720 (49Q / 40V / 6IR / 4.5AWA) Debrief - GMAT Journey Part One

I've really appreciated all the help from the GMAT Community and now it's my turn to pay it back. I prepared for the test for about 6 months, which is way more than I thought I would need. Out of those 6 months, the last 2 were the most intense. I started my preparation in January earlier this year with a diagnostic CAT. For some context, I generally test well and scored in the 99th percentile range on the GRE way back in 2010. I've split my GMAT experience into two parts. Here's Part 1.

Diagnostic CAT

GMAT Prep 1: 670 (48Q / 34V) : I made a lot of errors due to unfamiliarity with the types of questions and poor time management. I was confident I could do much better on the actual test as I ran out of time on both sections.

Preparation Material

Books:

Manhattan Strategy Guides : The most important set of books for the GMAT, in my opinion. The Sentence Correction Guide was the single most important book for me and I went over it thrice. The general GMAT strategy guide was also extremely useful and reading this book alone helped me understand the test better and elevated my score into the low 700s.

GMAT OG 2017 with Verbal and Quantitative Review: Also very important. I did the sections on Sentence Correction twice.

Manhattan Advanced Quant : A brilliant book that can boost your Quant score. I would highly recommend it to someone looking for a perfect Quant score.

CATs:

Official Gmat Prep Tests 1-6
Manhattan GMAT 1-5


Quant

I started out with the OG PS and DS problems and found them quite easy overall. I went through all the Manhattan Quant Strategy Guides and learnt a lot of useful tricks, especially in Number Properties. I went through the strategy guides in detail and focussed on problems which were unique to the GMAT and were repeatedly asked, for example, problems on min/max values of smallest/largest numbers given the mean and median and problems on divisibility and remainders. I tried to memorize as many tricks and formulae as I could because every second spent thinking and writing during the test matters. I also consulted Manhattan’s Advanced Quant before my first attempt. It has many useful tips and tricks and a great way to approach problem solving, as well as a some really high quality workout sets. Looking back, I underestimated the difficulty of problems GMAT is capable of throwing at the test taker and should’ve focused on speed a bit more. One of my weaknesses was letting go of long and problems and not guessing and moving on. Getting a problem wrong barely impacts your score, but getting it right and wasting minutes of valuable time is a much bigger hindrance. Those few minutes lost can create immense pressure at the end, leading to many more mistakes and a lower score than you would’ve got otherwise.


Verbal

I worked through both the Manhattan Strategy Guides mentioned above followed by OG practice questions. My verbal study was very focused on improving accuracy on sentence correction questions, because it was my weakest area. I performed well on RC/CR questions in the OG (>90% correct on each of RC/CR). I didn’t pay a lot of attention to CRs and RCs, apart from solving official questions from the OG and GMATPrep. Manhattan’s Sentence Correction Guides combined with GMAT Club’s explanations for OG problems was the perfect combination to give me a solid improvement in solving SCs. I recommend going through Manhattan SC and CR Strategy guides at least once. There are some neat concepts in there.


Full CATs

I took all 5 Official GMAT Prep tests in the last two weeks before the final exam. My scores were:

GMAT Prep 2: 730 (50Q / 38V / 8IR)
GMAT Prep 3: 730 (49Q / 40V / 8IR)
GMAT Prep 4: 770 (51Q / 44V / 8IR)
GMAT Prep 5: 770 (51Q / 44V / 8IR)
GMAT Prep 6: 760 (50Q / 45V / 8IR)

In addition, my MGMAT test scores before my first attempt were :

MGMAT 1: 680 (44Q / 38V)
MGMAT 2: 700 (46Q / 40V)
MGMAT 3: 690 (45Q / 38V)
MGMAT 4: 700 (47Q / 38V)
MGMAT 5: 700 (42Q / 40V)


While Official GMAT Prep exams are the best source of real practice questions, I found their quant section questions to be much easier than the actual GMAT’s. However, their verbal sections have questions which are quite similar to questions on the real exam. MGMAT Quant Sections are hard (much harder than the real test). Not because their questions are particularly hard, but because they almost never have really easy questions and its difficult to make up time lost while solving the hard ones. Nevertheless they're a great resource, and I recommend using them for your preparation. I seldom got higher than Q45/46 and therefore my score barely touched 700 on their tests. I found the verbal section on MGMATs slightly harder, but more importantly quite different from official tests. I wouldn’t call them, or any other unofficial verbal section for that matter, representative of the actual test. I knew that these were challenging and didn’t worry too much about the final score on MGMATs.
 The only IR questions I practiced were from the IR sections on the official GMAT Prep exams. Aside from the 4 practice tests above, I spent some time on sentence correction problems as well as auditing my errors across all the various questions I had done (including practice tests). Given the practice test results, I felt like a 740 was a realistic score. My practice test scores were consistently 760-770 on the 3 last official tests, so a 740 didn’t seem out of reach. With some luck, I might even touch/cross 750.

Test Day


The verbal section seemed close to the GMAT Official Test Verbal Sections and I was satisfied with my performance right after the test. But the quant section left me stunned. Not only was it much harder than expected, I was also a couple of minutes late due to my faulty estimation of my break length between the two sections. Naturally, that put me under a lot of pressure early on. But I think the real reason for the relatively lower score was the sheer shock from the general difficulty level of the section. It was as if I had been preparing for a completely different test so far. There was a relentless wave of “700+” questions on the test and I couldn’t keep up and had to guess 3-4 questions at the end, all of which I got wrong. I couldn’t steady my nerves facing the ticking stopwatch and took a lot of time even on some easy questions.

ESR

It took me a few days to recover from what had happened during the test. I wrote down all the questions I could recall (Almost 28!) from the Quant section and solved all of them, identifying my mistakes. Although 720 isn’t a bad score at all and I was sort of happy, I knew I hadn’t performed to my full potential and wanted to retake the test. My verbal score was a bit surprising to me as well. I was looking forward to V42-44 based on how I had felt while taking the test. I ordered the ESR on my way back from the test center and started analyzing it as soon as I got access to it. As expected, I hadn’t performed well during the last quarter of my quant section( 60% Accuracy). There wasn’t scope for a ton of improvement, as realistically I was looking at a 1 point improvement, but I absolutely wanted to get that last point. I also felt that there weren’t any glaring holes in my quant fundamentals. It was more a matter of pacing myself accurately and avoiding mistakes than anything else. Prior to the test, I had assumed that the real quant section would be similar to the Official GMAT Prep Quant Sections and was lured into a sense of complacency, leading to a bad performance. The verbal ESR was a revelation. I tested in the 90th percentile on SCs, my highest among the three verbal sub sections. A section that was once my weakness had become my strength! While that was encouraging, my accuracy on the RC and CR sections left me puzzled. I tested at accuracy levels from mid 60s to mid 70s on both. I knew what I had to focus on for my next test. I also realized that my performance on the verbal section was the key to getting a better score. I decided I was going to focus solely on practicing new problems, both on Verbal and Quant. Getting faster on the Quant section and improving CR and RC accuracies would be my primary goals.

Part 2 Here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/780-51q-46v- ... l#p2325755