730 (Q51, V37) After an Unfortunate First Attempt

A different background story:
I'm currently a third-year mechanical engineering student at BITS Pilani. I had given my first GMAT attempt in August'22 during my summer break (1.5-2 months, along with an internship). I was preparing using all the free material available on the net and had bought the 4 practice tests from GMAT Prep. I was fairly confident about my preparation and was scoring decently on the official mocks as well. Then on the exam day, as luck would have it, there was a network issue in my test centre (Ansal University, Gurugram) and my test stopped abruptly. I waited for about 2 hours, but no luck. Finally I decided to give up that attempt and I couldn't reschedule as I had to leave for college the next day. Although devastated that my efforts had gone down the drain, I decided at that time itself that I would prepare again during my 3 week winter vacations ( 1 Jan-21 Jan) and booked the slot as soon as I reached back home from the test centre for 24 Jan 2023.
Then I got busy with my semester and barely even touched any GMAT material for the next 4 months.
My semester got over on 30th December, I rested for a day and started my preparation again from 1st January. While I was preparing during the summers, I was pretty impressed by e-gmat's content available online and specially the personalised study plan as that was exactly what I needed, given the short time I had. Hence, I bought the course and started my preparation straight way with their last mile push program.
My review about e-gmat is pretty positive. I was in constant contact with my mentor, Abha Ma'am. I was willing to put in efforts ( 8 hours per day) and e-gmat had all that I needed to effectively prepare in the 3 weeks that I had.

Quant: I was fairly confident about my ability in quant (effect of being an engineer in India maybe). I just needed to fine tune my preparation to find out all the areas where I take longer to solve the questions and then I could possibly get that perfect quant score. E-gmat was really helpful in this aspect as their cementing quizzes contain high quality questions that make you think more critically and are designed to make you fall in common traps found in the test.

Verbal: I diligently followed the plan given to me by Abha Ma'am. Didn't face any problem as such and e-gmat's content is well structured and more than enough to prepare you for anything the test can throw at you. I found the effective reading strategies especially helpful as earlier I wasn't that comfortable with RC. I could notice significant improvement in my accuracy for RC questions by following the process.

Mocks: Highly accurate mocks and give great analysis of your score. I scored a 730 even in the last e-gmat mock that I gave.

Test Day: This time I had a much better test centre ( Pearson Professional Centre, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi). Quant section went as planned, though I noticed that I got 3-4 questions on speed, distance & time , all of them either lengthy or hard. I messed up on the timing for my verbal section, due to which I had to guess the last three questions. I felt pretty confident about the IR section until I saw an extremely complex multi-source reasoning question. I guess I got all three related questions wrong due to which my score fell to a 6 in IR.
Finally, the screen flashed 730. I was pretty satisfied with the score, specially with the perfect quant score. Given the fact that I put 8-10 hours for 3 weeks continuously, I felt that my hard work did pay off at the end.

congratulations for score.. wish you the best for applications

730 score with only 3 months' preparation. That's indeed commendable.

Congratulations & All the Best.
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Congrats on securing such a great score! Wish u best for the applications!

Hi Anirudh18,

Congratulations on 730!!

This is Abha from e-GMAT. Thank you for your kind words.

Improving from a 680 score in Sigma-X Mock to 730 on the official attempt in just 3 weeks is highly commendable. The sheer determination and diligence you have shown to get to this point is phenomenal.  

Colin Powell once said, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure” and your journey is a true reflection of the same.

In Verbal you completed every step on the way with utmost sincerity and attention to detail to such an extent that you made following the right approach second nature to you. Your diligence in imbibing the process and approach can be seen translated into your scholaranium stats, here is an image where your accuracy improved to 83% in Modifiers and time taken per question dropped to 1 min 36sec.



For Quant, which is your stronger section, you left no stone unturned to get the perfect Q51. You worked on all your weak areas to bridge the conceptual gaps and then mastered the concepts and process by cementing each of the sub-sections to improve your ability.



Your repeated success gave you the confidence you needed to succeed on the test day. You could predict your success just by having a glance at your last mock score, wherein you scored 730 with almost the same score split. I am glad you noticed it 😊



The journey was possible because you made sure you stay focused and trusted the process. It paid off, and, paid off well!   

 At last, I just want to say, it was a pleasure working with you in the Last Mile Push Program and I wish you all the best for the next steps. 😊

Regards,   
Abha Mohan
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