A three month preparation attempt at GMAT!

A long-time lurker but a first-time poster on GMAT Club – I never thought I’d be writing my GMAT story over here but remembering how much other people’s stories helped me out, I think I’ll give it a shot with the hope that my experience helps someone.
TLDR – I scored 720 (Q48, V41) through targeted studying and 3 months of preparation.


My Background:
I come from an Economics background but am just average at Math. I believe my verbal skills are quite decent and thought that preparing for GMAT could make sense as I had heard verbal is the tough nut in this exam.


My Journey:

I started thinking of GMAT after one of my teachers told me about Indian School of Business in March 2019. I approached my CAT counsellor regarding this (had recently enrolled for one), and she suggested giving a mock without even checking the curriculum once to see if you’ll be ready for GMAT by the time ISB deadlines arrive (Aug-2019). I got a 640 and felt that this could be a cakewalk for me. However, things were obviously very different.


Initial Study Approach and Strategy:

Started with the OG, and completed it in about 4 weeks. Never felt much challenged in the quant part, verbal although was difficult at times. I made sure to note down every point to ensure that I never make the same mistake again, and it made sense even later on as the rules of GMAT were pretty consistent. Never gave a mock between these 4 weeks as I was still riding high on my expectation that GMAT will be rather easy for me.
I spent roughly a couple of hours every day, as a newfound internship (something I had not planned originally) took up a lot of my time. Post this I finally managed to give another mock, which was the official one at mba.com.


Mock and a change in strategy:

The score I got was 680, which was a rude shock to me. I was acing most questions on the OG and here I was sitting with a sub-par score (the average score at ISB is 708). I decided to change my approach and decided to give regular mocks to see how I progress week by week and focus more on the areas where I think practice would help me – verbal.
I firstly started going through a lot of free resources, especially sets of questions specifically designed for the 700 – 800 range as I felt I was draining a lot of energy on simple questions I would ultimately get right. I did not buy any secondary study material as I did not have the time and I felt I needed to be more exam ready than getting a lot of questions right since all I had was about 5-6 weeks.
Secondly, I bought a mock test series from Experts’ Global which contained 15 mocks. This really changed the course as giving mocks twice a day made me realise that a large number of questions, I was getting wrong just because I was mentally exhausted, and would attempt them correctly upon re-review. Plus, I felt that the quality of questions was pretty good from Experts’ Global, which was in line with the reviews I had read. I personally am not a fan of providers going over the top with difficulty and thankfully I did not have to face that.


Exam:

Finally, after about 12 mocks and 1000’s of questions later, my mock score settled at 700 – 740 and I was ready to take the final dive (even if I were not ready, I still had to give it considering the deadline was nearly over).
I kept revising my error log prior to the exam, and on the centre, I was at first taken aback by the complete silence (at home it's never really completely silent). However, after I while I felt I was doing just fine as most of the questions were okay, although a few quant questions did take me aback.
All in all, I managed to get a 720 (Q48, V41), IR 8 and AWA 5.5. To top it up, I got an admit into ISB a few months later which is what I exactly I had hoped for when I started preparing.


Final Thoughts:

The best resource would be self-awareness, you should know what your weaknesses are, how much you can reasonably score and then work around these things. Do give a lot of mocks (official mocks and Experts’ Global’s 15 mocks would be my recommendation), as the exam is very long and can be quite tiring, so don’t just focus on revising a million questions. Lastly, the biggest feature of GMAT (at least as compared to CAT, the Indian MBA entrance exam) is that you can give it again, so don’t worry if you get a less-than-expected score.