Debunking myths - 620 to 740(q49, v41)

There are enough number of awesome debriefs on this forum that I feel my traditional debrief will not add any value to forum. Especially what I did to achieve score of 740 was not much different than what others have already done in the past. However, I did make few blunders along the way and wish to share those with everyone.

To start with, brief background about my GMAT experience, I started my GMAT preparation around Aug 2018 with a plan to appear for GMAT in February 2019. Around January, I started seeing the scores of close to 700 in my mock exams and hence took the exam date of February end. To my surprise, or rather shock, I scored only 620(q48, v28), which was lower than the first mock exam I had taken before starting the GMAT preparation. While I thought I was thoroughly prepared for the exam, chink in my armor was exposed. I took 2 days to introspect, took my next date from April first week and started the preparation all over again.

So what did I do differently in second attempt? I identified some myths, mostly self created, that were holding me back and worked on those :

1. Getting few questions wrong is not ok.
"...You will always end up getting few questions wrong, even if you are scoring >90 percentile...". You read this all the time on various website and forums. Whenever I got few questions wrong on my question set or during my mock exams, I did not bother me much mostly because overall accuracy for more than 80%. Although I did cursory review it to figure out the mistake and put it in the error log, I did not lose my sleep over it. In my second attempt, I prepared with the mindset that each and every mistake is a crime, at least during the prep phase. This was one significant change that changed the game for me.

2.Use GMATClub wisely.
GMATClub is awesome, with such valuable discussions from experts as well as other participants. But, if you don't know what should look for, it does more harm than good, it did for me at least. In my second attempt, I hardly referred to the forums on GMATClub. With so many experts and participants opinions, it was causing more confusion to me and was making me challenge my methods. Only when I had no clue about the solution, I referred to couple of solutions for hint, then proceeded to explore the solution on my own. That way, I was building my own approach to solve the problem, rather than rely on someone else's approach.

3. Official questions are precious.
I know how much GMATNinja has stressed on importance of referring to OG problems as much as possible. I observed one typical behavior during my preparation. Whenever I study the material provided by the prep company and then attempted their question set, my accuracy was very high. However, when I switched to OG questions or some other prep company, my accuracy dropped. So during my second attempt, I used prep company material for study, and OG for doing practice set. I had already solved OG twice before that, so being fair was little bit of a challenge. But anyways practice set was more about applying the concepts rather than getting the answers right

4. Its all about your preparation and conceptual knowledge, voodoo wont help
There is lot of content around taking the exams on the same time as mocks and during your peak attention time, eating specific stuff during section breaks, etc... and I followed them all in my first attempt. Result 620. For my second attempt, I had a late night event on the night before exam, took the exam in late evening when I am usually tired as that was the only slot available, did not care about what I do in the break and it was still fine. I believe, exam day is 99% about the preparation you have done and 1% about everything else.

5. "Gut feel" is never right with GMAT.
All throughout my first attempt, I was reasonably comfortable answering the questions, both in Quant & Verbal. At no point in the exam, I felt challenged to the point of breaking apart. Hence, I found it very difficult to digest the score of 620. On the contrary, in my second attempt, halfway through the verbal section, I was disgruntled. After completing my Quant & Verbal section, I became too casual with IR and AWA sections, as I thought I have screwed up this attempt as well.

I would like to conclude by saying that, GMAT is a predictable exam, once you have your eye set on a target score, all you need to do is lose your sleep over it !

If you feel any more details from my preparation would help you reach your target score, feel free to comment and I will be happy to share.