Debrief- 760 first attempt

This is a long one, sorry. There's a TLDR and summary at the bottom

The Day Of

I took the day off from work as I had a 12:30 time slot for the test. This time slot proved to be…problematic for me. I usually start work at 5:30 am, so I was wide awake by 5am with nothing to do. I tried to play some video games, made some food to kill time, looked at my school spreadsheet to see what schools I wanted to send my scores to, and worked on my “bottom number”, aka the lowest I’d be willing to accept, eventually settling on a 680. (My previous practices were 650-730) After all of this was done, is was still just 10am. Sigh. I killed a few more hours before hopping in my truck and heading to the test center.

Upon arrival, I checked in, dropped my stuff in a locker, and got to it pretty quickly. Probably 10 minutes tops from arrival to testing. I decided to take the test in the standard order since I hadn’t put much thought into it and I hadn’t done any practices in any other order, so it made sense to stick to what I knew already. I also suspected that being able to work away at an essay (which doesn’t matter as much as the 800 score) would give the opportunity to calm down and settle into a groove.

The essay prompt was about a tourism office wanting a to host another major sporting event. I picked three flaws out of it, and weakened them. There were some major gaps in the way things were stated so it wasn’t particularly challenging.

IR was a different story. For some reason, this one really caught me off guard. There were two or three questions I just didn’t get. There were a few fill in the blank type questions too, which I hadn’t seen before. I had 7 or 8s on all of my practices, and wound up with a 6 on this one. Not really sure what the issue was if I’m honest, but I can live with the 6 I received.

Math started off pretty slow, the first ten felt like freebies. Around question 20 it started to get a little harder, and by 25 it was turned up another notch. From 25-37 the problems seemed similar in difficulty. There wasn’t too much variety, and very few questions felt “difficult” which had me pretty unsure by the time I finished. The DS seemed tricky, and I will admit that I spent a lot of time thinking to myself, “why are they giving me this second statement” on a few, just trying to find the trap that didn’t exist.

Verbal is where great scores go to die, and I was pretty sure this was the case for me. By the time the first 20 were done, I already felt like it was challenging. I had 2 long reading comprehensions and a few sentence corrections that had me really confused. This trend continued to the end, and I really struggled at the finish from fatigue. A few yawns were had, and I mumbled more than a few words to myself while reading some of the questions. I eventually got through it with just 3 minutes to spare, a record low for me.

The moment of truth arrived shortly after and I felt like I waited forever for the score to finish loading. 760! Q49, V44, IR6. Holy $^&*. I almost missed the “do you want to accept this score” prompt when it popped up because I was so surprised. I walked in with the expectation of a 700 at best and left with a 760. I was ecstatic.

The Training

I wish I could say I had a dedicated, well thought out plan for my studying, but I didn’t. I started off buying a Kaplan book on Amazon for about 15 bucks, and an older OG book on sale, I think it was the 2015. I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to go back to school, so I figured if I could get through a book and take a test, I’d see where I sat and reevaluate. My undergrap GPA is under 3, so I knew I would need to do very on the test to have any chance of admission. It just wouldn’t be worth applying with a sub par GPA and GMAT score. I worked my way through the OG over the course of a month or so and took a few Kaplan tests in segments to get the hang of things. When I sat down and took my first complete Kaplan, I scored a 690. On the right track, but still not completely convincing. I continued to work through the Kaplan book occasionally until I was on a business trip without it, and came across Magoosh. There was a sale going on and I took the offer. That was a significant turning point for my studies.

I watched a bunch of the videos and worked my way through about 85% of the practice problems on the site. After doing these problems, I took a gmatprep test and scored a 710. Very nice, some steady progress. I kept the same verbal, and increased math by a few points. Most importantly though, it confirmed the Kaplan result wasn’t a fluke. Between the two test results and the school research I had been doing, I knew I wanted to apply to school, and made a more serious effort to prep.

I found the gmatclub site and took the free Veritas exam offer( I'm a sucker for sales and free stuff). It was brutal. My score plummeted to the mid 600s. I decided to capitalize on the 6 exam promotion they were offering, and starting grinding away at the free problem bank to help prepare. I took a second Veritas exam and scored a 680. Ok, things are starting to get back in line. I was feeling confident, with my official test about a month away. I decided to take the second gmatprep test and scored a 730. That really helped my confidence level, as I once again increased my quant and the verbal by 2 points each.

I kept drilling problems from Veritas and Magoosh for another two weeks really focusing on a few things that I was struggling with. Number properties, probabilities and reading comprehension were the 3 biggest. After doing more than a fair share of them, I decided to take one final practice test from Veritas. I scored a 710, another huge boost to my confidence, and I really cut back on my studying for the home stretch.

In the last week and a half, I studied just a few hours in an effort to keep the material fresh. I knew that very little would come from cramming at the end and decided instead to just enjoy my evenings. I played video games with my wife, went for a few runs, and started to gather some information on school applications. I wrote two awa essays two days prior to my test, and that was that. The day prior to my test was spent doing some chores and relaxing. I tried really hard not to stress about the test, and I think that was a major factor in my success. Going in calm and collected (and confident from practice scores!) is truly critical to performing your best.

In summary, the resources I used were:

Kaplan gmat book – select problem sets
OG book – entire book with math twice, verbal once
Magoosh – nearly all problems in the bank and many videos
Veritas – several practice exams and a few hundred problems from the bank
Gmatprep – 2 exams and the 90 free problems

My few bits of advice, which may or may not work for you-

Treat practice exams as just that, practice. Use them to work on timing issues, fatigue, etc. Also remember, the scoring is not perfect, especially from 3rd parties. I was 50 points above my best Veritas and 30 above Gmatprep.
Focus on what you do not know. Don’t take the easy route and practice what comes easily to you. If you are terrible at sentence correction, focus on sentence correction. It sounds easy, but it is really hard to get motivated to do this sometimes.
Don’t stress about missing study time. I went back and forth sporadically with my studies. There were weeks that I worked close to 70 hours, and I spent little time studying during those. It’s ok to do this. Just stay focused and pick it back up when you can.
You don't have to spend a fortune on prep to do well. Excluding the test, I spent less than $200 on study material, and the majority of that was the Magoosh subscription.

TLDR:

Did much better than practice exams and pulled a 760 on my first attempt. Q49, V44, IR6. Tied my highest quant score, and scored 2 higher than my best verbal.
Self studied sporadically for ~6 months using Kaplan, OG, Magoosh, Veritas to prepare. Practice exams were 650-730.

If you have any questions, I'll try to keep up with this thread and answer them.