Congratulations and thanks a lot for sharing your gmat story in detail.
zdeminador wrote:
Just got my scores, some advice to give back to this helpful community:
Online exam test day advice experience:
1. Don't drink too much water you don't get to use the bathroom until after both Q and V.
2. You get a 30 second break between Q and V, if you manage to finish Q early, just let the timer run and submit with ~30 seconds left (or however confident you are in your clicking ability), and also let the timer run for the 30 second break so you can maximize. Fatigue during the verbal section was high.
3. I asked during the 5 min break to use the bathroom, the proctor didn't reply for some reason so I just went. Nothing happened I still got my score and everything, but I would suggest at least asking.
4. Try not to cover your mouth, look away from the screen, or make any noises, the proctor may tell you to stop doing those things and it was super distracting and wasted precious time because the chat window pops up every time and covers half the screen.
5. IR is usually my slowest section but I finished in like 17 minutes somehow, super easy and short questions too. There was some page misalignment in the answer choices which made it hard to read but not a dealbreaker and i provided that feedback after the exam.
6. Took it on 7/6 at 10am and got scores on 7/13 7pm.
7. Came out of it feeling very confused, because there were hard questions but I felt confident I got them right, which was weird because usually when I scored high I felt like it was easy, and when I didn't score high I immediately knew it felt hard. I guess this is the adaptive part of the test working per design?
8. Check in about 15-30 mins early to take pictures of your desk etc. It took a few mins and another few minutes to get matched up to a proctor. I ended up starting the exam about 5 mins earlier than my scheduled time because I signed in 15 minutes early. Finished in about 2hr 25 mins.
Practice exam history:
1. 680 49Q 35V, July 2019, diagnostic cold attempt, Kaplan
2. 680 45Q 39V, Aug 2019, didn't study and took the same diagnostic again
3. 700 48Q 38V, Apr 2020, studied on and off for about 4 months over the course of 8 months and took the same Kaplan diagnostic again haha
4. 640 44Q 33V, May 2020 seriously studied for 1 month about 5 hrs per week on average, took GMAT Club CAT. GMAT club math questions were definitely harder, some were AMC 10 level olympiad type questions and concepts especially in combinatorics and number theory
5. 650 44Q 35V, May 2020 Took GMAT club CAT #2 the next day
6. 640 42 Q 35V, Jul 2020 3 days before GMAT, studied hardcore for 2 months, took official GMAT practice #1. At this point I'm super concerned so I look up some strategies and it was a game changer. First impression was this test was VERY different in content and feel to Kaplan and GMAT club practice tests.
7. 730 48Q 42V, 2 days before GMAT, took GMAT club CAT #3
8. 760 49Q 46V, day before GMAT, Official GMAT practice #2
9. 780 50Q 51V 8IR real GMAT
I'm very happy with my score, it's my first attempt. Minor question shouldn't 50q and 51v be 790 or even 800 territory? Does this mean everyone who took this test scored really high?
General advice:
In total I studied around 100 hours and did around 700 practice verbal questions and got 71% correct, and 200 quant questions 82% correct, but I really think quality>quantity. These were all high difficulty questions, no point doing easy questions. This isn't a lot of reps compared to some crazy numbers I've seen on these forums but I spent only around 30% of my time doing questions, 20% reviewing wrong answers, and around 50% of my time painstakingly analyzing and collecting stats on what types of questions I get wrong, why I get them wrong, any patterns to wrong questions such as how much time I take, what topic the verbal topics are on etc. Anything to find any patterns.
Exam Strategy: Key for me was exam strategy. I was attacking the GMAT like it was my actual job and solving all questions fully, understanding all topics completely, making sure I QC and everything is correct. This was very slow and I usually left around 2-5 questions blank at the end, even though I got almost all questions that I do attempt correct. As you can see it resulted in my low practice scores up until practice #7 when I finally figured this out.
Key priorities when flexing your exam strategies: 1. Definitely prioritize getting all questions done 2. then try to maximize % 3. then try to nail the last few questions, even if at the expense of getting some middle questions wrong in the 10s.
Verbal: I discovered I was weakest in Sentence Correction>Weaken>biology and society related questions. So when I encounter these on the exam I slow down and read very thoroughly and map out the logic, vs passages and sentences about economics for example I trust my first gut and breeze through. I figured out I was good at SC and RC, so I focused my questions on CR and specifically on question types that I was weak in. Also it helps to know which topics you are more comfortable with and interested in and compensate. I'm a consultant and most of the economics/finance related concepts are interesting and pretty basic for me to grasp, but topics like biology and society etc. in which I have little experience and frankly, interest, are harder for me to not only conceptually understand, but also put in the mental effort to understand. So when I encounter these topics, I force myself to slow down and map out the topics and logic.
Quant: I'm weakest at combinatorics, number theory, so if I encounter a difficult problem I allocate more time until I'm on pace (i.e. solve question 5 until I have 52 mins then guess and move on. thankfully I didn't need to guess on any questions during the actual exam) and make inferences and speed through without checking on topics I'm strong in such as rates, algebra, geometry, set theory. I also only picked out the hardest questions for quant, and split them out into 23 topics. If I got 6 questions in a row correctly I moved to the next topic.
IR: honestly didn't study at all. I must have only did IR once in my first ever diagnostic and once on my first practice GMAT. Got 7 in both but left 2/12 questions blank. On the real GMAT I somehow finished the section in 17 minutes, got an 8... weird but i'm not really indexing too much on this section.
Full time professionals: For those of you working, my senior director gave me this advice and it really helped, but I basically took a week off work, and locked myself in for 9 days and just studied my ass off 9am - 6pm. Progress was insane. I think doing 1 hr per night after work is necessary and good in the months leading up, but it takes a bit of intensive focus in the last stretch to really create the muscle memory to do this test. I really don't think this test is about knowledge at all, it's specifically about how good you are at taking the GMAT. Knowledge and intelligence helps but it's primarily how conditioned you are to take this test.
These forums helped me a lot throughout this process so I'm just happy to give back a bit now that I'm done with the GMAT forever.
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16 Jul 2020, 00:23
