700 M48 V34 - never give up

I had been considering business school for a while and wanted to get at least 700 in GMAT to have a chance at top business schools. I’ve probably bought every book and online course material out there. Some of my study materials included MGMAT guides, Veritas tutoring, KAPLAN, Official guides, PowerScore bibles, GMAT pill, e-GMAT and The Economist Tutor.

Math always been my strong suit so most of my preparation was around improving verbal score. I’ve taken GMAT few years ago and scored 560. I’ve got busy with my life and didn’t get a chance to retake GMAT for few years. I’ve prepared for few weeks and was scoring around 680 in practice tests, so figured I’d do well and took the test, ended up scoring 650. In frustration, I purchased every book/course out there and prepared for few more weeks. I’ve started scoring above 700 in practice tests and went ahead for another test. I took the GMAT again and scored 650. I’ve almost given up on GMAT and started preparing for my applications for schools. With little bit of motivation, I figured why don’t I try again and see what happens – I can’t do any worse than 650. I knew this was going to be my last attempt because Round 2 applications would close after that. I've attacked GMAT systematically and got a score of 700 on the test. I've summarized the things that have worked for me very well below.

Sentence Correction
• Check for Subject Verb Agreement errors
• Check for Parallelism errors
• Check for Modifiers errors
• Try to Understand the meaning of the sentence in its entirety, this is the most important trick anyone can teach you – this method automatically highlights every error out there in the wrong sentences and makes your job easy in picking the correct answer. GMAT exam has changed quite a bit and I believe test makers are looking for candidates who can understand the meaning of the sentence than checking few grammar rules and selecting an answer. Master this and you don’t have to worry about those pesky grammar rules.

Critical Reasoning
• Read the argument – don’t read the question
• Identify the summary
• Read the question now
• Try to come up with a possible answer
• Check the answers now and pick the answer that is close to the one you have come up with
• For some question types it is not possible, so make sure the answer is directly related to summary not to the arguments – this is very important.

Reading Comprehension
• I was not very good at the reading comprehension to begin with, but lot of practice can make it easy to eliminate the wrong answer choices. For me reading the entire passage first and answering the questions worked well.

Books/Material
MGMAT guides, Powerscore CR bible, OG guides, OG questions banks and practice tests, don't waste your time on any other material or online course - not worth it.

Test Preparation
• Take as many practice test you can and leave enough time in between to go through the mistakes and correct them.
• Do the entire practice test including IR and AWA, not doing this has burned me many times. Verbal is the last piece of the puzzle and you get tired by then in the main test if you don’t follow this practice.

I’ve got 700 on the test and I consider that was a bad day given that I was consistently scoring above 740+ in practice tests. I didn’t have time to retake so went through application process. I’ve applied to and got selected in Wharton and UCLA, Chose Wharton because it fits with what I’m trying to do in my life. I have read countless success stories and dreamed of writing a success story for a while. I’m happy I could do it now and hope some of the points will help you in preparing for the test.

Good Luck with your GMAT!!!