AWA went well, I finished 15 mins before time, and spent 15 mins staring at the screen and calming myself down. I was pretty stressed at this point for some reason, as it was game time, and when I saw the first IR question, I panicked. It was a combination of Graphs+Tables+CR and some really complicated data, which I took 5 minutes to understand, let alone solve. I completely lost it at this point. Is this what it had come to? I guessed the first 3 questions, knowing that I am committing IR suicide, but at this point 14 minutes had passed and I did not know what else to do. At this point I sort of slapped myself and thought of my dream school - motivated, I took a shot at all the questions, and managed to solve most of them with ease and in time. In the break, I wolfed down an apple, drank half a litre of vitamin water (trust me this is waaay better than water during the exam). I reminded myself again that this is a mind game and now the most important part of the exam was coming up.
As is evident from my test scores, Quant wasn’t my strong suit and I had never scored above 45. However, I had revised my timing strategy (more on this in ‘Beat the exam, not the subject’ below) to make sure that I have enough time for the first 8 questions. I solved them easily, and kept powering on. I got a probability question around Q13, maybe I was doing well or maybe it was an experimental question. However, after Q30 I got 2 co ordinate geometry questions and 1 combinatorics question, and I was confident that I had at least crossed 45-46. One part of the target achieved.
The GMAT breaks are a farce. You get 8 minutes, of which 2 minutes are for that security nonsense, 1 minute transit time to the locker, 1 minute buffer and 1 minute to open and close the locker. So you actually get 3 minutes of time. Anyway, in this break I downed a Red Bull, splashed some water (This is important: refer learnings) and strode in confidently into the testing room.
Verbal started off on a shaky footing – I am sure I got a couple of questions wrong in the first 10 else I would have hit a V45. There was one particularly tricky SC question which I could narrow down only to 2 options and then guessed, and Q3 was RC (:O) on some arbit existentialism type philosophical nosense which doesn’t affect any of our lives. Going forward, I was confident of most of my answers, and towards the end I got a boldface (I could’ve cried in joy) – this was my marker that I had done well here. Finished the exam, there was arbit info which I just kept clicking next, and got the score – I was pleased, although a couple of more points in verbal would have not hurt the GMAC, I am sure. Although I am happier with this score rather than a V45 Q45- makes me seem more balanced, I think.

Okay, now since my long story is over, let me move on to stuff that might actually help you.

Learnings (I know this word is grammatically incorrect):

1. Beat the GMAT, do not become a subject matter expert:
The GMAT is a unique exam – its beauty lies in its questions as much as its algorithm. I spent a significant amount of time researching the algorithm and the way the exam works, and I think this helped me a lot. You need to understand what the exam is testing, how it is testing it, and how best do you approach a problem. You also need to phase out your response, timing strategies with respect to where you stand in the exam at any point in time. The algorithm is trying to beat you with its sorcery (this is my word for it) – think of it as a Sauron to your Frodo (if you are an LOTR fan) and you need to make sure you see through it.
You can be an SC expert but it is of no use if you cannot solve RC, or if you cannot solve SC in under 2 minutes. SC is part of the whole and not the whole, and this is the same for every section. Ensure that you reach your required proficiency level in each sub section and maintain that. There is some curve somewhere - I think it is called curve of diminishing value or some such - that basically says that after a point each unit of effort put in counts for negligible improvement. Understand when you reach this point and stop.
You need to start loving the exam. Love how the questions are framed, love how the next question’s difficulty is determined, and how it will grade you. Only when you realize that each question has a significant amount of money invested behind it by the GMAC, do you realize the value of GMAC material. I cannot stress enough on this – USE ONLY GMAC MATERIAL – nothing else comes close. There are finer nuances and subtleties that hardly any material comes close to. Also, I never agreed with any of the Manhattan CR reasoning. The actual quant I saw on the GMAT was different, if not easier than anything I had seen other than official material. The idea is to think like the GMAC does and not like any test prep company. Beat the enemy by thinking like him and thinking one step ahead.

2. Timing Strategy:
This is the final strategy I used – more time towards the first and last block of questions, and lesser towards the middle. The first determines your level, the last fine tunes it. The middle ones contain the experimental questions (most likely) and you can afford to go a little fast here.

Time Left QA Q No Time Per Question
75 0
60 7 2.14
45 14 2.14
30 22 1.88
15 30 1.88
0 37 2.14

Time Left VA Q No Time Per Question
75 0
60 8 1.88
45 16 1.88
30 25 1.67
15 33 1.88
0 41 1.88


2. Maintain an error log:
This is probably the single most important thing that helped me in my prep. An error log is basically a map of your weaknesses. I maintained a detailed log that I found here (Saruba’s error log) and marked each question with type and subtype – this helped me make my own deductions by easy analysis. In the last ten days of my prep, I focused solely on my weaknesses. REVIEW this log often – I did it once a week for 2-3 hours, striking off questions that I got right this time, and progressively the number of questions in my error log reduced.

3. Set an expectation/Target:
‘800’ is not a target score. Well, atleast for most of us. Decide for yourself what your target score should be, and try and backward engineer the score to VA and QA using the percentile matrix. It really helped me.

4. Quality > Quantity (Except SC)
Enough and more has been said about this. I would just not say this for SC as I believe that SC comes with practice, and other than a few questions pretty much every other question is of the same quality.

5. SC is all about pattern. Pattern recognition comes from practice
SC can be approached purely as a math/logic problem. Practice like mad, you WILL start identifying patterns in SC soon. You’ll look at an SC and be like “Ah! This is testing modifiers, there’s an as vs like, and there is also an SV agreement problem” and solve it within a minute. This is what happened to me in the exam, I think I got most of them correct. Manhattan SC guide is undoubtedly the best book for SC, and I recommend you buy the latest edition and not use the decade old e book that’s been floating around!

6. Take copious notes in RC. Imagine you have to explain it to a 3 year old.

7. Math:
Manhattan SC: SC :: Jeff Sackman’s Math Bible: Math – if your fundamentals in math are shaky like mine, start with this bible. It is bloody brilliant. Simple, lucid with examples.

8. Rely only on GMAT Prep mock scores (refer to my test scores for evidence)
9. Practice with full tests (AWA+IR with timed breaks) - this helps
10. Vitamin Water and Red Bull works like a charm. Trust me.
11. Splash water during a break– This triggers something called divers reflex, inducing a rush of blood to the head. Look it up!

Good luck guys! Hope this helps someone atleast