720 it is!

Hi,

I hail from India and I started my preparation in the May 2019 and wrote my exam in August 2019. I scored 720(Q50 V38 IR8 AWA6) after repeatedly scoring 760 in the prep mocks. This debrief is an attempt to guide the fellow aspirants.

A little about me :

Repeated CAT 99% scorer. Excellent at Quant. Didn't prepare for Quant for a single day.

Although I had cracked CAT Verbal(which is mostly RC based, I had to put in a lot of effort to nail GMAT verbal. This debrief will only help students who are Quant heavy but dont have English as their native language. Here is how I prepared for verbal.

For SC:-SC was my major weakness. Before starting the preparation, I had marginal idea about grammar. I had to learn a lot of new phrases, rules and idioms just to make myself comfortable. Remember, learning grammar is optional and you can still manage to score decent, but I also had an aim of becoming a blogger and hence I had to learn such things to write better.

I watched a lot of "Thursdays with Ron" and sailed on the Gmatclub almost everyday to learn new tricks. To be honest, SC is the area in which one can make the most difference. It is slightly mechanical and favors students good in math. So I had to ensure that irrespective of what I do, I want to nail this section. In the exam, I just got 1 SC wrong.

For CR : I would advice solving LSAT questions , however understand the type of questions GMAT asks. Not all LSAT questions adhere to the form of GMAT CR questions. Over and above that, leverage the questions available on GMATCLUB and try to solve as many as possible.
Word of Caution : When you are attempting a CR question for the first time, don't use clock. Instead understand the question, take as much time as you need and then look for possible answers. Only after this exercise, go to the available answer choices. The reason why I recommend doing this is that, unlike SC, in CR you will remember the story-line. Next time when you attempt that question, you already have answer in your mind.

For RC : Do watch the videos by Ron and go through "RC Strategy document" on GMATCLub. The document is really awesome.

DO reach out if you need any more help.