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Have you ever wondered how to score a PERFECT 805 on the GMAT? Meet Julia, a banking professional who used the Target Test Prep course to achieve this incredible feat. Julia's story is nothing short of an inspiration.
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Attend this session to learn how to Deconstruct arguments, Pre-Think Author’s Assumptions, and apply Negation Test.- Dec 15
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GMAT Club 12 Days of Christmas is a 4th Annual GMAT Club Winter Competition based on solving questions. This is the Winter GMAT competition on GMAT Club with an amazing opportunity to win over $40,000 worth of prizes!
Firstly, to give some background - I am a 3.28 GPA, Engineering undergraduate from Singapore.
Secondly, I took one month of leave from work to focus all my energy on studying. During this period, I worked 2-3hours daily from home, and I spent between 6-12hours studying each day. The total time I spent studying for GMAT was approximately 250-300hrs in the 25 days.
Thirdly, please take reference of my progress from below. The 2 GMATPrep tests were taken on 1 Jan and 11 Jan:
Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 9.11.37 PM.png [ 85.38 KiB | Viewed 5844 times ]
I just wanted to share a few tips on how I achieved the improvement:
1) I focused all my time and energy on attacking my weakness.
During the 25 days, I completed many rounds of mock tests, and from each test, I learnt about my weakness, and refined my strategy along the way. In all, I spent 70% of my time on SC foundation, 30% on mock tests(namely 1 Veritas Prep(620), 1 MGMAT CAT (550), 3 GMATPrep(2 scores as above, the other 670), 1 CAT from 800-score (660), and a ton of simulated tests 'created' from GMAT Question Bank)
For Quantitative, I knew I was strong in the concepts (I am an Engineer afterall), but I did not expect my Q-score to fare that badly in the first GMATPrep test. So quickly figured out that my weakness is that I am unable to complete each Q-question under 2 minutes. So for my last week of preparation, I gave myself 75mins each day to complete 37 questions of Medium & Difficult level questions from the GMAT Question Pack
I knew i was weak at Verbal - and indeed the results on my 1st GMATPrep convinced me that I was terrible at Verbal. After analysing the questions that were wrong, I singled out SC as the section that I needed to work on most. To do so, I started from scratch by learning all the Grammar rules that GMAT tests. I had the Manhattan SC guide, so I read through the book. But after taking a few more mock tests, I realised that my accuracy for SC section was not improving. As such, i changed my strategy. I worked through the OG questions, because I knew I can utilise GMATPrep Forum to find the explanations for each OG question. I also googled some of the OG questions and managed to find some e-GMAT videos that explained how to break the sentences into clauses and to analyze the errors. I liked e-GMAT's approach, hence I signed up for the Verbal course. I then used e-GMAT intensively for one week to practice the OG SC questions. Unfortunately I did not have sufficient time to complete all the OG SC questions, but my accuracy was averaging 60-70%, an improvement from 30%, by the time i got to my final week of preparation. At this point in time, I also realised that my accuracy for CR was not fantastic; I was achieving about 60-70% for CR. For RC, I was consistently getting 90-100% accuracy, however, I took way too long to comprehend each passage. But heck, I knew i had to move on to more important things - that is to do simulate one mock test every day for the last 7 days of preparation.
2) I practiced primarily from the GMAT Question Pack and GMATPrep Exam Pack for the last 1 week
I DID NOT complete OG because I find that the questions(especially Q) were too easy. Now looking back, I would benchmark the OG questions in the range of 500-650 level difficulty, and wished i spent lesser time on it. I instead practiced the questions that were pegged at the level of Medium or Difficult from the GMATPrep Question Bank. For the last 7 days, I simulated 7 mock tests daily, each of 37 Q-questions and 41 V-questions from the GMAT Question Bank. This strategy alone, improved my score to above 650 for the final mock tests I took.
Although I scored a 730(Q50, V38), I think i can further improve on my V-score if I had another 1 month to practice for CR and RC. However, my Verbal/Quantitative split is well balanced at 85%/87%, as such i am going to focus all my energy on b-school applications instead.
I hope that my posts will help those whom are struggling - do not blindly follow the study guides. Always take stock and assess the situation that you are at, refine, make changes and move forward!
All the best!
Secondly, I took one month of leave from work to focus all my energy on studying. During this period, I worked 2-3hours daily from home, and I spent between 6-12hours studying each day. The total time I spent studying for GMAT was approximately 250-300hrs in the 25 days.
Thirdly, please take reference of my progress from below. The 2 GMATPrep tests were taken on 1 Jan and 11 Jan:
Attachment:
Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 9.11.37 PM.png [ 85.38 KiB | Viewed 5844 times ]
I just wanted to share a few tips on how I achieved the improvement:
1) I focused all my time and energy on attacking my weakness.
During the 25 days, I completed many rounds of mock tests, and from each test, I learnt about my weakness, and refined my strategy along the way. In all, I spent 70% of my time on SC foundation, 30% on mock tests(namely 1 Veritas Prep(620), 1 MGMAT CAT (550), 3 GMATPrep(2 scores as above, the other 670), 1 CAT from 800-score (660), and a ton of simulated tests 'created' from GMAT Question Bank)
For Quantitative, I knew I was strong in the concepts (I am an Engineer afterall), but I did not expect my Q-score to fare that badly in the first GMATPrep test. So quickly figured out that my weakness is that I am unable to complete each Q-question under 2 minutes. So for my last week of preparation, I gave myself 75mins each day to complete 37 questions of Medium & Difficult level questions from the GMAT Question Pack
I knew i was weak at Verbal - and indeed the results on my 1st GMATPrep convinced me that I was terrible at Verbal. After analysing the questions that were wrong, I singled out SC as the section that I needed to work on most. To do so, I started from scratch by learning all the Grammar rules that GMAT tests. I had the Manhattan SC guide, so I read through the book. But after taking a few more mock tests, I realised that my accuracy for SC section was not improving. As such, i changed my strategy. I worked through the OG questions, because I knew I can utilise GMATPrep Forum to find the explanations for each OG question. I also googled some of the OG questions and managed to find some e-GMAT videos that explained how to break the sentences into clauses and to analyze the errors. I liked e-GMAT's approach, hence I signed up for the Verbal course. I then used e-GMAT intensively for one week to practice the OG SC questions. Unfortunately I did not have sufficient time to complete all the OG SC questions, but my accuracy was averaging 60-70%, an improvement from 30%, by the time i got to my final week of preparation. At this point in time, I also realised that my accuracy for CR was not fantastic; I was achieving about 60-70% for CR. For RC, I was consistently getting 90-100% accuracy, however, I took way too long to comprehend each passage. But heck, I knew i had to move on to more important things - that is to do simulate one mock test every day for the last 7 days of preparation.
2) I practiced primarily from the GMAT Question Pack and GMATPrep Exam Pack for the last 1 week
I DID NOT complete OG because I find that the questions(especially Q) were too easy. Now looking back, I would benchmark the OG questions in the range of 500-650 level difficulty, and wished i spent lesser time on it. I instead practiced the questions that were pegged at the level of Medium or Difficult from the GMATPrep Question Bank. For the last 7 days, I simulated 7 mock tests daily, each of 37 Q-questions and 41 V-questions from the GMAT Question Bank. This strategy alone, improved my score to above 650 for the final mock tests I took.
Although I scored a 730(Q50, V38), I think i can further improve on my V-score if I had another 1 month to practice for CR and RC. However, my Verbal/Quantitative split is well balanced at 85%/87%, as such i am going to focus all my energy on b-school applications instead.
I hope that my posts will help those whom are struggling - do not blindly follow the study guides. Always take stock and assess the situation that you are at, refine, make changes and move forward!
All the best!
spetznaz
Joined: 08 Jun 2015
Last visit: 14 Jul 2024
Posts: 256
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Location: India
Schools: Tepper '21 (D) IIMC PGPEX"20 (A) ISB '20 (A) HEC Jan19 Intake IIMA PGPX"20 (A) IIMB EPGP"20 (D) IMD '21 (D)
GMAT 1: 640 Q48 V29
GMAT 2: 700 Q48 V38
GPA: 3.33
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Schools: Tepper '21 (D) IIMC PGPEX"20 (A) ISB '20 (A) HEC Jan19 Intake IIMA PGPX"20 (A) IIMB EPGP"20 (D) IMD '21 (D)
GMAT 2: 700 Q48 V38
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25 Jan 2017, 07:38
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Congrats on your score. Must be a pleasant surprise going from a diagnostic of 460 to a final of 730 ! Can you suggest what strategy you used for RC ?
spetznaz
Congrats on your score. Must be a pleasant surprise going from a diagnostic of 460 to a final of 730 ! Can you suggest what strategy you used for RC ?
Honestly, I think my foundation for RC is strong to begin with. In my education system, most of my English exams were primarily based on answering Reading Comprehension questions - with question styles very similar to those of GMAT. In addition, i enjoyed reading business, health and science articles prior to preparing for the GMAT, so that really helped. I only struggled with passages related to US history and politics, because I was not familiar with the background to such passages.
My main strategy is to read the passage once thoroughly - and in my case thoroughly equates to spending approximately 2.5-3.5 mins reading the passage. While reading, i synthesize (in my mind) what each paragraph is intending to convey, and somehow I am able to memorize what I have synthesized really well. When it comes to answering the questions, I ended up requiring only 30-40secs to answer each question. I devised this strategy because from my analysis of my RC statistics, i realised that the average time taken for 1 RC question, is still faster than the time taken for 1 CR question. Think about this - if my RC sections hits 90-100% accuracy, but for CR section I only hit a 70% accuracy, so it actually implies a better ROI for the time spent on RC during the actual exam.
I used the above strategy for business, health and science-based passages. But as mentioned, this strategy worked for me, because I had a good foundation from my school days.
During my practice, if i come across passages on US history or politics, I made the effort to google and read up on the history. During my mock test, and the actual test(in which there was one), I decided to 'give up' on questions that I knew I was not confident.
. I only have less than 2 months to prepare now, I haven't scheduled my test yet, but the b-school application deadline is April 15th. I am aiming at least 610 and I am afraid I won't have enough time to prepare, since I have full time job. Your post really motivated me!
