Events & Promotions
|
|
GMAT Club Daily Prep
Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.
Customized
for You
Track
Your Progress
Practice
Pays
Not interested in getting valuable practice questions and articles delivered to your email? No problem, unsubscribe here.
Nov 2007:30 AM PST
-08:30 AM PST
Learn what truly sets the UC Riverside MBA apart and how it helps in your professional growth
Nov 2211:00 AM IST
-01:00 PM IST
Do RC/MSR passages scare you? e-GMAT is conducting a masterclass to help you learn – Learn effective reading strategies Tackle difficult RC & MSR with confidence Excel in timed test environment- Nov 23
11:00 AM IST
-01:00 PM IST
Attend this free GMAT Algebra Webinar and learn how to master the most challenging Inequalities and Absolute Value problems with ease. 
Nov 2510:00 AM EST
-11:00 AM EST
Prefer video-based learning? The Target Test Prep OnDemand course is a one-of-a-kind video masterclass featuring 400 hours of lecture-style teaching by Scott Woodbury-Stewart, founder of Target Test Prep and one of the most accomplished GMAT instructors.
Introduction
Hi folks,
I’m a long-time lurker around GMAT Club’s awesome platform. I have learnt so much from this forum and its members, and I am so glad I can finally give something back to the community here. (:
First, I want to thank bb Bunuel souvik101990, GMATNinja (wonderful video tutorials!!) and many other test prep instructors as well as community members who have provided great explanations and advice to many struggling test-takers like me.
I haven’t been able to contribute great posts on GC that have helped a lot of people on this platform, so I’d like to at least share my GMAT slog story in hopes of providing some small inspiration to anyone who might be feeling low or wants to give up on this test. This will be a long read (pardon me for the length & detail as it’s a way of writing to find closure to my GMAT chapter).
My entire GMAT experience lasted over 4 years from beginning to end, its length partially extended by a 1-year break I took in between for work. My first attempt on a GMAT exam was on a GMAT Prep mock exam 3.5 years ago when I did a 610 (Q40, V31) despite having gone through a few months of self-prep and classes. My first attempt on the real GMAT exam was only 4 weeks ago, managing a 710 (Q49, V37, IR 6, AWA 6); 4 weeks later, I would do a 760 (Q50, V44, IR 4, AWA 6).
I would like to share with you what I did in the initial stages of my study and what I did differently in my 2nd attempt that helped me take my score to a different level.
Together with this debrief, I have attached my ESR reports for both of my actual attempts, so you can have an idea of the accuracy you would need for a 700+ score. I have also put in my test experience in the attached version of my debrief.
Here’s the summarized version:
Useful observations
Preparing:
1) Quality over Quantity – review not just the right answer, but also the wrong answers and why you picked the wrong answer. Understanding the right answer only means you leave out 80% of the other potential learnings on the table. If possible, try to predict how a small tweak would make an easy wrong answer much harder to eliminate.
2) Don’t rush your preparation; develop and follow a tested process and trust that it will bring you there.
3) Don’t do GMAT Prep questions until you have already achieved your basics and fundamentals – do not waste these official questions, ever.
4) Use an error log to go through the habit of scrutinizing your approach and revisiting problematic questions (whether correct or incorrect), especially for beginners.
5) Exercise and keep your mind fresh; sleep well as good sleep helps in memory consolidation (your hippocampus uses sleep time to encode your learnings into long term memory).
6) Have patience and faith, don’t give up (ever) – GMAT is a game of perseverance and application, and it rewards people who are structured and methodical in their approach to problem-solving (Note: people who try ‘silver bullets’ will find that there are none, especially if you want to hit 700+ level).
Testing:
1) Wake up earlier the day before the exam so that you’ll feel a bit more tired and will sleep earlier. Avoid caffeine or intense exercise / revision. Chill out and don’t do too much 1 day before the exam.
2) Follow your question strategy/process and DON’T DEVIATE FROM IT.
3) Learn to let go and make educated guesses when you cannot solve that question (trust me, this is harder to do than it sounds – you have to find your own way of deciding the trigger point, though the clock timer is one way).
4) If you’re doing well, don’t be over-confident; if you’re finding it tough and every question seems a killer, try your best to be unaffected and continue to power through till the end. If you’re finding that you’re getting seemingly easy questions served continually, don’t be disheartened – it may not necessarily mean that you’re doing badly. Treat each question as a separate, independent challenge.
General Evidence-based Study Tips:
Part 1: Active Recall – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE
Part 2: Spaced Repetition – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zNHHpXoMM
Background
I am what many would call a ‘scrapper’ and am not naturally inclined at studying. I did my undergrad in Singapore with majors in Economics and Psychology, and am a social science student through and through. I have never been great at taking standardized tests and am in some ways, a relatively slow test taker, and I do require quite a bit of rote prep prior to each exam. Despite my shortcomings and my tendency to do a significant amount of prep per unit gain on test-taking confidence, I am tenacious and very conscientious. Every day after work, I’d grab dinner quickly and hit the books for about 3-4 hours for almost all nights of the week. Overall, I would say neither quant nor verbal were dealbreakers for me in general.
However, the GMAT does not care about ANY OF THESE. Why?
It’s a whole new level of a beast, likely because GMAC has had 67 years to refine this test carefully and over possibly billions of data points, and because the test sported an adaptive element that I had never experienced before and that I actually found much difficulty with its unique way of testing one’s ability to reason logically under great time pressure by using a very efficient method to do so.
Verbal
SC
No house is stable without its foundations. Get your house in order first by focusing on being really, really solid at the 500-600 level questions (>90% accuracy for each practice you do). At this level, grammar is king – learn the various areas key foundational areas (e.g. SVA, Verbs, Pronouns, and especially Modifiers, Parallelism, and Comparisons) really well, and don’t rush – work at it till you’re 100% confident. Review all question answer choices instead of looking at only the correct answer because you’ll be leaving 80% of the learning on the table if you do.
After I got the basics right, I started working on my ability to recognize patterns and meaning changes in sentence structure – grammatically correct answers can have wildly different meanings. Use your well-honed knowledge of modifiers, usage of ‘comma + and’ structures that may or may not apply for related information, and tenses to establish those common tricks that the GMAT uses. In my experience, a sentence is overall easier to understand and to analyze once you get the intended meaning of the sentence – sometimes of which you may not get until you see the answer choices carefully to analyze which makes sense and which don’t. Meaning at 700-level questions is king and meaning can be changed using a few tricks such as placement of modifiers, nested parallelism (omitting 1 element changes the list and therefore the meaning) etc.
I realized that using GMAT Club's Grammar Book and the egmat course helped me go back to basics on my sentence structure and formation (things that I had taken for granted). It made me realize that my years of schooling had inculcated a fundamentally wrong approach, in that we were taught to more to memorize how certain sentences are correct and others not. Over time, it became an ingrained habit of ‘listening’ out for the right sentence and whether something ‘sounded’ right.
Let me tell you this. The GMAT is absolutely brutal in making use of this fact to trick you into using wrong answers – I can attest to this timeless truth that the GMAT was testing me on this, right until the last question on the final GMAT exam I took. The test-makers will start the sentence off to make sure that it sounds right, then use tricks such as a single, subtle modifier placement to render the entire sentence wrong in meaning.
Take my word for it – don’t make the mistakes I did, unlearn this habit (if you ever had one), and learn English again from the perspective of the GMAT (for the sake of passing this test). Especially for non-native speakers like myself, it is crucial that you put aside your assumptions and check your blind spots for this.
In my first attempt, I deviated from my question strategy i.e. under test anxiety, I started to rush into the answer choices without first trying to understand the intended meaning and given structure of the sentence. I ended up spending much more time getting to the right answer because I wasn’t structured.
In my second attempt, I forced myself to follow the process of understanding the sentence structure in the context of meaning, and my results improved significantly because I was able to get to the meaning quickly and efficiently by using cues in the sentence structure from the answer choices to select the right answer (despite battling a headache throughout the exam).
CR
For CR questions, I found that Pre-thinking makes sense only if you understand the conclusion and the reasoning link involved. Therefore, I worked hard on first identifying the type of CR question and the reasoning involved (e.g. X, therefore Y; A is B, therefore C is also B etc.) before applying question strategies such as negation or being super conservative for inference questions. This can be tricky to understand but I found PowerScore Bible’s CR book more than sufficient to get me going on this.
Another trick I used was to in a way personalize the argument and stand in the person’s shoes – if I were him and I was hiding something, how can I strengthen / destroy my own argument? Then, I worked from that angle and thought about potential answers for a bit before starting on the answers. Quite often, I don’t find an exact match of the answer I thought of, but more critically, the process of anchoring that argument to a clear reasoning pattern and conclusion allows you to weed out irrelevant and seemingly valid answers that validate another unrelated conclusion.
RC
This was the section I had the most improvement on, particularly on inference type questions. Overall, the main difference on my second GMAT attempt was working on RC and making sure that I apply the right reading strategies and doing active, effortful interpretation of the passage.
In my first attempt, I zipped through the passage in hopes of saving time for the questions. However, I realized that I often took longer trying to understand the question and look for clues in the passage. Especially for inference questions, I was unable to apply an evidence-based approach to get the answer (as you can see in my ESR). Particularly for RC, I did the second attempt differently this time by focusing on summarizing the idea for each paragraph, and noting the logical, overall structure of the content e.g. “Oh so this paragraph is about doing X to get Y, it’s been an idea scientists have tested since the 1930’s, and author is reporting that there’s actually 2 ways to do X.”
In addition, I also followed closely the evidence stated from the passage. One of the tricks on the GMAT is that for RC questions, they will give you answer choices that are similar in thought, content, but tweak some part of it that makes it slightly wrong. Therefore, to do well on RC questions, you need to adopt a mindset of “Prove it to me, willya?” – if it’s not something you can support from using the passage’s evidence, or have to make extra assumptions to get to it, those are likely to be the wrong answers. Once I was able to recognize and use a strict evidence-based approach, it really turned my performance around on the harder RC inference questions (as evident from my ESR).
[E-GMAT’s role in my journey]
I took up the course midway through my Verbal preparation and found it tremendously useful. The course is very structured, allowing me to learn at my own time and build proficiency sub-section by sub-section. This was especially useful for a working professional like me who has been out of college for some time and had varying working hours to capitalize on the self-learning platform.
The methodology and process advocated by E-GMAT involves understanding the problem, utilizing pre-thinking based on that clear understanding, then analyzing the answer choices accordingly. It was very useful in that I learnt not just what was right with the correct answer, but also what was wrong with the wrong answers. In addition, E-GMAT does advocate for you to approach the question by first understanding the broad idea intended in the Verbal problem at hand. As mentioned, meaning differences are crucial to achieving 700+ level proficiency and I have personally been tested on this right until my last question on the actual test.
I also utilized the platform’s library and test-builder function Scholaranium to practice my subsections and hone accuracy before scaling up on speed. Another very useful feature that was critical to my retake success was that I could approach E-GMAT’s support to conduct an ESR analysis for my first exam. Nava, the E-GMAT instructor who worked with me on my retake study plan, was able to analyze and pinpoint my weaknesses and recommended clear areas for improvement. I am very thankful for his close support and would similarly recommend the course for non-native speakers especially.
Quant
In my retake preparation, I primarily focused on Geometry and Counting/Sets. I started first by going through my concepts again, then by doing harder questions and eventually improving on my timing. Timing is an outcome of proficiency in concepts and nuances on the GMAT, so I went back to basics to revise my notes on Geometry and Counting/Sets while focusing on achieving >90% accuracy in 600-700 level questions. I filtered 600-level questions using GMAT Club’s question bank features and solved up to 30-40 questions a day, going through them without a timer first to consolidate my understanding. Slow-walking through the questions allowed me to understand where my conceptual gaps were on mid to higher level questions. Then, I started using timers to time myself on 600-level questions.
Once I gained proficiency, I started on 700-level questions. I wasn’t able to do a lot of 700-level questions as I took time to understand each question and its nuances, and would often do the same slow-walk through the question to understand what were my gaps in conceptual areas. Therefore, I was basically going through 700-level questions without actually worrying too much on timing – the focus was on developing my ability to understand the concept and develop conceptual nous for such questions.
To freshen up other concepts, I went through GMAT Club Tests I did before and basically solved them on a timer but did not click on the correct answer – I merely went through the fixed selection of questions and compared whether I managed to make improvements on incorrect questions.
Overall, I only did 1 full-length mock test for the entirety of the re-take preparation – I did a reset of GMAT Prep 1 as they seem to have more questions in the test bank. Some questions were repeated but I wasn’t too concern about the validity of the inflated score (790), as I was focused on learning the process and conceptual improvement. I also worked on timing (i.e. don’t get stuck on the first 10 questions, don’t hold on beyond 2.5 minutes etc.) and deliberately trained myself to let go of questions by making educated guesses using elimination of clear wrong answers.
Key learnings
1. The GMAT is only just a test. You, on the other hand, are a whole, complete individual who is smart and good.
For many, there will be times you feel that your sense of self-worth is intertwined with your performance on the GMAT. Remember that you would feel this way only as much as you allow it to. The GMAT is really a game of confidence in application, and I learnt this only after such a long time in preparation. If you feel down, take time out to relax. I would de-stress by playing computer games such as Heroes III or allow myself some downtime to socialize with friends. Afterall, life is so much more than just the GMAT.
2. Prioritize quality over quantity throughout your preparation.
Carefully review both the right answer AND the other wrong answers. On top of that, analyze your own approach – slow-walk through the question and your thought process, making sure you get the decision-making and analysis correct before speeding up. Right methods and processes always trump quick shortcuts as the GMAT will eventually make you pay for not taking a methodical approach. In addition, there is no need to have done ALL questions in the GMAT universe/OG/prep courses so long as you can adequately understand and apply the concepts involved. Practicing ALOT of questions does not help unless you can correctly address the quality aspect of it i.e. really going through the concepts, your reasoning approach and question strategy, why you got it right/wrong, and your ability to apply it in similar questions.
3. Prioritize accuracy over speed when first developing competency.
Don’t rush to do 600-level questions when you’ve not mastered 500-level ones, and don’t do 700-level ones until you’ve completely mastered the concepts at both 500 and 600 level questions. You will save a lot of time going back to basics when you’ve built a strong foundation. 700-level questions often test upon the same foundations but add a twist to it. Without strong basics, you would find it difficult to hit 700-level questions consistently. Therefore, commit to learning the basics – one subsection at a time – before moving onto higher level questions.
4. Develop a tested and tried core process to answer each of your question types.
Don’t deviate from them during test day. Deviating from question strategy means you will spend extra time figuring out an alternative approach on test day and you may take a long time to do so. Worse, you didn’t and you end up losing time and accuracy. GMAT is a game of perseverance and application, and it rewards people who are structured and methodical in their approach to problem-solving (Note: people who try ‘silver bullets’ will find that there are none, especially if you want to hit 700+ level).
5. “No battle plan survives the enemy”
It is important to accept the fact that no matter how much you plan, there will be some questions that will throw you off. It is then important to know it is okay to make an educated guess and move on. According to the GMAT, good guesses and mistakes have only a small effect on your test score. Do not lose the forest for the trees, they say. That is especially true on the GMAT as you could have spent that additional time finishing up the easy and medium level questions that play a huge role in bumping your score up to a 700+ level. You do NOT need to answer all questions correctly to obtain an elite score. My ESRs are proof that even if you take time to achieve perfection in some subsections, you will be penalized equally for other questions that you don’t spend sufficient time on and therefore answer incorrectly, especially when you’re perfectly able to solve those missed questions to begin with, given good time management. Give yourself permission to LET GO of questions – I know this was difficult for me because my traditional schooling taught me the habit of getting every question right. Unlearning these habits will take you to an elite score on the GMAT.
6. You don’t need to master EVERY 700-level question to be able to get a good score.
In general, you should look at the key ways in which a certain subsection topic can be asked at a 700-level question – the key to knowing this is to do enough questions and noting the core patterns involved. Whenever I see a pattern that’s really an outlier, I try to understand but then I’m not to be too bothered about it appearing because the probability of such a pattern coming up is really low and would not be worth spending a lot of time learning these outliers. What is also true is that test prep companies deliberately come up with really complicated and calculation-intensive Quant questions that don’t even reflect what GMAT’s questions are. The difficult Quant questions I encountered on the GMAT are elegantly designed and simply worded, but they test a few concepts at once and involves usually a non-formulaic approach i.e. you cannot just solve for variables the hard way and expect to get an answer. You might, but you will surely end up losing much time with that method. Therefore, remember that the GMAT is a reasoning test (not a test of formulas) and that each question can more or less be solved within 2 minutes.
7. Find your source of courage and motivation to carry on, and don’t give up.
I often went back to my initial motivation as to why I did what I did and anchored that firmly. I also accepted that I may not test as well as I would like to, but I would not let a test determine my sense of self-worth (see Point 1).
Whatever the outcome may be, I knew that I would be okay to move forward with it.
This sense of acceptance that I got towards the end was liberating – it lifted much of my fears and helped me take on the test with confidence.
As Adrian asked Rocky in Rocky III:
Adrian: “What's so bad? Tell me, what?”
Rocky: “I'M AFRAID! ALL RIGHT?! YOU WANT TO HEAR ME SAY IT? You want to break me down? All right, I'm afraid. For the first time in my life, I'm afraid."
Adrian: “Why? You're human, aren't you?... But it doesn't matter what I believe because you're the one that's got to carry that fear around inside you… Get rid of it!”
"Because when all the smoke has cleared and everyone's through chanting your name, it's just going to be us. And you can't live like this. We can't live like this. Cause it's going to bother you for the rest of your life. Look what it's doing to you now."
"But you gotta want to do it for the right reasons. Not for the guilt over Mickey, not for the people, not for the title, not for money or me, but for you."
"Just you. Just you alone."
Rocky: “And if I lose?”
Adrian: “Then you lose. But at least you lose with no excuses, no fear. And I know you can live with that.”
Rocky: "How'd you get so tough?"
Adrian: "Because I live with a fighter."
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn26NOoV_lQ
If I can do it, so can you. Keep it going!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mock Scores
I have listed all of my scores on the prep exams I have taken, examples of scores that some have tried to compile, compare, and correlate for their own mock vs. estimated actual performance on the GMAT – hopefully this provides some general indication but more importantly some encouragement if you find your test scores fluctuating wildly or not reflective of what you think your actual performance would be (and conversely, not be over-confident if you have always done well).
When I was doing these tests, I felt a large fluctuation in my confidence from time to time but tried to maintain the objective of learning from the test and building stamina.
Here are my scores on the mock exams:
Manhattan GMAT
MGMT 1 – 720 (Q51, V37); MGMT 2 – 710 (Q46, V41);
MGMT 3 – 680 (Q46, V37); MGMT 4 – 710 (Q49, V37);
MGMT 5 – 730 (Q48, V41); MGMT 6 – 700 (Q47, V38)
GMAT Prep
Prep 1 – 770 (Q50, V46); Prep 2 – 770 (Q51, V44)
Prep 3 – 720 (Q48, V40); Prep 4 – 780 (Q51, V46)
Prep 5 – 750 (Q48, V44); Prep 6 – 750 (Q50, V41)
GMAT Club Tests
Quant: (in order of test sequence from first to last)
41, 51, 49, 50, 49, 49, 50, 50, 51, 51, 50, 50, 51, 49, 50, 47, 47
Verbal:
45, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 33
Hi folks,
I’m a long-time lurker around GMAT Club’s awesome platform. I have learnt so much from this forum and its members, and I am so glad I can finally give something back to the community here. (:
First, I want to thank bb Bunuel souvik101990, GMATNinja (wonderful video tutorials!!) and many other test prep instructors as well as community members who have provided great explanations and advice to many struggling test-takers like me.
I haven’t been able to contribute great posts on GC that have helped a lot of people on this platform, so I’d like to at least share my GMAT slog story in hopes of providing some small inspiration to anyone who might be feeling low or wants to give up on this test. This will be a long read (pardon me for the length & detail as it’s a way of writing to find closure to my GMAT chapter).
My entire GMAT experience lasted over 4 years from beginning to end, its length partially extended by a 1-year break I took in between for work. My first attempt on a GMAT exam was on a GMAT Prep mock exam 3.5 years ago when I did a 610 (Q40, V31) despite having gone through a few months of self-prep and classes. My first attempt on the real GMAT exam was only 4 weeks ago, managing a 710 (Q49, V37, IR 6, AWA 6); 4 weeks later, I would do a 760 (Q50, V44, IR 4, AWA 6).
I would like to share with you what I did in the initial stages of my study and what I did differently in my 2nd attempt that helped me take my score to a different level.
Together with this debrief, I have attached my ESR reports for both of my actual attempts, so you can have an idea of the accuracy you would need for a 700+ score. I have also put in my test experience in the attached version of my debrief.
Here’s the summarized version:
Useful observations
Preparing:
1) Quality over Quantity – review not just the right answer, but also the wrong answers and why you picked the wrong answer. Understanding the right answer only means you leave out 80% of the other potential learnings on the table. If possible, try to predict how a small tweak would make an easy wrong answer much harder to eliminate.
2) Don’t rush your preparation; develop and follow a tested process and trust that it will bring you there.
3) Don’t do GMAT Prep questions until you have already achieved your basics and fundamentals – do not waste these official questions, ever.
4) Use an error log to go through the habit of scrutinizing your approach and revisiting problematic questions (whether correct or incorrect), especially for beginners.
5) Exercise and keep your mind fresh; sleep well as good sleep helps in memory consolidation (your hippocampus uses sleep time to encode your learnings into long term memory).
6) Have patience and faith, don’t give up (ever) – GMAT is a game of perseverance and application, and it rewards people who are structured and methodical in their approach to problem-solving (Note: people who try ‘silver bullets’ will find that there are none, especially if you want to hit 700+ level).
Testing:
1) Wake up earlier the day before the exam so that you’ll feel a bit more tired and will sleep earlier. Avoid caffeine or intense exercise / revision. Chill out and don’t do too much 1 day before the exam.
2) Follow your question strategy/process and DON’T DEVIATE FROM IT.
3) Learn to let go and make educated guesses when you cannot solve that question (trust me, this is harder to do than it sounds – you have to find your own way of deciding the trigger point, though the clock timer is one way).
4) If you’re doing well, don’t be over-confident; if you’re finding it tough and every question seems a killer, try your best to be unaffected and continue to power through till the end. If you’re finding that you’re getting seemingly easy questions served continually, don’t be disheartened – it may not necessarily mean that you’re doing badly. Treat each question as a separate, independent challenge.
General Evidence-based Study Tips:
Part 1: Active Recall – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE
Part 2: Spaced Repetition – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zNHHpXoMM
Background
I am what many would call a ‘scrapper’ and am not naturally inclined at studying. I did my undergrad in Singapore with majors in Economics and Psychology, and am a social science student through and through. I have never been great at taking standardized tests and am in some ways, a relatively slow test taker, and I do require quite a bit of rote prep prior to each exam. Despite my shortcomings and my tendency to do a significant amount of prep per unit gain on test-taking confidence, I am tenacious and very conscientious. Every day after work, I’d grab dinner quickly and hit the books for about 3-4 hours for almost all nights of the week. Overall, I would say neither quant nor verbal were dealbreakers for me in general.
However, the GMAT does not care about ANY OF THESE. Why?
It’s a whole new level of a beast, likely because GMAC has had 67 years to refine this test carefully and over possibly billions of data points, and because the test sported an adaptive element that I had never experienced before and that I actually found much difficulty with its unique way of testing one’s ability to reason logically under great time pressure by using a very efficient method to do so.
Verbal
SC
No house is stable without its foundations. Get your house in order first by focusing on being really, really solid at the 500-600 level questions (>90% accuracy for each practice you do). At this level, grammar is king – learn the various areas key foundational areas (e.g. SVA, Verbs, Pronouns, and especially Modifiers, Parallelism, and Comparisons) really well, and don’t rush – work at it till you’re 100% confident. Review all question answer choices instead of looking at only the correct answer because you’ll be leaving 80% of the learning on the table if you do.
After I got the basics right, I started working on my ability to recognize patterns and meaning changes in sentence structure – grammatically correct answers can have wildly different meanings. Use your well-honed knowledge of modifiers, usage of ‘comma + and’ structures that may or may not apply for related information, and tenses to establish those common tricks that the GMAT uses. In my experience, a sentence is overall easier to understand and to analyze once you get the intended meaning of the sentence – sometimes of which you may not get until you see the answer choices carefully to analyze which makes sense and which don’t. Meaning at 700-level questions is king and meaning can be changed using a few tricks such as placement of modifiers, nested parallelism (omitting 1 element changes the list and therefore the meaning) etc.
I realized that using GMAT Club's Grammar Book and the egmat course helped me go back to basics on my sentence structure and formation (things that I had taken for granted). It made me realize that my years of schooling had inculcated a fundamentally wrong approach, in that we were taught to more to memorize how certain sentences are correct and others not. Over time, it became an ingrained habit of ‘listening’ out for the right sentence and whether something ‘sounded’ right.
Let me tell you this. The GMAT is absolutely brutal in making use of this fact to trick you into using wrong answers – I can attest to this timeless truth that the GMAT was testing me on this, right until the last question on the final GMAT exam I took. The test-makers will start the sentence off to make sure that it sounds right, then use tricks such as a single, subtle modifier placement to render the entire sentence wrong in meaning.
Take my word for it – don’t make the mistakes I did, unlearn this habit (if you ever had one), and learn English again from the perspective of the GMAT (for the sake of passing this test). Especially for non-native speakers like myself, it is crucial that you put aside your assumptions and check your blind spots for this.
In my first attempt, I deviated from my question strategy i.e. under test anxiety, I started to rush into the answer choices without first trying to understand the intended meaning and given structure of the sentence. I ended up spending much more time getting to the right answer because I wasn’t structured.
In my second attempt, I forced myself to follow the process of understanding the sentence structure in the context of meaning, and my results improved significantly because I was able to get to the meaning quickly and efficiently by using cues in the sentence structure from the answer choices to select the right answer (despite battling a headache throughout the exam).
CR
For CR questions, I found that Pre-thinking makes sense only if you understand the conclusion and the reasoning link involved. Therefore, I worked hard on first identifying the type of CR question and the reasoning involved (e.g. X, therefore Y; A is B, therefore C is also B etc.) before applying question strategies such as negation or being super conservative for inference questions. This can be tricky to understand but I found PowerScore Bible’s CR book more than sufficient to get me going on this.
Another trick I used was to in a way personalize the argument and stand in the person’s shoes – if I were him and I was hiding something, how can I strengthen / destroy my own argument? Then, I worked from that angle and thought about potential answers for a bit before starting on the answers. Quite often, I don’t find an exact match of the answer I thought of, but more critically, the process of anchoring that argument to a clear reasoning pattern and conclusion allows you to weed out irrelevant and seemingly valid answers that validate another unrelated conclusion.
RC
This was the section I had the most improvement on, particularly on inference type questions. Overall, the main difference on my second GMAT attempt was working on RC and making sure that I apply the right reading strategies and doing active, effortful interpretation of the passage.
In my first attempt, I zipped through the passage in hopes of saving time for the questions. However, I realized that I often took longer trying to understand the question and look for clues in the passage. Especially for inference questions, I was unable to apply an evidence-based approach to get the answer (as you can see in my ESR). Particularly for RC, I did the second attempt differently this time by focusing on summarizing the idea for each paragraph, and noting the logical, overall structure of the content e.g. “Oh so this paragraph is about doing X to get Y, it’s been an idea scientists have tested since the 1930’s, and author is reporting that there’s actually 2 ways to do X.”
In addition, I also followed closely the evidence stated from the passage. One of the tricks on the GMAT is that for RC questions, they will give you answer choices that are similar in thought, content, but tweak some part of it that makes it slightly wrong. Therefore, to do well on RC questions, you need to adopt a mindset of “Prove it to me, willya?” – if it’s not something you can support from using the passage’s evidence, or have to make extra assumptions to get to it, those are likely to be the wrong answers. Once I was able to recognize and use a strict evidence-based approach, it really turned my performance around on the harder RC inference questions (as evident from my ESR).
[E-GMAT’s role in my journey]
I took up the course midway through my Verbal preparation and found it tremendously useful. The course is very structured, allowing me to learn at my own time and build proficiency sub-section by sub-section. This was especially useful for a working professional like me who has been out of college for some time and had varying working hours to capitalize on the self-learning platform.
The methodology and process advocated by E-GMAT involves understanding the problem, utilizing pre-thinking based on that clear understanding, then analyzing the answer choices accordingly. It was very useful in that I learnt not just what was right with the correct answer, but also what was wrong with the wrong answers. In addition, E-GMAT does advocate for you to approach the question by first understanding the broad idea intended in the Verbal problem at hand. As mentioned, meaning differences are crucial to achieving 700+ level proficiency and I have personally been tested on this right until my last question on the actual test.
I also utilized the platform’s library and test-builder function Scholaranium to practice my subsections and hone accuracy before scaling up on speed. Another very useful feature that was critical to my retake success was that I could approach E-GMAT’s support to conduct an ESR analysis for my first exam. Nava, the E-GMAT instructor who worked with me on my retake study plan, was able to analyze and pinpoint my weaknesses and recommended clear areas for improvement. I am very thankful for his close support and would similarly recommend the course for non-native speakers especially.
Quant
In my retake preparation, I primarily focused on Geometry and Counting/Sets. I started first by going through my concepts again, then by doing harder questions and eventually improving on my timing. Timing is an outcome of proficiency in concepts and nuances on the GMAT, so I went back to basics to revise my notes on Geometry and Counting/Sets while focusing on achieving >90% accuracy in 600-700 level questions. I filtered 600-level questions using GMAT Club’s question bank features and solved up to 30-40 questions a day, going through them without a timer first to consolidate my understanding. Slow-walking through the questions allowed me to understand where my conceptual gaps were on mid to higher level questions. Then, I started using timers to time myself on 600-level questions.
Once I gained proficiency, I started on 700-level questions. I wasn’t able to do a lot of 700-level questions as I took time to understand each question and its nuances, and would often do the same slow-walk through the question to understand what were my gaps in conceptual areas. Therefore, I was basically going through 700-level questions without actually worrying too much on timing – the focus was on developing my ability to understand the concept and develop conceptual nous for such questions.
To freshen up other concepts, I went through GMAT Club Tests I did before and basically solved them on a timer but did not click on the correct answer – I merely went through the fixed selection of questions and compared whether I managed to make improvements on incorrect questions.
Overall, I only did 1 full-length mock test for the entirety of the re-take preparation – I did a reset of GMAT Prep 1 as they seem to have more questions in the test bank. Some questions were repeated but I wasn’t too concern about the validity of the inflated score (790), as I was focused on learning the process and conceptual improvement. I also worked on timing (i.e. don’t get stuck on the first 10 questions, don’t hold on beyond 2.5 minutes etc.) and deliberately trained myself to let go of questions by making educated guesses using elimination of clear wrong answers.
Key learnings
1. The GMAT is only just a test. You, on the other hand, are a whole, complete individual who is smart and good.
For many, there will be times you feel that your sense of self-worth is intertwined with your performance on the GMAT. Remember that you would feel this way only as much as you allow it to. The GMAT is really a game of confidence in application, and I learnt this only after such a long time in preparation. If you feel down, take time out to relax. I would de-stress by playing computer games such as Heroes III or allow myself some downtime to socialize with friends. Afterall, life is so much more than just the GMAT.
2. Prioritize quality over quantity throughout your preparation.
Carefully review both the right answer AND the other wrong answers. On top of that, analyze your own approach – slow-walk through the question and your thought process, making sure you get the decision-making and analysis correct before speeding up. Right methods and processes always trump quick shortcuts as the GMAT will eventually make you pay for not taking a methodical approach. In addition, there is no need to have done ALL questions in the GMAT universe/OG/prep courses so long as you can adequately understand and apply the concepts involved. Practicing ALOT of questions does not help unless you can correctly address the quality aspect of it i.e. really going through the concepts, your reasoning approach and question strategy, why you got it right/wrong, and your ability to apply it in similar questions.
3. Prioritize accuracy over speed when first developing competency.
Don’t rush to do 600-level questions when you’ve not mastered 500-level ones, and don’t do 700-level ones until you’ve completely mastered the concepts at both 500 and 600 level questions. You will save a lot of time going back to basics when you’ve built a strong foundation. 700-level questions often test upon the same foundations but add a twist to it. Without strong basics, you would find it difficult to hit 700-level questions consistently. Therefore, commit to learning the basics – one subsection at a time – before moving onto higher level questions.
4. Develop a tested and tried core process to answer each of your question types.
Don’t deviate from them during test day. Deviating from question strategy means you will spend extra time figuring out an alternative approach on test day and you may take a long time to do so. Worse, you didn’t and you end up losing time and accuracy. GMAT is a game of perseverance and application, and it rewards people who are structured and methodical in their approach to problem-solving (Note: people who try ‘silver bullets’ will find that there are none, especially if you want to hit 700+ level).
5. “No battle plan survives the enemy”
It is important to accept the fact that no matter how much you plan, there will be some questions that will throw you off. It is then important to know it is okay to make an educated guess and move on. According to the GMAT, good guesses and mistakes have only a small effect on your test score. Do not lose the forest for the trees, they say. That is especially true on the GMAT as you could have spent that additional time finishing up the easy and medium level questions that play a huge role in bumping your score up to a 700+ level. You do NOT need to answer all questions correctly to obtain an elite score. My ESRs are proof that even if you take time to achieve perfection in some subsections, you will be penalized equally for other questions that you don’t spend sufficient time on and therefore answer incorrectly, especially when you’re perfectly able to solve those missed questions to begin with, given good time management. Give yourself permission to LET GO of questions – I know this was difficult for me because my traditional schooling taught me the habit of getting every question right. Unlearning these habits will take you to an elite score on the GMAT.
6. You don’t need to master EVERY 700-level question to be able to get a good score.
In general, you should look at the key ways in which a certain subsection topic can be asked at a 700-level question – the key to knowing this is to do enough questions and noting the core patterns involved. Whenever I see a pattern that’s really an outlier, I try to understand but then I’m not to be too bothered about it appearing because the probability of such a pattern coming up is really low and would not be worth spending a lot of time learning these outliers. What is also true is that test prep companies deliberately come up with really complicated and calculation-intensive Quant questions that don’t even reflect what GMAT’s questions are. The difficult Quant questions I encountered on the GMAT are elegantly designed and simply worded, but they test a few concepts at once and involves usually a non-formulaic approach i.e. you cannot just solve for variables the hard way and expect to get an answer. You might, but you will surely end up losing much time with that method. Therefore, remember that the GMAT is a reasoning test (not a test of formulas) and that each question can more or less be solved within 2 minutes.
7. Find your source of courage and motivation to carry on, and don’t give up.
I often went back to my initial motivation as to why I did what I did and anchored that firmly. I also accepted that I may not test as well as I would like to, but I would not let a test determine my sense of self-worth (see Point 1).
Whatever the outcome may be, I knew that I would be okay to move forward with it.
This sense of acceptance that I got towards the end was liberating – it lifted much of my fears and helped me take on the test with confidence.
As Adrian asked Rocky in Rocky III:
Adrian: “What's so bad? Tell me, what?”
Rocky: “I'M AFRAID! ALL RIGHT?! YOU WANT TO HEAR ME SAY IT? You want to break me down? All right, I'm afraid. For the first time in my life, I'm afraid."
Adrian: “Why? You're human, aren't you?... But it doesn't matter what I believe because you're the one that's got to carry that fear around inside you… Get rid of it!”
"Because when all the smoke has cleared and everyone's through chanting your name, it's just going to be us. And you can't live like this. We can't live like this. Cause it's going to bother you for the rest of your life. Look what it's doing to you now."
"But you gotta want to do it for the right reasons. Not for the guilt over Mickey, not for the people, not for the title, not for money or me, but for you."
"Just you. Just you alone."
Rocky: “And if I lose?”
Adrian: “Then you lose. But at least you lose with no excuses, no fear. And I know you can live with that.”
Rocky: "How'd you get so tough?"
Adrian: "Because I live with a fighter."
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn26NOoV_lQ
If I can do it, so can you. Keep it going!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mock Scores
I have listed all of my scores on the prep exams I have taken, examples of scores that some have tried to compile, compare, and correlate for their own mock vs. estimated actual performance on the GMAT – hopefully this provides some general indication but more importantly some encouragement if you find your test scores fluctuating wildly or not reflective of what you think your actual performance would be (and conversely, not be over-confident if you have always done well).
When I was doing these tests, I felt a large fluctuation in my confidence from time to time but tried to maintain the objective of learning from the test and building stamina.
Here are my scores on the mock exams:
Manhattan GMAT
MGMT 1 – 720 (Q51, V37); MGMT 2 – 710 (Q46, V41);
MGMT 3 – 680 (Q46, V37); MGMT 4 – 710 (Q49, V37);
MGMT 5 – 730 (Q48, V41); MGMT 6 – 700 (Q47, V38)
GMAT Prep
Prep 1 – 770 (Q50, V46); Prep 2 – 770 (Q51, V44)
Prep 3 – 720 (Q48, V40); Prep 4 – 780 (Q51, V46)
Prep 5 – 750 (Q48, V44); Prep 6 – 750 (Q50, V41)
GMAT Club Tests
Quant: (in order of test sequence from first to last)
41, 51, 49, 50, 49, 49, 50, 50, 51, 51, 50, 50, 51, 49, 50, 47, 47
Verbal:
45, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 33
Attachments
Score Gains_Retake Stats GMAC.pdf [1.62 MiB]
Downloaded 166 times
GMAT Club Debrief_tinytiger.pdf [262.86 KiB]
Downloaded 91 times
tinytiger_760_ESR.pdf [466.31 KiB]
Downloaded 317 times
tinytiger_710_ESR.pdf [475.71 KiB]
Downloaded 210 times
22 Sep 2020, 00:33
Kudos
Bookmarks
Hi Kimwei,
Congratulations on scoring a 760 on the GMAT, and thank you for taking out the time to share your story with us. I am sure that your debrief will really help several GMAT aspirants.
Firstly, I am glad that you followed the right strategies to excel. Following strategies such as the meaning-based approach for SC, Pre-Thinking for CR, and Reading strategies for RC really shows that you focused on understanding the needs of a sub-section and built the necessary core skills required to master the respective approach, and perfected the same through applying them consciously.
Above all, I loved your attitude towards the test itself. Many students, especially those who often find themselves struggling with the test, think of GMAT as proof of intelligence. This attitude puts unnecessary pressure on aspirants, which does more harm than gain.
Secondly, In addition to your amazing debrief, I also want to thank you for sharing your ESRs. They have a ton of data, which shows how much you have improved to get to that 760 score. I have tried to simplify both your ESRs as much as possible and hope that it will help students understand what it takes to ace the GMAT
1) The difference made by personalized approaches
• In RC, you improved from 51st percentile to 93rd percentile
• And, in SC you went from 87th percentile to 99th percentile.
This improvement shows that you understood what’s tested on each sub-section such as – how meaning is the key to achieve the 90th percentile on SC, learned the approach designed to tackle that sub-section such as meaning based approach for SC or Reading Strategies for RC. This also shows that you perfected the same using a tool such as Scholaranium.
2) Mastering Time Management
GMAT 760 does not only demand perfection in conceptual understanding and application of the same but also requires you to be test ready.
In your first attempt, you allocated the most time on the first two blocks of questions; therefore, your ESR shows that you struggled for time in the third and the fourth block and that you had to rush through through questions.
However, in your second attempt, your timing improved considerably. As a result, you had a lot more time in the third and the fourth block of questions. This shows that you build exam readiness, which is key to hit the 99th percentile on the test.
Overall, while 710 is a very good score, 760 is an excellent shows and your debrief shows that to excel, one needs to do many things right. Great job executing on these things!!
Again, congratulations on the amazing score, and Goodluck for your applications
-Rajat
Congratulations on scoring a 760 on the GMAT, and thank you for taking out the time to share your story with us. I am sure that your debrief will really help several GMAT aspirants.
Firstly, I am glad that you followed the right strategies to excel. Following strategies such as the meaning-based approach for SC, Pre-Thinking for CR, and Reading strategies for RC really shows that you focused on understanding the needs of a sub-section and built the necessary core skills required to master the respective approach, and perfected the same through applying them consciously.
Above all, I loved your attitude towards the test itself. Many students, especially those who often find themselves struggling with the test, think of GMAT as proof of intelligence. This attitude puts unnecessary pressure on aspirants, which does more harm than gain.
Secondly, In addition to your amazing debrief, I also want to thank you for sharing your ESRs. They have a ton of data, which shows how much you have improved to get to that 760 score. I have tried to simplify both your ESRs as much as possible and hope that it will help students understand what it takes to ace the GMAT
1) The difference made by personalized approaches
• In RC, you improved from 51st percentile to 93rd percentile
• And, in SC you went from 87th percentile to 99th percentile.
This improvement shows that you understood what’s tested on each sub-section such as – how meaning is the key to achieve the 90th percentile on SC, learned the approach designed to tackle that sub-section such as meaning based approach for SC or Reading Strategies for RC. This also shows that you perfected the same using a tool such as Scholaranium.
2) Mastering Time Management
GMAT 760 does not only demand perfection in conceptual understanding and application of the same but also requires you to be test ready.
In your first attempt, you allocated the most time on the first two blocks of questions; therefore, your ESR shows that you struggled for time in the third and the fourth block and that you had to rush through through questions.
However, in your second attempt, your timing improved considerably. As a result, you had a lot more time in the third and the fourth block of questions. This shows that you build exam readiness, which is key to hit the 99th percentile on the test.
Overall, while 710 is a very good score, 760 is an excellent shows and your debrief shows that to excel, one needs to do many things right. Great job executing on these things!!
Again, congratulations on the amazing score, and Goodluck for your applications
-Rajat
22 Sep 2020, 06:15
Kudos
Bookmarks
egmat
Thank you Rajat & egmat for the concise breakdown of what it takes to do well on the test!
I really hope others can learn from my mistakes and achieve their goals in a much shorter time than I did, though indeed there are no shortcuts to a great score. I've learnt alot about myself in this process as well - I hope to bring forth these insights onto my applications and beyond too.
Cheers,
Kim
