730 - Triumph of Hard Work and Logic

I recently took the GMAT and scored a respectful 730 (Q48, V42). While not a 99 percentile, I am very happy because ever since I was 17, I have dreamt of studying in USA. However, entrance exams, not money have been my biggest hurdle. I gave up preparing for SAT and GRE because I could not work with the world lists. I could never understand how mugging Synonyms, and Antonyms judges a person’s intelligence, let alone evaluate his ability to become a good engineer. 5 years post my master’s degree, I felt the need for an MBA and decided to take the GMAT. I was super happy to note that this is the only American Entrance Exam (that I know of) that does not test the stupid word lists.


Phase 1 – Princeton Review

I looked on the Amazon and purchased the Princeton Review book since it had 4 star reviews. While the book gave me a good introduction to what the GMAT is, it is nothing but a good introduction to the GMAT. I finished the book in 10 days. Other than covering the basic strategies, the book has little content. After preparing from the book, I took one of the 6 CATs and scored a mere 600. Even though it’s a very cheap book ~$20, I would not recommend purchasing this book for two reasons:
1. Not much learning.
2. False sense of accomplishment – you feel that you are done with the preparation only to realize that you have not even begun.

Phase 2– Discovering GMAT Club

I discovered GMAT Club 6 months back. I felt I needed more help in Verbal than in Quant. The Manhattan GMAT books were highly recommended – especially the Sentence Correction book so I purchased the entire set. I was excited to see a nice thick stack. Excited, I started reading the Sentence Correction book on the Thanksgiving Weekend.
5 days into reading the book, I was super frustrated. There were just too many grammar rules. Memorizing the book was no different than the word list torture albeit in grammar form. I asked myself

“Why god why do I need to learn subjunctive, if all I need to do is to be able to go a business school to learn to make better decisions. Moreover why do I need to know about command and hypothetical subjunctive?. I don’t believe that Sergey or Larry Paige, or the co-founder of Baidu or even Steve Jobs who is American educated cared about Subjunctives..”

To be fair, I did learn a lot from the book. For example,
- Quentin is meeting Alex tomorrow for lunch - wrong
- Quentin will meet Alex tomorrow for lunch - correct

But one thing that I also realized was that there was no way in world that I could remember all these modifiers, and verbs, and tenses etc. Nor could I see myself applying this to actual questions in the exam.

Dejected, I moved to the CR and RC books. Frankly, I found the CR and RC books much better. They were so much easier to read. I could finish each book in a week and felt that I learned a lot more in CR and RC than I did in SC. The most important part – I felt that I could apply whatever I learned in CR and RC. I could not say the same about SC. For me, the CR and RC books provided much better value. I finished the books in December and was able to score V32 on mocks.

Phase 3 – The triumph of logic in Sentence Correction


In early January I attended a Webinar by Ms Payal Tandon from e-GMAT in which she demonstrated how to solve Sentence Correction questions using Meaning and Logic. I absolutely loved the approach. Even though there was some grammar (guess we cannot escape it) but a majority of the time in the Webinar was spent on Meaning – what the author was trying to state and Logic – how to express the intended meaning in unambiguous manner. The beauty of this approach was that I was able to answer 75% of the questions purely based on meaning.
Right after the Session, I attempted 10 questions and got 7 correct. Not excellent, but the key thing is that I was dead confident about each of these questions.

Thereafter, I joined the Verbal Live Prep Program. It is a super rigorous program. I got this study plan in excel that had over 100 line items. At first, it was intimidating.. but I realized that most line items took 30 minutes or less to complete. Once I got a hang of the study plan, I was able to plan every hour of my study time, which was amazing.

Sentence Correction was much more manageable with e-GMAT. While there were grammar concepts, they were not excessive and mostly played on logic such as Subject Verb Make Sense. The Audio Visual medium is a huge thing. It just makes learning 5X easier when compared to reading a book. Secondly, they have these application files that teach you how to approach each Sentence Correction Question something that I found missing from every book that I read.

While the Critical Reasoning section covered the same concepts as the MGMAT CR book did, the key difference was application. They teach something call Prethinking, which makes answers jump out when you do the POE. Overall, I found Prethinking to be a real asset when facing 700+ level problems.

It took me 45 days to complete the course. I took a GMAT Prep mock after completing the course and was happy to score a V36. Although, just 4 point score improvement, the best thing was that my SC was quite good – 82% while my RC was quite bad at 57% overall, not surprising since I was short on time on a RC passage. Once I removed this RC passage, then my RC shot up to 81%.


Phase 4 – Improving Verbal to V42


Thanks to the amazing Scholaranium tool, I analyzed my timing and realized that I was taking a little longer than average on CR questions – 2:15 on average. This was primarily driven by
1. Difficult Weaken Questions: 2:35
2. Bold Face Questions: 3:05
3. Evaluate Questions: 2:52 seconds.

All three above together accounted for 5-6 questions which means that they had a minimum of (-3) minute impact on my overall time.

Fixing Bold Face: I studied Bold Face for 3 days. I read and solve every Bold Face Question there. I focused on three things: 1) Identifying the main conclusion really well (there are many arguments in which there were two conclusions), 2) taking time prethinking my Bold Face and 3) Making sure that I read every answer choice just once , to reduce the back and forth. Basically, I followed the e-GMAT methodology even for the 8 questions in the MGMAT CR book. When I did this, I was able to solve pretty much every question under 2:20.

Fixing Evaluate and Weaken: I followed the same approach. I watched the recording of Evaluate and Weaken sessions to see the approach. I realized that I was only allocating a certain amount of time for initial read regardless of the length of the argument, which impacted the quality of my prethinking whereas longer arguments meant more complex logic, which meant more complex prethinking. For such arguments, I slowed down early and created logical structures on to prethink (assumption, Weakner). This worked wonders as I was able to reject not 3 but 4 choices really easily. While I took about 1:20 (30 seconds more) to read the argument and to prethink, I was able to cut down the time to do POE. Also classifying the argument as Predictive or Causal really helped in this regard.

[b]Quant Preparation[/b]
One of the biggest mistakes that I did was that after finishing Princeton Review, I ignored Quant till the end. I had this implicit confidence that Quant was manageable, which meant that I had to study for Quant while taking mocks. As a result, I was not even able to complete the OG well. I would take a mock test and evaluate it and figure out my weakness in Quant. I would work on the weakness in a few ways:

1. Practice Questions from GMAT Club: Look at the resources for that particular topic here: gmat-ps-question-directory-by-topic-difficulty-127957.html
2. Read the relevant theory from GMAT Club Quant book here: all-you-need-for-quant-140445.html Note, I was selective about what I felt was needed. For example, I never memorized any arithmetic calculations.
3. Took the Study Plan for Q44 to Q50: : how-to-improve-your-quant-from-q44-to-q50-141670.html is an amazing post by BB. Even though I could not get to Q50, I followed many of his inputs.

In addition, I also attended the Number Properties Webinar by e-GMAT which was absolutely amazing. Number Properties is one topic where I made careless mistakes but their approach is of tacking the question stem is amazing. This Webinar added 1-2 points to my Quant Score.

Unfortunately, despite all of this I could only muster a Q48. I regret it otherwise I would have gotten to a 760.

General Tips and Things (and advise that I followed)

Here are somethings that I feel everyone can benefit from.
Solving Questions
Most of the GMAT Questions have very simple and very logical explanations. You will see many complex explanations on forums especially in SC and many a times in CR as well. Seek out for the simpler explanations. Look at e-GMATs responses on SC. BB in his Study Plan article said that 95% of the Quant Questions have extremely simple solutions. I would say that the same holds true for Verbal as well.

Leave Some Questions
Done bother about the 5% that don’t have simple explanations. Such questions are a time sucker and time = money on GMAT. You are not likely to get them right anyway. It’s better to simply mark such questions randomly and move on.

Have a Process that works for you
This is something that’s super important in Verbal. Whenever you do a verbal question, you should know what you would do in step 1, step 2, step 3 etc. Having the process makes you focus on the question when you are studying. It also helps isolate the 5% super hard questions because the process will most likely not work for them. Lastly, when you make a mistake, the process will help you identify the root cause. Having a process helped me attain really high accuracy in Sentence Correction. It also helped me improve in Critical Reasoning.

Focus on Reasoning and not mugging
This may seem like #1 but its super important. There is a lot of jargon that people use while justifying the correct answer. The thing is that if you are not able to reason out the correct answer then knowing the jargon will not help you avoid the mistake. All the more reason to seek out for those simpler logic based explanations.

Have a Plan and stick by it
Ok, I did not have the most optimal plan but I did have a plan. I wanted to finish Verbal and then spend the remaining time on Quant. I believe having a plan allows you to focus. Even if you plan is not the best, having a plan is much better than not having a plan.


Own up your mistake – Prove the Question wrong, or be ready to learn
Spend time revising your mistakes in mock tests. Every mistake should have a corresponding learning. You may maintain an error log for this. I preferred an Evernote notebook. However, don’t leave a question without making the appropriate notes. The only exception to it would be if you can prove the question to be incorrect.
Why Evernote: It allows rich text editing. The tagging features give similar flexibility as excel does. Lastly, it’s available on any mobile platform so you can revise on the go very easily.


How to Study while working full time

This is one of the biggest challenges that anyone faces. Here is what worked for me.

Have a steady schedule
This are much simpler when you study the same time every day whether it’s before work or after work. If you fix a time, there is one less thing to plan and one less reason for you to procrastinate.

Fix your External Environment
Studying for the GMAT require focus, much more than what you need for your job or day to day work. Create that environment. Brighten up the lighting in the study area, eliminate clutter to reduce anxiety and improve focus. Reduce external disturbing noise (birds chirping is good); invest in a noise cancelling headphone if you have to (I did. I always wanted to have one ).

Create Short Workouts
You probably will have to cut down on the gym to take time out for studying. Compensate that by creating small 10 minute workout routines. Microsoft’s Health and Fitness is an excellent app that is available for your PC for free. There are many others as well.

Sleep Well

Get a full 7 hours. This will ensure that you have the energy to study after work or in the morning (if you choose to)

Number of hours Vs Attention Management
Don’t study till you drop dead. This will do more harm than good as you will not remember much of what you studied. Start revising when you feel you have last 10% of energy left. Go to bed with that 5% energy. On days when I went to bed with no energy, I felt like taking a break from studies which was quite detrimental.

This debrief went a lot longer than I thought it would. I hope it does some good. I know that I am only half done but I am glad that I have put the GMAT behind me. Hope to see you guys in the MBA applications forums.