710(51Q, 34V) to 760(50Q, 42V) in 1 month

There are already so many great debriefs out there, so I am going to limit this one to the lessons learnt from my first attempt and my strategy while studying for the second one. This would help anyone looking to improve in verbal (I believe I was quite natural at quant, but verbal used to give me nightmares)

I took my first GMAT in July 2015, and scored a 710(51Q, 34V, IR8, AWA 6). While I knew it was a decent score, it was not enough given my demographic (Indian female), years of work experience (3 years at the time of matriculation), traditional work background and target colleges. I applied anyway and ended up getting waitlisted at a top 10 US school. Apparently, my GMAT score was not enough (may have been many more things as well).

I buckled up end of last month, and thought about my dismal performance in verbal. I was quite anxious during the test, probably because I was never confident of the answers I was marking. I found the options very close, in every area of verbal, and ended up racing towards the end.

This time, I went with the egmat course. I went through the SC and CR courses of egmat, and they were, no doubt, a great stepping-stone to a better understanding of the subtle concepts in SC, and the pre-thinking way in CR. I did not bother going through the RC course (I saw a couple of videos, and they did not do as a good a job as they did in the other two courses in my opinion). My target for the next two weeks was to finish the SC, CR courses and scholaranium. In addition, it was at this time that I thought of taking Kaplan tests. I started taking tests twice a week.

What worked for me in SC was that I understood the meaning of the sentence in question and always questioned myself about the modifiers used in that sentence. I do remember few questions in the actual exam where multiple options were grammatically right, but they were not sensible. Tenses were also quite important and well explained in the egmat course, although I do not remember a single question in the final test testing on tenses. I found it hard remembering all the grammatical rules in the manhattan sc book, and by the end of the egmat sc course, I had only three important usages to remember:

Verb-ing modifier
Verb-ed modifier
Noun modifier.

Trust me, rest of the concepts are well covered in the ‘meaning aspect’ of a sentence. There is no need to learn the zillion idioms out there. I did not get a single question which tested me on an idiom usage. Parallelism etc. will come intuitively.

For CR, the pre-thinking, as obvious as it sounds, tremendously helped me. CR arguments were predictable by the end: there would be questions on how plan x could achieve goal Y; how profits increased, but revenue did not. I also found out that I had a problem tackling arguments involving fossils and their dating. I was always very confused in these types of questions, so I went again through all the official/egmat questions for this argument type. More than the CR course, the questions in scholaranium helped me because I learnt how to approach such questions effectively.

I felt that I had much better grip on the SC and CR questions, but I was still struggling to find the right RC strategy for me. I also bought the official question pack at this time and practiced them. I was down to 1:10/1:20 mins on an average on the hard CR questions. This question pack helped me in boosting my confidence (though it is a bit pricey given that I only wanted to practice verbal).

I came across Gin’s strategy guide for RC, and I practiced around 25-30 RCs using his strategy, and I applied the same in the following tests. Apart from a better accuracy, his strategy also helped me psychologically; the entire passage is mapped on the paper, removing pressure off you to remember the details. It also taxes your brain less during the long 3.5-hour GMAT marathon, since you do not have to remember a lot about the passage. You know at the back of your mind that if you forget something important about the passage, you can atleast find from the notes where that detail is located.

My Kaplan and GMAT prep ep2 test scores leading to the test:
27th Mar -GMAT CAT 2 – 720(49Q, 40V)
29th Mar -GMAT CAT 3 – 710(49Q, 39V)
3rd Apr -GMAT CAT 4 – 720(49Q, 40V)
9th Apr -GMAT CAT 1 – 720(49Q, 38V)
GMAT prep Exam 3 – 760(50Q, 42V)
GMAT prep Exam 4 – 710(49Q, 38V)
17th Apr -GMAT CAT 5 – 710(50Q, 38V)
18th Apr– Official GMAT– 760(50Q, 42V)

I did not give much importance to less than 51Q I was getting in these tests. These tests were good, but I got as many as 12-17 wrongs in each verbal test. It was scary, but I decided that I will not get disheartened with these numbers. I also got gmat club tests from the egmat subscription and did 8 of the 9 verbal tests. Those tests are good, but scoring and a lot of questions are debatable, but anyway a great practice!

Test Day

AWA, IR & quant went as expected. I was expecting 7/8 on IR and at least a 50 in Quant. Verbal was the deciding factor. First five questions were breeze, took around 7-8 mins to solve. After 15 questions, questions started getting more difficult, and I started to get more tired. Made few wrong decisions in between, because of which I only had 11 mins to do the last 10 questions with one short RC left. I thought I would have to guess by the end. I dint read the last RC completely because I was short on time. I answered anyway, and finished the section just on time. When I pressed next, I was ecstatic to see a 760 with 42 on verbal.

I let out a silent wow, and came out of the room smiling. I was done with GMAT, and this time I had beaten it!