650 to 750, a 10-month journey to the score

DISCLAIMER: VERY LONG POST

Background
Aerospace Engineer with 3+ years of WE.

Attempted GMAT 3 times.
GMAT attempt 1- Oct 2014: 650 (Q49, V30, IR 7, AWA 6.0)
GMAT attempt 2- June 2015: 690 (Q49, V34, IR 4, AWA 5.5)
GMAT attempt 3- Aug 2015: 750 (Q49, V44, IR 6, AWA 6.0)

Decided to do MBA as a means of career change and exposure to wider industry base. Additionally, aerospace sector has not been doing well of late. So in March 2014 decided to take this leap and move forward.

GMAT 1&2: 650 (Q49, V30) to 690 (Q49, V34)

GMAT 1 was given after 'studying' off and on for 4 months. There were periods of 1-2 weeks of not studying at all and gave GMAT without any confidence. Started with a GMATPREP 1 score of 640 so saw that DS and Verbal were my achilles heel. Started by going through MGMAT guides 1 by 1 and doing the exercises and online question banks. Even after I completed the guides, I was not confident of my answers to Verbal Questions. Went ahead with eGMAT's verbal live prep program. I was impressed by their approaches to SC. I found prethinking for CR questions to be difficult. This would become the reason why I wasnt able to push my score. During the GMAT, I thought I was doing well only to have the score popup. Mock scores varied from 660 to 750 (3 MGMAT, 4 GMATPREP). Scored 660 2 days before the GMAT that lowered the confidence even further. Did not want to move the date out so went ahead with GMAT. Score 650. Quant was the only saving grace. Ordered ESR from mba.com to see that RC bombed my score. Sectional division for sc,cr and rc was 37,33,23.

Mock (before GMAT 1):

MGMAT 1: 660
MGMAT 2: 680
Economist GMAT Tutor 1: 630 (Q47, V 31)
Economist GMAT Tutor 1: 680 (Q48, V 36)
GMATPREP 1: 710 (Q50, V 35)
GMATPREP 2: 750 (Q50, V 41)
GMATPREP 3: 730
GMATPREP 4: 660 (2 days before GMAT)
GMAT 1: 650 (Q49, V30)


GMAT 2 was given after putting in 2 months of study. IR was a disaster. Couldnt find my rhythm after the initial IR setback. Kept thinking about it through out which would have played its role in screwing up verbal in particular. Was surprised to see Quant score breakdown as I was pretty confident of getting a 50 or 51 after scoring 51 in 3 GMATCLUB Quant CATs. But GMAT has different tricks up its sleeve. After ordering ESR, saw that CR dipped a bit to 29, SC and RC increased to 40 and 33 respectively. Low in RC was not acceptable as everything is given to you in the form of the passage. Anyhow, thought the score would be sufficient for the schools that I was targeting, but a couple of consultants told me otherwise. Mock scores were 700,750,700,730 in 4 GMATPREP. So much variation should have told me that I need to figure out the issue but I thought a 700 should be easy enough to get. Maintained an error log with percentage division for various error types and a collection of difficult questions from various sources.


Materials used (for both GMAT 1 and GMAT 2):

Manhattan Strategy Guides, all 10 (highly recommended for the basics. Do not bother with Advanced Quant.)
eGMAT Verbal Live (highly recommended for non-natives)
Jeff Sackman Quant (quant book was ok, challenge sets were not GMAT like,IMO.)
GMATCLUB Premium (Good collection of questions)
GMATCLUB test for quant only. Excellent collection of questions.
OG 13
GMATPREP Question Pack 1
Veritas Prep guides (good guides and questions)
Magoosh qbank
Economist GMAT Tutor Ultimate Prep

Mocks (before GMAT 2):

GMATPREP 1: 700 (Q49, V 35)
Economist GMAT Tutor 3: 660 (Q48, V 34)
MGMAT #3: 680 (Q47, V35)
GMATPREP 2: 750 (Q50, V 41)
Economist GMAT Tutor 4: 710 (Q50, V 39)
GMATCLUB Quant only CAT: Q51
GMATCLUB Quant only CAT: Q51
GMATPREP 3: 700 (Q49, V35)
GMATCLUB Quant only CAT: Q51
GMATPREP 4: 730 (Q50, V34)
GMAT 2 : 690 (Q49, V34)



GMAT 3: 750 (Q49, V44)

After GMAT 2 , I knew I had to give it and give it soon enough to keep some time for applications for R1. Scheduled 3rd attempt right after GMAT 2, coming out of Pearson Center. Quant started well for the first 3-4 questions but in a couple of number properties questions, took close to 2.5-3 minutes. Probably got them wrong , so felt that I should have chosen the answer earlier than later. But anyhow, was able to finish the section 5 minutes earlier. For verbal, started well with some SCs followed by CR, RC came in on 9th question. CR and RCs were straightforward with prethinking the answers the best strategy. SCs were surprisingly shorter than what I have seen before. 2 were meaning based (thank you eGMAT). Finished verbal in 72 minutes and Quant in 70 minutes. Sectional division for verbal was 42,47,42 for CR,RC,SC respectively (via ESR). Verbal answers were unambiguous and if you understood the meaning in SC, understand the CR prompt and RC passage, 1-2 answers were easy to rule out.

Couple of things differently I did: actively involved in GC Quant and Verbal forums. The best way to check whether you have understood a concept is by teaching the same to others. This helped me in understanding the various traps in the answer choices and the questions stem themselves. Additionally, for verbal I did complete OG 2013 for CR,RC and SC with close to 90% accuracy under timed conditions. Finally, I realised the power of prethinking the answer in RC and CR. RC answers were straightforward but prethinking in CR always used to stump me. For this attempt, I realized that the prethinking is good enough to make you understand the structure of the argument. Once your prethinking provide you that information, stop spending anymore time on finding the "most elegant" prethinking answer. Once I understood this, I was able to clearly see which answers were out of scope or were irrelevant, leading to a higher accuracy.

Another massively helpful (IMO) thing I did was to incorporate LSAT RC and LR for practice. Working with more dense LSAT RCs, helped me figure out the out of scope and partially incorrect options. LSAT LR passages are more convoluted than GMAT CR passages. I was able to achieve 60-70 % accuracy under timed conditions. USe these LSAT resources only after you have exhausted OG and Verbal Review books.
Gave 2 mocks for this attempt, GMATPREP 1 and 3 with 760 each.

Still disappointed with missing out on a Q50 or 51 and 7-8 on IR. I believe I still lack the tricks to get to that elusive Q50 or Q51.


Materials used:

Magoosh qbank
GMATCLUB quant and verbal forums
GMATCLUB Tests for quant only
LSAT RC
LSAT LR
Economist GMAT Tutor
GMATPREP Question pack 1
eGMAT Scholaranium (I am not too convinced about their "ability quiz" calculation algorithm). It gave me an ability score of 72 percentile in verbal 4 days before GMAT. This was a bit difficult to accept as I scored 760 each in 2 GMATPREP (#1 and #3) CATs that I gave int he 2 days after the ability quiz. If eGMAT team can study the correlation better, then this tool of theirs will be of immense help to all test takers. Quality of questions in scholaranium is top notch.
IanStewart 's Number Properties , Stats book and sets 1 and 2 (highly recommended!)

Mocks (before GMAT 3):

GMATPREP 3: 760 (Q50, V42), 4 days before (No AWA)
GMATPREP 1: 760 (Q51, V41), 2 days before (No IR or AWA)

Some points about the various guides and courses I took:

Manhattan Guides: good for the basics but could do better with more questions.

eGMAT Verbal prep and Quant live prep: Good for non-natives. CR prethinking and assumption negation are both powerful tools. Scholaranium is a very useful tool. Quant is highly theoretical, this is the reason why I wont prefer such an approach for GMAT. Would do well if a scholaranium for quant is also provided.

Economist GMAT Tutor: Dont think its for non natives. SC rules are very formulaic and I do not agree with some of them! Good algorithm behind the tutor that makes you keep doing the same thing over and over again until you have mastered it. Not many CR arguments to practice. RCs are very dense and some questions will make you realise the importance of understanding the implied meanings. I do not personally agree with their approach of only reading the first few lines of every paragraph in RCs. I think if you spend those extra 30-45 seconds in understanding the passage completely by reading the entire thing, it will save you a lot of time while answering the questions. Mocks are 6 in number and consist of questions that are challenging.

Magoosh q bank: Useful practice with questions and follow up video lessons. Some of the SC questions are meaning based that will make you understand how and what to look for in an SC question. Didnt do much CR and RC practice.

Grockit: dont bother. Only used quant part and felt that most of the questions were calculation intensive and not at all representative of GMAT.

EmpowerGMAT: Good course . I got their subscription for 1 month and happened to do close to 60% of their course, both verbal and quant. The collection of video tutorials and questions for practice for both verbal and quant were very beneficial to undertsand what the classic traps are. Techniques like test it and triage are time savers and can be applied to a majority of the questions. EMPOWERgmatRichC 's and EMPOWERgmatMax 's approach to some DS and CR questions made me realize how elegant some solutions can be.

GMATPREP QBank 1: A definite buy! Some really challenging questions, but ironically didnt do that well in CR in these questions. I felt actual GMAT CR questions were easier. Quant is of representative level. dabral has given a very useful way of using the qpack 1 at the location https://www.gmatquantum.com/faq/gmatprep ... -of-t.html

I was able to finish the entire Qpack 1 as per his recommendation.

GMATPREP: You should be giving these 4 CATs as they are the most representative of actual GMAT. Analyse both correct and incorrect answers and make a separate error log just for these questions (incorrect question, questions guesses, questions that you spent a lot of time on etc) and once you mark those question types, go back to OG and do those types. Entire practice should be timed.

IanStewart 's sets: I got sets 1 and 2 made by IanStewart ,and these were very good practice as I was taking too much time in number properties questions.

Sentence Correction
1. Read slowly and understand the meaning
2. try to find 1-2 errors in the original sentence.
3. Remove those options that repeat the same errors.
4. Repeat this till you are left with 1 option

Critical Reasoning
1. Understand the question type
2. Read slowly and understand the structure of the argument
3. Try to prethink the assumptions (no fancy prethink but just enough to understand the scope of the argument)
4. Do POE to get to the correct answer.


Powerscore LSAT LR Bible and CR Bible : LR bible is better than CR bible (but only the sections relevant to GMAT) . Read it once and understand the various types on incorrect answer choices for different question types.

Reading Comprehension

1. Read the passage slowly and understand the structure of the passage (relation of different elements to other elements, different viewpoints, tone of the passage, scope of the passage etc.)
2. Do not remember peculiar details as they will only serve to confuse you. Just remember that function of the details as to why a particular detail has been provided.
3. Read all answer choices and do POE to arrive at your answer.


As for the D-day tips, I do not have many. But 1 thing I think is very important is not to think about how you are doing or what is the relative difficulty of the question you are answering or have answered. This is not going to help and would only increase your anxiety. Sit back, focus on the question at hand and do your best.

Feel free to ask me about anything I have mentioned.