Around the GMAT in 60 Days - From 560 to 730 (Q49, V41)

My GMAT journey was governed by 5 values - like the 5 Ps in marketing there are my 5Ds for GMAT prep -

1. Discipline

2. Determination

3. Demarcation

4. Demonstration

5. Diet

I want to elaborate the above mentioned through this de-brief and I hope you can use this to navigate through your GMAT journey.



Pre-prep Phase

I had gotten used to the corporate hustle by the end of two years of my work in my first company. The days were long, and the nights felt longer. I was working as a Customer Success Product Consultant and there was a constant ringing in my head that told me to do more, to go that extra mile, and be better than all my peers and even seniors. This led to me focusing on nothing else, but work and I soon realized that I would have to quit my job to do anything else because it literally seemed like I was married to it.

I quit my job in October and took a break to figure things out. I had a few offers in hand but I always wanted to pursue an MBA and saw that GMAT is the only exam that can open multiple doors for me. I did not want a gap in my CV, so I started working part-time, around 4 days a week and also started contributing some hours weekly in an NGO near my place where I taught school children English and Mathematics Of course, this somehow fell in line with my prep.

When I took my first GMAT Official Mock test, I scored a mere 560. This shook me as my target score was 750. My GMAT journey began with overconfidence and a lot of optimism and slowly that drained what was left was fear and doubt. I started my prep on the 12th of November of 2022 and saw that the syllabus is vast, and everything seemed too alien. I heard somewhere that if you book a test date for the GMAT before itself, the preparation becomes serious in the head. So, I booked the test date for 22nd January 2023 since I was aiming to apply in the final rounds of admission for colleges for the 2023 intake.

That is when I started receiving content from a lot of advertisements from GMAT Prep institutions and had a few options in my hand. I took a demo consultation from 2 of those and attended an Inequalities session by Payal Tandon from e-GMAT. This, essentially, was a turning point in my journey. The way she incorporated basic skills of decoding a problem and taking the most error free methods of solving problems was amazing. Just a few sums in and I could understand a basic problem that I was facing. I was hurrying while reading the question statement, not taking all cases into consideration and forgetting to apply constraints. Even though I knew how to solve questions, my absent mindedness was getting the better of me. Since I got so many revelations in just one session, I decided to go ahead with e-GMAT as my coach.

Since the coaching is a cost intensive affair, I wrote to them seeking a scholarship/discount and gave them all my details. They were kind enough to offer me a discount for the 2-month course that I wanted.

Early Prep-phase

When overcoming a hurdle like the GMAT, it is important to not make it a do or die situation. Of course, the expenses are a major factor, but it is never advisable to put yourself under insurmountable pressure.
I, however, took the exact opposite route since I realized that after constantly working under pressure for 2 years, I was just not able to concentrate as much without a looming deadline/threat over my head. My concentration still was far from being remotely adequate. In the beginning, I could just stretch myself enough to give in 2.5 – 3 hours a day for prep. I was haphazard with the curriculum and was not following any pattern of learning. I was not able to get rid of all distractions – social media, Netflix and just wasting time became a mechanism to avoid the anxiety of trusting the process completely, but I was fickle minded.

It took a lot, but I tried to make a schedule where I incorporated small rewards for small achievements. For example, if I finished a topic, I would reward myself with half a movie or an episode of a series. I deleted Instagram as it was neither adding value nor helping me relax my mind. I tracked my daily activities and total time spent in preparation and made sure that I put at least an hour of serious preparation without any distractions in one go. I understood that I needed to fix more than just my mental health and started exercising and maintaining a strict diet, this helped me feel more active and regulate my sleep. I was waking up early in the morning and finishing up with half of the day’s preparation before I began working. As you know, December and January are the months of festivities. So many weddings, holidays, parties and festivals, with people going out even more in the post covid setting. Your goals need to be clear when you are preparing for any competitive exam. Celebrations like these would come every year but you will not get many shots in for exams like these. I made sure that I focused my attention on prep and did not go out for any outings whatsoever. This is pretty easy, after you reject the first lucrative chance to go out and enjoy, the rest becomes simple.

I sought help from the e-GMAT team on how to approach the syllabus and they chalked out a plan for me where I was supposed to complete the verbal syllabus and then attack quants. Like most students, I doubted this plan as I wasn’t able to concentrate, and the progress was not visible as fast as it should have been. I made the mistake of switching between quants and verbal whenever I felt bored of a topic, and this led to a situation where my learning was not sticking well. I was overlooking minute details and was just trying to cover the syllabus. In an exam like GMAT, that is fatal.

Mid Prep-phase

I contacted the e-GMAT support team, and they made me realize my mistake and motivated me to follow the study plan again while showing data between my performance level before and after I decided to shift from the study plan. I followed the Verbal plan in the below mentioned format:

1) Master Comprehension – This helped with my reading and understanding skills of sentences, how to apply pause points, how to remember all the information and connect dots while reading long sentences and finally, how to extract the correct meaning out of sentences. I feel like starting off with this helps with all three components of verbal immensely.

2) Sentence Correction – Each module focused on different types of errors found and the progression of difficulty and content was such that I did not forget what I learnt from the beginning. The practice questions kept increasing in difficulty while making sure that the skills required in the earlier lessons were being applied later as well. There was a proper bucketing of concepts which helped in retention of the learnings. I was always fearing SC but the amount of practice in the lessons itself helped me memorize certain rules that made this journey easier. For example, the utilization of subjunctive terms and usage of similar sounding words like “aggravating” and “aggravated” was explained thoroughly enough to make sure you didn’t have to look at them concepts again.

3) Critical Reasoning – This deals specifically around one methodology: Understanding assumptions. Once this method of approaching questions was understood, half the battle was won. Post which methods of elimination were brought into picture, where assumptions did not work, elimination did. The pre-thinking approach was of prime focus here. I, probably like every other GMAT aspirant, had doubts about this method as it seemed to be time taking in the beginning, but through practice I found a visible difference in the way I was getting more questions correctly and slowly, CR became my strongest feat.

4) Reading Comprehension – Here, different methods of reading were re-iterated and a golden rule that I found out was that you will make things easier if you aim at connecting every sentence with its previous one to understand the meaning of the passage best.

Once I was done with each of the sections of Verbal, I gave multiple tests to strengthen my skills and make sure that the learnings I had did not fly away. After this, I moved to quants.





Quants

The quants syllabus is really vast and there is no shortcut to success here. You need to understand the basics of each topic and make sure that you check the trends of the previous pattern of exam and focus more on areas that give more questions. This doesn’t mean that you discount anything else, it is just that you cannot mess those up. Parts like Algebra and Word Problems come in abundance. e-GMAT focuses on quants just as it does on Verbal. Each difficult concept was taught in multiple methods so that you could choose the most comfortable path for yourself. The way the Scholaranium questions were in abundance and gave a good understanding of my progress along with the areas that I needed to work on.

Towards the tail end of my preparation for Quants, I realized that I only have 14 days left for the exam and no time for revision of concepts or practice tests whatsoever.

I had given 4 mock tests till this point in time – 2 official and 2 Sigma X mock tests of the e-GMAT solution and had not scored above 720. I was far away from my target score and had read that you can expect a lot to go wrong during the main exam, so you usually score less there than compared to mocks.

Last Mile Push

I was in a fix and wasn’t able to prepare with all the anxiety. I decided to get in touch with the e-GMAT team about this since I figured they must have some advice with respect to how to deal with this. I was a little late in getting in touch with them since they have a dedicated Last Mile Push program that helps people achieve their targets. They laid out a day-wise plan for me and gave me all the tools that I needed to succeed. Rashmi, from the e-GMAT team, came on multiple calls with me and provided both mental and strategic support. This came as a positive turning point, and I tried to follow whatever they said down to the T.

The support that I received was extremely meticulous, for example, when Rashmi heard that I had not been keeping well and I told her that I had stopped working out, she motivated me to go out, dedicate some time to exercising and shared personal anecdotes of how these activities helped.

The data interpretation of the e-GMAT team and software are both spot on. They further highlight the importance of the design and concept of the lesson plans and methodology. The way things were taught too was brilliant, with every lesson having practical examples and a pure focus on building basics, each topic became simple and natural to understand. Even complex problems were simplified, and enough practice questions were given through the lessons itself such that you gained enough confidence and skill to solve real GMAT questions. Furthermore, each question that was present on the platform had been explained by the utilization of basic process skills. The personalization of analytics was brilliant, I could really understand where I was lacking without having to introspect, the data on the platform gave me enough to know where I needed to focus. More than anything else, the sheer effort taken to build each lesson was commendable as everything was video oriented, and I did not need to read on and on. After each lesson, you had downloadable summaries to give a gist .

It dawned on me that the topics I did not practice fully were the ones I was weak in. I would have to agree, I was a tad bit late to recover fully in those topics, so I decided to focus on my prescribed study plan.

Last Few Days

Two days before the actual exam, I took an official mock. Everything went wrong here as I just could not get my time management right. I got most questions in verbal correct from the beginning to the middle of the exam but spent too much time on them. As a result, I did not get enough time for the last 5 questions. I scored a low 660 two days before my GMAT exam. This was a devastating moment, and I couldn’t get my confidence back. My mentor told me to trust in the process and gave me pointers on how I could improve which included the below mentioned:

1) Skipping Strategy: There are questions you need to skip so there is enough time left for the other questions you can solve. Here is how you can identify this:
First Indication: It is a question you did not understand.
Second Indication: You do not know the approach.
Third Indication: While solving it, you get stuck.
Fourth Indication: Your answer does not match the options you can see.
Final Indication: When you have spent over 40 seconds on any of the above steps, you know it is time to let go.

2) Error Log – Going back to the error log that was maintained from the beginning of prep and making sure that all the errors over there are understood and now repeated.

3) Time Markers – Maintaining a mapping of how much time should be remaining after a set of questions are completed. You can create checkpoints with respect to how you want to set your pace.

4) Assumption – While this works in CR, you must ensure you do not take this as a one–size–fits–all solution. Always infer things from the question statement, never assume.

D-Day

Come exam day, I decided to have a small set of practice questions – a mixture of easy, medium, and hard- level questions. Thank God I did this, whatever process-oriented mishaps had to take place, took place here. I, fortunately, reviewed all the questions and got my head in the zone to solve questions. I maintained a notebook where one-page summaries of all topics had been given. This helped a lot with respect to memorizing rules for SC and formulae for quants.

Things seldom go as you plan and what happened next was something that no one would ever want to face before an exam. I was staying at a different place (not my home) as it was closer to the exam centre and it would save me an ample amount of travel time to reach the venue from there. A relative of mine was supposed to come on the morning of the exam to give me my passport which is mandatory for you to carry for the exam. As luck would have it, they forgot the passport at my home itself. Going to my place, getting the passport, and then reaching the exam venue would result in me missing my reporting time. It was a situation of panic, but I eventually calmed down and arranged for the passport to be delivered to me directly at the exam venue. I was really flustered but thankful that I had finally made it on time with all the required documents.

I started off with quants and it just seemed like I couldn’t get a hold of myself for the first few questions but then got into the groove. I decided to not focus on the difficulty level of the questions at all and take one question at a time without thinking about the result too much. This helped me maintain a balance with time and I finished the paper on time. With all that happened in the morning, I was pretty exhausted by now and was having high-energy snacks during the break. As luck would have it again, I extended my break by 45 seconds and when I reached my computer station, I saw the timer ticking away. I tried to fill in the gap and went through the first few questions swiftly. However, as I progressed, I faced one Reading Comprehension after another and by the end of the exam, I had gone through 5 RC questions with two of them having 4 and 5 paragraphs each. I was exhausted and the timer was running beyond my reach. I took my best guess at the last 3 questions which were SC and tried to make sure that I finished the test. To this day, I do not know whether I was able to hit the submit button on the last question of the Verbal set.

I had lost all hope with the exam and saw my college application plans crumbling before my eyes. I halfheartedly finished the rest of the paper and to my surprise, I had scored a 730. I mean, it was still 20 points below my target score but not so bad as to be rejected. I accepted the score (V41 Q49) with bittersweet feelings.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I really think that we all focus on what to do when we are preparing. However, what to not do is equally important:

1) Do not overestimate your abilities and take any topic lightly, cover the basics well even if you are confident.

2) Do not skip question analysis even if you get them confidently correct, there will always be some piece of information that you can learn from.

3) Do not skip maintaining an error log, I did that in the beginning and paid the price by wasting time on things that I had already learnt earlier.

4) Do not do some topic first because you think it will be easier to do or better for your sanity. Always follow the chalked-out plan given by experienced coaches, especially plans built on deep analysis of your skills.

5) Do not take other factors lightly: sleep, diet, and refreshment are equally important.

6) Do not believe in myths. Go by data and facts.

7) Do not compare yourselves with others, take inspiration instead.

8) Do not prioritize anything else over this. There is enough time for things later.

9) Do not learn the same thing from multiple places: more confusion, less learning.

10) Finally, do not forget to have all documents ready with you one day prior to your exam, especially your passport.

Now for the things you ought to remember, you must have heard about the 5 Ps of marketing, let us call these the 5 Do’s or rather, the 5 Ds of GMAT:

1. Discipline – Maintain a daily routine and make sure that you are diligent and mindful about your preparation. Do not let even one day slip away.

2. Determination – Manifest your target score in your preparation, if you are doing bad during practice, understand that this can be the best thing that can happen to you, and you can extract the maximum amount of learnings from this. Do not get demotivated.

3. Demarcation – Put your efforts smartly. Do not waste too much time on one thing. Make sure that you compartmentalize what you need to do and set lower and higher-level boundaries on efforts.

4. Demonstration – Always follow up learning with practice. Maintain an error log to see how you are demonstrating your skills and keep looking back before taking a step ahead.

5. Diet – Maintain a healthy diet that helps in building body and mind. Your physical health aids your mental health and capacity.


Trust the process, trust your efforts, trust your mentor, and trust your skills.
Searching for excellence while neglecting perseverance makes one nothing but delusional. Focus on your hard work. Make sure you make so much out of this opportunity that the next one makes the best effort to grab you!