How it all Started
I clearly remember the day when I read on Quora about a post of the student who recently admitted into a prestigious MBA college in Europe. I hardly remember that college name but I clearly remember the hardships he mentioned, years it took, and mental resilience it demanded.
I started the preparation by keeping a 740 score in my mind. In my first attempt back in 2018 October, I scored 650, In 2nd attempt with much added time in preparation, I scored to 690 in October 2019. In 3rd and latest attempt, I scored 720, just after 15 days from my second exam. Yet to reach there, I find the journey to perfecting GMAT score hard but exciting and sometimes frustrating but promising.
So I started out with keeping in mind the long journey but I felt prepared. As I researched about GMAT and its question types in the exam, I instantly liked it. I always think that questions on GMAT help you get into that MBA mindset.
At the beginning of 2018, within few days of preparation, I was landed into this beautiful community of GMAT club. Here I discovered students such as Sauvik and Abhimanha.
These students’ debriefs deeply inspired me, I still remember their struggles and progress when I find hurdles.
I was so sure of preparing for GMAT that I decided to quit my job. I quit my job in March 2018 and started fully focusing on GMAT. I am good at Quant as most of the Indian candidates are, but I struggled a lot in verbal. Here is a brief of both the subjects.
VERBAL -
In verbal, for me, the practice is the key, I daily practiced 4 RCs and 12+ questions of both CR and SC. Initially, I kept this practice untimed but later shifted to timed practice. I kept 2 mins to solve a CR and 1 min to solve SC question and I analyzed over timings on certain questions.
Sentence Correction
Material Used for Learning - I mainly used Manhattan Guides to perfect my bases. I find the material good for non-native English speakers;
Magoosh Guides for certain concepts such as verbs, and comparison, etc;
Expert Global concept videos.
The material used for practice and Tests – GMAT club topic wise questions,
Experts’ Global mocks, and Veritas Prep Question bank
Solving questions with a timer on the GMAT club. I gradually observed progress and started noticing minor splits.
My learnings from SC – 1. It is crucial to understand the core concepts of SC that will not only help you in getting a good score on this section but also help you in overall writing.
2. SC practice will help you read and understand the text a lot better.
3. In difficult SC questions, meaning shifts are subtle but once you understand the words under the words, you can solve it correctly.
4. Elimination is a super strategy for SC. Reading the question, you must know whether A is right, keep it, or wrong.
5. My experience from tests depicts that understanding the meaning is absolutely necessary. I remember my 1st exam had SC questions in which I simply could not eliminate options but had to understand the meaning. I shuffled my approach then to understand and apply meaning first and then eliminate based on splits. This approach helped me do better, bringing my verbal score from 28 to 40.
Critical Reasoning
Material Used for Learning – the PowerScore critical reasoning and Manhattan CR guide is the best choice here.. These 2 books, in my opinion, are enough to digest the basics of CR.
Material used for practice and Tests – GMAT club topic wise questions,
Experts’ Global mocks, Official Guides, and Verbal Review.
CR is the most enjoyable section to me in the test
For a long time, I kept practicing CR to perfect it. Now, it has become my stronger side. My strategy for CR included understanding argument, thinking before you look for options, and eliminating wrong choices. With practice, I got better at all 3 parts.
My Learnings from CR
1. Not thinking about your knowledge of the subject helps in understanding the argument correctly.
2. Every word matters in CR. Some, most, any, none, more are the words that must stand out and scream to you. These are the words that make difference. Reading closely can tremendously add up your CR abilities.
3. Sometimes 2 answers are strengthening the argument, in this scenario, pick the one which supports the conclusion the most. The answer which partially strengthens is
the trap that GMAT sets for us.
4. Less common question types such as boldface and find a flaw is good to practice but don’t bang your head against the wall if you can’t get it right every time. Because
GMAT loves to test what you are solving right. It’s totally okay to skip such questions if they are taking too much time and brain bandwidth.
Reading Comprehension
RC is a part that I still think ‘not easy’ to conquer. But few things help, according to my observations, daily reading of good quality English. English fiction reading helps. I am not a fan of English fiction, so I chose to read Economist. Reading 2-3 stories on The Economist helped me to read closely while understanding the meaning. I regularly discussed what I read with my friends, making sure to absorb and understand the content.
Material Used for Learning – Manhattan Guide and Ron’s videos help but for RC I developed my own strategies to decode and answer the passage.
Material used for practice and Tests – GMAT club topic wise questions, Official Guides, Verbal Review.
My Learnings from studying RC 1. Sometimes it’s okay not to understand the passage completely, with elimination and reading options closely, we can answer the questions.
2. Ability to read and understand increases with time, so practice is the only key here.
3. Trying to pretend as if you know the topic helps. Relate the topic with things you know, it adds chances that you end up understanding passage without giving much strain to the brain.
Quant Section
Material Used for Learning –
Manhattan books and
Experts’ Global concept videos
The material used for practice and Tests – GMAT club topic wise questions, Official Guides, Quant Review, advanced quant.
Though quant falls into my stronger side, I needed to practice quant regularly before exams. I aimed for perfect 51 for quant section but I have 50 as my max score till now.(talk about scores)
Once I covered the concepts from the books, I started solving 700-800 level questions for particular topic. Though you can solve less questions in this category in given time, these questions can help you tremendously improve overall quant skills.
Otherwise, you can start with 600-700 topic questions for practicing quant, once you achieve a fair accuracy, switch to 700-800 level questions. Solving difficult questions is extremely necessary if you want to cross that 46-48 mark in the exam.
My Learnings from Quant 1. Learn, understand, and absorb concepts wholeheartedly.
2. Practice level wise to achieve accuracy.
3. Know your strong and weak topics so that in the exam, you can decide if the question is worth spending the time.
Preparing for The Day: Mock exams and Mindset
Mocks Exams that helped me immensely:
1.
Experts' Global – The tool for exams is pretty similar to the real exam. Questions are not that much harder or easier than the real exam but pretty much closer to GMAT. Good analysis of performance that can actually help us go back and improve that particular section. There are video answers available for each question, in case of quant, video explanation helps.
2.
Veritas Prep – Good set of exams paired with good explanations. Good to practice real exam.
3.
Manhattan Prep – The quality of the exam is really good but I find it a little difficult compared with the real exam. Exam sets are good to get your brains fired up for the actual exam, don’t be discouraged by scores though.
Mindset No matter how many months you prepared, how many mocks you gave, how many questions you practiced, the key ingredient you take to the GMAT center is the right mindset.
Worrying doesn’t help and don’t have expectations from questions: On the first exam, I was worried. A lot. I was so hoping for a good verbal session that I selected my sequence and started the exam. The trickier part of the actual exam is that real questions on the exam may appear very different from than types of questions you solved for practice. So in real exams, the strategies that you developed through practice only matter. But if you go on finding similar splits in the real exam, it wouldn’t be helpful.
For example: Mostly in SC questions, there are splits or comparison, verbs, or any subtopic. But I got a series of questions of SC in the real exam which needed to be answered solely on the basis of meaning. No visible splits of common topics. So the strategy of finding the meaning out of sentence comes first.
Solutions to worrying: 1. Breathing practice helps. It overall helps to calm the mind. I read and learned about the technique from Sayan2k blog here on GMAT
2. Not being desperate for results: I agree, we need to have that score. But many parameters depend on that odd couple of hours of the exam. Whatever happens, there is always the next chance that you can take.
During my second attempt, I took lots of days to perfect concepts. When it was finally the time for the exam, I was away from the R1 deadline for some days and I had to have that score. But when I came out, I got 690. It was sad and depressing for some days. But later when I decided to give another shot just to have that perfect 700 score (Decent score in my mind to apply for colleges), I got 720.
If I had got 700 in the second attempt, I would have applied to colleges in the 1st round. But when I applied in 2nd round with 720, My scores fell into a totally different bucket.
Overall, GMAT in itself is a great journey. It will teach us all something that will stay with us for life.
Apart from improving our general reading and CR abilities, GMAT teaches us the most important lesson of life:
Resilience.
And the resilience will always take you forward.
In the end, I would like to give special thanks to GMAT Club for its platform and for its community and also to some special people who had really helped me to achieve this score
bb,
ron Purewal,
souvik101990,
GMATNinja,
mikemcgarry, and
Experts' Global team