Hi Guys,
Just wrote my GMAT on the 11th of September,2016 and scored a 720. I have not been actively posting in the Gmatclub forum but have been following the posts in the forum for answers to questions in both quant and verbal and also posts about earlier success stories. So, I thought I would also pen down my experience incase it can help someone in the future as the earlier posts had helped me.
I started off in March with a score of 580 in a manhattan mock without any prep. From then on I have used
Magoosh,
E-gmat and joined classes in Bangalore which was called Top one percent.
I thought it would be useful to evaluate these options for you guys since I've been through all of them.
First of all if your at the start of your Gmat preps you need to remember that Gmat is a way of thinking rather than an exam you need to study for. The best analogy I can give you is that it is like learning a programming language. If you have ever learnt a programming language( or you can ask someone who has), you'll find that it takes a couple of months to understand the logic,syntax and flow of the language. And then maybe some more time to really understand the nuances in the language. Similarly in GMAT you need to really understand the nuances to do well.
BASICS
Use
the official guide and manhattan guides to brush up on basics and try out some questions. It is essential to really get your basics in order before you proceed any further in your prep.
This goes for both quant and verbal. In verbal in the start you need to really understand the rules in SC because if your like me(English is good, but have never really looked at sentences in such a way) then this section is really new. CR and RC you can learn along the way while practicing questions.
STUCK AT 650
After 15 days of studies I took another mock and scored a 650. I was happy with the progress I had made and studied hard again for another 15 days. During these 15 days I took up the
magoosh course. They really helped clear my basics in maths.Although the verbal I felt really wasnt as good as their quant section.Surprisingly the next mock I took after 15 days I scored a 650 again. This really frustrated me because I was unable to understand what went wrong. Reading all the reviews about e-gmats verbal I took that up. The videos were well paced and explained the basics of GMAT verbal quite well. Although by this point I already knew most of the basics of verbal this helped to clear any doubts I had in SC. After doing this and quant for 15 days I took another mock and to my horror scored a 660.
GETTING TO 720
This is when I knew I had to make a change. I had some work so had to take a month off from the prep and once that was done I decided to join Top one percent in Bangalore. These guys really helped clear up my basics and make me understand why wasnt able to cross that 700 mark. I was good at the base and mid level questions but lacked the skills to answer higher level questions. They provided me with methods and tips to better understand and answer 700 level questions. Although I felt their material was very high and is tough to grasp if you havnt studied a bit already. Since I had already spent over a month preparing this was perfect for me. They have a video course also which you can order but I would recommend the live classes if it is possible for you.
After putting in approx. one and a half months with them(They recommend more time,but I think I was able to do it faster because I had already prepared a bit from before) I began getting close to 740 in my gmat prep mocks and then went ahead and took the GMAT.
Through this whole journey I followed gmatclub's solutions for all the questions I couldnt answer, and they always had brilliant ways of solving problems which not only show you how to solve a question but also to do it in superfast time. I also used their test and started off scoring in the early 30's and went on to get 44 consistently towards the end. More than the score I think you need to focus on your mistakes and method of solving questions.
Further tips/learnings :
*Getting struck at a score is tough, but remember to keep moving and enjoy the study time for GMAT. The GMAT is not like school exams where you have keeping learning something and go and spit it out on exam day. Its more like puzzle solving, start enjoying it.
*Don't let the scratch pad they give in the GMAT be your first experience with it. I ordered the manhattan one to practice on, you can that one only or any other one which is similar to what they give you on the final day.
*Choose a time slot during which your brain really works on full throttle. I took it 5pm in the evening because I always felt that I am at my highest efficiency between 5pm and 11pm. Yours could be different.
*Practice mocks,and even when solving individual questions do it at 2 hour stretches, this helps you develop the concentration required during the test.
TEST DAY
Everything really went well for me on test day until I had 11 minutes left on the clock and 8 questions left.I had just finished reading my last RC passage and the computer lost connection or something and the screen went blank. The people from the centre shifted me to a new computer and resumed it from where I had left off. But by then I had forgotten a lot of what had happened in the passage and lost concentration. I ordered the enhanced score report from GMAC and found in the last quarter of verbal I had gotten 50% of the questions wrong compared to only 10-15% in my previous three quarters. So felt I could have done a little better had it not been for the mishap but I was pretty happy with my score in the end so its ok.
To conclude I would just like to give a big thank you to all the folks at Gmatclub and to all the people who have made posts earlier about how they got the score that they did. Those posts were real inspirations for me to get the score that I did.
Let me know if anyones has any questions about anything I have written.
I'll also keep updating this post incase I can think of any other things to add.