590 to 720 in two months: 130 point increase - The Debrief

Bhavz10 thank you! Planning certainly helped a lot, as did staying flexible with my plan when needed (we humans tend to be overly optimistic about what we can do in a certain amount of time haha)

My study plan was very much centred around the courses I was doing - TTP and eGMAT. Especially for the foundational part of my study. As I mentioned, I’m not always a super structured person, so particularly with TTP it helped to implemented THEIR course structure into my plan. The way I went about this was starting at my desired test date and backtrack. Allot 2 weeks for practice tests, 2 weeks for verbal (as I mentioned, I wasn’t super worried though I did need to improve) and 1 month for TTP. Then I went back day by day and saw how much I could do each day to ensure my plan was realistic.

TTP is a very dense course, it probably took me over 100 hours to complete so I wouldn’t recommend following my method in the same time frame unless you don’t have other commitments. For the first month with TTP I’d write down the lessons I was going to take that day and how many tests I was going to take and review.

That said, I want to give you some more specific details on what my plan looked like once I was at the practice phase (this was a bit more free-flowing but here goes):

• Take a GMAT Club test (1h)
• Review wrong AND RIGHT answers and note down ones that I wasn’t confident in (10min)
• Look for answers to those questions on here, take notes, analyse and make sure I understood the concept or strategy behind it (this could take me up to 2h. Reviewing is perhaps the most important part of taking practice tests or doing question sets)
• Take a question set of 50 min from the OG Verbal Review (mix of SC and CR usually, and only medium and hard as I wanted to be challenged).
• Review questions based on answers from the forum and my study notes (again, this could take me up to 2h sometimes if there was a particular concept that I couldn’t get my head around. )
• Call my bf and cry (joking haha)
• Reward myself with an episode of The Witcher

You can see how this would easily take 5 to 7h. As I mentioned, I was studying full time, so I could manage it. I did have to take days off or I would have broken down, give yourself time to recover and to process that info (ie sleep and have fun).

I tried to do both verbal and quant every day at the practice stage, as I wanted to keep both fresh in my head. I was also more lazy towards verbal because I actually have fun doing maths exercises (I’m a problem solver haha) whereas verbal feels like more effort. This is why I forced myself to still do it every day.

Sometimes there was a concept that was challenging me more, so I’d focus my daily quant study on that. This happened a lot with inequalities , overlapping sets and absolute modulus there are a few question sets made by experts here on the forum that are pure gold. Bunuel especially comes to mind. This is what I mean by staying flexible. Sometimes it really was worth it to just drill down on one topic, even if I disrupted my plan.

When I was taking official practice tests, I’d follow a similar method of noting down questions to check later. But the practice tests are very intense if you do them right, so I’d usually have to take the afternoon off and do it the next day, or review in parts.

Let me know if you have any other questions! If you are in need of structure for your study, I can absolutely recommend TTP for quant it helped me a lot.