To my fellow adventurers seeking their own lucrative GMAT treasure,
I gave my first attempt on the 16th of October last year and scored a 750. I went through a lot to figure out what was right and what was not, and I hope to help some of you avoid going all the places or at least cut down your itinerary of the grand tour of the gmatclub forums.
Note:1. I will attach a detailed breakdown of my mock test scores at the bottom, along with the resources I used.
2. If you need specific advice or my notes, feel free to dm me.
3. I am a novice when it comes to posting here, the formatting may not be great. Sorry about that.
Before starting preparation: First Blood
The first step irrespective of who or what you are is to take the first GMAT Prep mock (1 of the 2 free tests). I purchased
the Official guide, verbal and quant reviews in 2018 but did not start my prep until May 2019. On the 25th of May, I took the mock, hoping to score 650+ at least and ended up with a 580. Personally disappointing but not without its silver lining.
Purpose: Giving the test unprepared, you are bound to crash. But the idea here is not to cross the pacific but to simulate the flight and analyze your systems' behavior and shortcomings.
Take away: Although disappointed with the 580, I scored a Q43 and V27. Off the bat, I knew Quant was my strength, and I recognized my mistakes were because I lacked practice and needed to revise a few basic concepts. Verbal at this stage was a hail mary, but I would burn that bridge when I got there.
The biggest reason for failure in exams(Personal opinion):The primary reason that people don't do well in time-bound tests is fear of the test and the lack of conviction in one's abilities. Like most monsters, GMAT thrives on your anxiety and self-doubt.
The solution?: There is no spoon.
I went in saying three things.
1. I will attempt the GMAT at least once in 2019. I do not have a target score. If not successful, it is a test; retake!
2. The GMAT is not exceptional, it like any other task is simply a matter of investing time and effort, both of which I control
3. I will spend whatever I have to until I feel comfortable with my score, save elsewhere(don't eat at restaurants) but if possible, don't be stingy here, the ROI is unreal
Take away: The only person you are competing against is yourself. Don't let anyone else scare you into thinking that you cannot do what they did. The only difference between all of us would be the amount of time required to prepare.
Getting started
My challenges:
1. Need a systematic approach; I don't want to break my head over what I should do next.
2. Need online course because of extensive overseas travel
3. Need a time table with SMART Goals(Google this one)
While I took the mock on the 25th of May, I was already confused with the plethora of options for online courses, after much consideration and free trails, I opted for
e-GMAT primarily for the following reasons.
1. The personal planner. I input my starting score, it asked my target score, how many hours I can spare and when I planned on taking the test and out came this timetable that was perfect for me, a 3-4 month calendar with a daily breakdown of modules
2. The course structure was systematic and aligned with the schedule; I no longer needed to think what to do; it was all planned and laid out.
3. The approach, test yourself without any concept, go through the concept with solved examples, test your improvement, rinse, and repeat.
4. The cost. One of the more economical options with similar reviews as others
Take away: Find out what works best for YOU. If something works for me, it does not necessarily mean that it'll work for you. Explore all the free trails and take time to decide on your approach. As Lincon said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax." Invest time in finding the right approach for yourself; you might end up saving months in terms of preparation time. I planned to write the exam in December, but because of the pacing of the modules, I ended up finishing it in October.
Quantitative
I decided to start my prep with Quant, which was already strong owing to the gladiator styled education system of India. I knew what I needed to work on because this was a fundamental problem that I had since school.
1. Rushing to finish the question: Speed is of the essence yes but not if you are going fast to crash and burn
2. Overconfidence and impatience leading to silly mistakes, 2*3 = π
There are no short cut's here, at least in the beginning, but you can take solace in the fact that if you do walk the road, it leads to the same destination. The only thing you need to do for Quant is to go through the entire syllabus, focus on the fundamental concepts, and practice away to kingdom come.
Advice: This is not a sprint, and if you go into it thinking that you are going to "bolt" across, I have news for you. In the beginning, you will take time, but if you stay true to the course, your pace will increase. Everyone has strong and weak areas, keep pushing forward.
My rhythm was to follow
e-GMAT down to the letter, I crossed every 't' and dotted every 'i,' it did not matter if I was good at something already if the course needed me to do something I did it. Test before concept, learn the concept, practice on
e-GMAT questions, practice on
OG questions, next topic, rinse, repeat.
After completing a module (say Number properties), I would go to
Scholarium (don't try to pronounce this, I gave up) and attempt the questions there, failed miserably in the beginning, but moved on to the next module. When I completed all the modules, I took a book and made my notes for each chapter with all the essential formulae, information, and possible tricks/methods.
Problem-solving vs. Data sufficiency: Here, something that I would like to add is if like me, you have a problem with DS questions, the following helped me nail down the approach, it may sound like common sense but believe me, you may have to hammer this into your head.
1. Test S1 alone, don't even acknowledge the existence of S2
2. Test S2 alone, disown and bury the memory of S1
3. Test both S1 and S2 together
Take away: Success in Quant, in my opinion, is about pure practice. It does not require a unique set of skills or inherent mathematical prowess. Once you have the basic concepts nailed down, the rest is all practice. Your score is directly proportional to the number of questions you solve, and it plateaus off reasonably quickly. You don't have to solve thousands of problems to get a Q50, just enough that you are comfortable going in without fear of the unknown.
Milestone 1: He is starting to believe
It took me 41 days to complete the Quant module, and I took GMAT Prep official mock two, and my score went up from 580 to 710. From Q43 V27 to Q50 V35.
How?: What I realized was that once you nail down Quant and get familiar with solving questions, your CR and RC also improve automatically (fundamentally they are the same, gather information, pick the right answer). On this day, I also decided to write all my practice tests and the actual GMAT at 10 AM.
Take away: The time you take the GMAT is also essential, you might be a morning person, a midnight person, or does not matter anyway kind of a person. Experiment with a few times if you are unsure. For me, it was not early morning, not after lunch, not so late that I start worrying about the test. If you worry too much. For the first few mocks, forget about the score or the pacing, this is about getting into the flow of GMAT
Verbal
Now, as fun as Quant was for me, Verbal turned out to be a nightmare. My score went up quite significantly, and I assumed it would be much easier to wrap up Verbal as well quickly. I no longer needed to worry about RC and CR. SC was the only thing remaining. I was very wrong, and when I went through the modules for SC, I was not able to make sense of anything.
The primary reason was that in the modules, due to the structure of the course, I was going through Subject-Verb, and when I reached the practice questions/
OG questions, there were questions from concepts that would be covered at a later stage(Not a fault on the part of
e-GMAT, official questions almost always test multiple concepts in one question)
I failed to realize a simple thing. If I stuck to the course work and did not worry about immediately getting the questions right, It would have been much easier for me to finish SC. But because I am the way I am, I let doubt get the better of me in saying that I was doing something wrong. So I switched materials, I ran to the shrine of SC. The Manhattan SC guide and I ended up even more confused. It sounded gibberish to me. I had to go back to
e-GMAT, and I changed my approach. I was going to go through the concepts alone and not solve questions. I focused on the meaning now rather than trying to find a trick to solve the question. Things cleared up a bit. Then I went to Manhattan SC again and finally, I was blind, but now I could see. I almost cried tears of joy when things finally made sense.
But the turning point for my SC was the gmatclub forum. I always searched the
OG/VR questions from the
e-GMAT module in the forums, and the user replies made things exponentially easier for me. I appreciate the help from the community. I urge everyone to do the same (people breakdown each option, and you learn a lot of ideas and approaches. You can even figure out where you went wrong)
Even though my CR and RC were strong now, I still completed all the modules in
e-GMAT, and it took me a total of 30 days to complete Verbal. Like Quant, I made my notes. Although not as polished as Quant, these were lifesavers.
Take away: 1. Verbal SC, forget the tricks initially, focus on understanding the meaning. Once you understand the meaning, you can go back and now compartmentalize it into methods (maybe). Rely heavily on gmatclub forums for the official questions, some amazing community answers that can help you reinforce your concepts or even help you discover new ways of solving SC questions.
2. For CR and RC, there is not much specific advice that I can provide except to read with a purpose. Don't just read the question, look at the answers, and come back. Read once, absorb, and jump into the answers. I had an intrinsic advantage of being able to read and absorb information very quickly. Find your strength and work with that.
Milestone 2:
I purchased the 4 additional tests from GMAT Prep and took mock 3 and scored a 730 with Q50 and V40. A good score but still not good enough, I wanted to score 760+. A detailed breakdown of mistakes showed that SC was my Achilles heel, and I needed to work on that.
Take away: 1. I took mocks at these specific landmarks because I did not need to worry about being able to maintain my composure for 3 4 hours of the exam. If you feel that you need to get into the habit of this exam, I would recommend other mock tests, do not use the official mocks for endurance training.
2. In the official mocks, it would serve you well to analyse yourself in detail. Break down the wrong answers into Quant PS and DS, Verbal SC,CR, and RC. Understand what is going wrong and why. Is your verbal weak because you jump into with without a break after Quant, do you want to attempt verbal first. Are you looking at the clock too much, which type of question do you need to focus on etc.
What next? A mistake of course
At this stage, I finished all the course material on
e-GMAT and wanted to solve a lot of questions now, so I jumped into the
OG, QR, and VR. I decided to solve 100 questions per day, and with a total of ~1400 questions in all 3, it would take me 2 weeks to finish all of them.
But then I suddenly became paranoid. I did not want to jeopardize my GMAT Prep scores or skew the scores because I thought that GMAT Prep would have the same questions as
OG, QR, and VR. If I solved them before and then during the mock, it would be terrible for me. I tried to search everywhere to see if they were the same question bank or different. I could not find anything, and so I sort of wasted a couple of weeks on that. (I am still not 100% sure but from what I have gathered, they are different sets of question banks and no overlap between any of them)
I gave up solving the
OG, QR, VR until I had given my GMAT Prep mock 5. In the meantime, I used the gmatclub filters to filter and select particular questions, official questions only but not from GMAT prep or
OG, VR, QR 2018. This slowed down my pace, and I got lost for a bit, but I decided to start giving a mock test every weekend from now on. So for the next two weeks, I jumped from one place to the other and also gave two mock tests from
Kaplan series that I had purchased. I scored a 710 and 700 but did not like either the test or the questions themselves. I will not recommend
Kaplan to anyone and especially not the mock tests.
Following that week, I gave my GMAT Prep official mock 4 on the 31st of August and managed to score a 760. This was good because that was my target, and I felt confident in my ability, but that was short-lived. After my analysis of the mock, while wandering the never-ending forum. I discovered that on GMAT official mocks, Quant seems to be at a more comfortable level than the actual GMAT, and maybe the score reflected in my mocks would not be my actual score. I found out that Manhattan had the toughest mocks, and so the next day, I took the free Manhattan mock and scored a 690 with a 48 on Quant. I searched online and was informed that this was good enough and so I stopped worrying about Quant. In hindsight, I think I should have focused a bit more on my Quant.
In the weeks following, I booked an appointment for the 16th of October and stuck to solving all the questions in
OG, QR, and VR and finishing the official mocks. I gave my last mock on the 5th of October and left the last week completely free and relaxed.
Take away: 1. The GMAT Prep mocks database is different from the
OG/VR/QR (community can correct me if I am wrong). I wasted 2-3 weeks drifting away from official material, getting confused. I should have reached out to
e-GMAT or the gmatclub community to resolve my doubts.
2. For Quant, I would recommend if you are comfortable in the mocks to go for questions that are of a higher difficulty level. I scored a Q49 but could have scored a 50 or 51 (or it could be that I made random mistakes). Here, it does not hurt to practice more than required.
3. You may feel overconfident to book the exam earlier than you planned on taking, or you may feel overwhelmed and keep postponing your test date. In either case, don't let yourself decide because your emotions will skew your decision. Rely on actual data such as mock scores. Look for consistency and then choose a date. Everything else is immaterial.
AWA and IR
IR: I did not focus much on IR and AWA. For IR, I simply went back to all the Official mocks and solved the questions, IR is a combination of Quant and Verbal and so it specifically does not require preparation, just go through the official questions and you should be good to go
AWA: I went through chineseburned guide to AWA(How to get 6.0 AWA on GMAT ....my guide) and that was good enough for me. I did not write any samples, just went through the guide. It should be good enough for a score of 5+
Take away: AWA, the holy grail is chineseburned guide
IR, practice the questions from the mocks, if you feel those are not enough, purchase more official questions. Overall, IR should be a combination of Quant and Verbal.
On the test day: Stop trying to hit me and hit me!
I went to the test center a day before the exam and made sure I knew the routes, had all the documents in place. Double checked on the storage facility at the center and returned home. I looked through my notes, played some games, and went to sleep early.
I reached the test center 45 minutes early and checked with them to see if they would allow me to start a bit soon. I started the test 30 minutes early. I got into the habit of not looking at the time until I reach question number 20 or 25
Quant: I went through fairly quickly, did not feel a lot of pressure, and managed to finish with time to spare.
Verbal: Again, no pressure, felt very comfortable answering the questions, did not stress at all about the order, quantity difficulty of SC or RC or CR. No strengths, no weaknesses just that question and me for those few minutes
IR: Felt that I bombed here
AWA: An easy enough prompt, and I managed to breeze through.
Result: When I clicked on view results, I was on 180 bpm, but when I saw the score, it was a mixed feeling. First IR 8, that was a pleasant surprise. V 42 (96th) percentile, very happy. Overall, 750 (98th percentile) and 49 on Quant (74th percentile) sort of threw me off. I was not completely happy with that, but for the moment, I accomplished my goal.
Take away: 1. One piece of advice here would be to not go in thinking that I will be done with this today. You don't want to rush into answering merely to be done with the GMAT. Don't stress about anything, for those few hours; one question at a time and nothing else exists in the world: just you and that computer. You got this!
2. Finally, it's only one exam, and you can always go back and improve your score; it is not the end of the world. There is no press conference after the exam or a guillotine waiting if you cannot score.
3. I used a lot of songs to hype myself during the entire journey. I can make a list if you like. Also, take very good care of your diet/health in general, you want yourself performing at 100%.
Mock Tests Breakdown
(Apparently I need 5 posts to be able to attach images and links
I cannot even mention U'R'L in my post, go figure)
......................................................................................Mistakes
.........................Mistakes
Mock Name
.......Date
....................Total(%ile)
.....Q(%ile)
..PS
...DS
...........V(%ile)
....SC
...CR
...RC
Mock 1
.............May 25
.................580(51)
..........43(50)
...5
.....8
............27(47)
.....5
.....5
.....6
Mock 2
.............July 13
..................710(91)
..........50(86)
...3
.....3
............37(83)
....9
.....2
......2
Mock 3
.............August 11
............730(96)
...........50(86)
...3
.....3
............40(91)
....7
.....1
.....2
Kaplan 1
...........August 17
............710(92)
...........49(79)
...x
.....x
............39(89)
Kaplan 2
...........August 24
............700(89)
...........49(79)
...x
.....x
............37(83)
Mock 4
.............August 31
............760(99)
...........50(86)
...1
.....2
............42(96)
....3
.....2
.....0
Manhattan
........September 1
.........690(86)
...........48(69)
...3
.....6
...........36(81)
Mock 1 reset
....September 7
.........780(99)
...........50(86)
...5
.....5
............51(99)
....0
.....0
.....0
Mock 5
.............September 14
.......750(98)
...........50(86)
...1
.....3
...........40(91)
.....5
.....1
.....2
Mock 2 reset
....September 21
.......760(99)
...........50(86)
...2
.....4
...........41(94)
.....2
.....3
.....2
Mock 6
............October 5
..............760(99)
...........50(86)
...1
.....2
...........42(96)
.....2
.....1
.....1
GMAT
..............October 16
............750(98)
...........49(74)
...x
.....x
...........42(96)
Materials used:
1.
e-GMAT online course
2.
OG, QR, and VR
3. Manhattan SC guide
4. gmatclub QOTD and forums
5. GMAT Prep official Mocks (all 6)
6.
Kaplan mocks (not recommended)
7. 1 Manhattan mock
8.
chineseburned guide to AWA
30 Jan 2020, 04:36
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