Fast lane to 770 (V47Q49)

Question

Preface I’m only calling this the ‘fast lane' because my particular story is unique in that I was both on a very tight timeline for R2 deadlines in early Jan and also between jobs so conquering 770 was pretty much my 9-9 for just under 60 days. I don't think there are any short-cuts to your target score, but I do hope some of my learnings can help you find your 'fast lane' to conquer the GMAT. Back in 2021, I purchased the e-GMAT course thinking I could juggle my full-time job and GMAT prep simultaneously. I was terribly mistaken and struggled with staying motivated and disciplined. As such, massive respect to the lot of you that do this (or plan to) late-nights and weekends- it’s no easy feat! About a year and a half later, I re-purchased the e-GMAT Online 360 course on October 26th (link in the comments to my review on why I chose e-GMAT) and took my first sigma-x mock test (700 V38Q47). I spent most of the next 60 days focused on the verbal section so a lot of this post is dedicated to my takeaways from that- hope you guys find it useful and best of luck on your GMAT journey and beyond! 1. Sentence Correction (SC) Despite being a native english speaker and a decently avid reader, there are many GMAT SC tricks that stumped me and seemed counter-intuitive to me. I think for this section in particular, there are topics, rules and nuances that you either know or don’t know (for example- the correct usage of past perfect tense or verb-ing modifiers, concept of parallelism and even ‘imperfect’ parallelism, certain idiomatic and un-idiomatic usages of common words like due to vs. because of, like vs. as, etc.). As such, my advice here is to really go through the entire e-GMAT course and focus on identifying and solidifying your conceptual gaps.

Long Live the error log! I would spend ~3-5 minutes to understand every mistake I made and document an entry with meaningful learnings. For example, “Watch out for verb-ing modifiers- they MUST either present the result or description of the action of the main clause” (and not just “study verb-ing usage”). Before attempting a new quiz or as a warm-up at the start of a study session, I would review the last 10-15 entries to get back in the groove. As it grew to 50+ entries, I began to see patterns in my mistakes and things I repeatedly tend to overlook. I summarized these in an additional ‘cheat sheet’ which I read almost every day like it was sacred text. I would share mine but that would be against the ethos of what I’m trying to tell you. Spend the time and effort analyzing, rectifying and documenting your mistakes- that is where you will get most of your learning, and therefore score improvement, from.

Meaning-based approach >> : I started at ~68%ile ability level and had an intuitive process I would follow that I thought was pretty decent. However, the biggest difference that helped me conquer the 99%ile was following the ‘meaning-based’ approach that I learned from the course. I am absolutely one to argue for everyone having their own style, but believe me, this process of 1) breaking down a long sentence into its various clauses, phrases and modifiers 2) understanding the author’s intended meaning of EACH part BEFORE 3) applying the rules of grammar could be the difference between getting many and most SC questions right. So as you follow the course, lay a special emphasis on learning and imbibing the tried-and-tested approach.

Pro Tip- Analyze the question stem/ option A very carefully before even looking at any of the other answer choices. Even if you’ve found a glaring mistake in option A, continue reading to find all the mistakes. This seeming extra time spent on this error analysis makes you much better at catching the errors in the other choices as well, so it is worth the extra effort and here’s why- the trick (and this is slightly true in other sections as well) is to find four incorrect choices and not the correct one. 2. Critical Reasoning (CR) I began at a relatively high starting ability level in CR with ~89%ile in my first two mocks. I always enjoyed logical reasoning and deduction which served me well in this section but the real key to my achieving the 96%ile ability level was the step-by-step methodical process I followed that included at least 20-30 seconds of thinking after reading the prompt BEFORE looking at the answer choices. Here it is: Understand the passage well and focus on the role of each statement in the passage. You must identify the conclusion which is the one statement that is the essence of the author’s argument and every other statement supports or explains. After I would read a CR prompt, I would almost summarize it to myself like “Ok, so the author thinks this new plan will improve exports for X and Y reasons despite the critics’ reasoning Z” I would then proceed to read the question (btw, I still have not looked at the options) and think something like “what would make me believe that the author is in fact correct in his logic that the exports will increase despite Z” . This is a ‘general pre-thinking framework’ which I then use to analyze each option choice. With this in mind, I would easily find the incorrect answers because they would be either against the direction of the argument or irrelevant altogether. Sometimes, I could even think of a reason myself (for example, maybe there has been a reduction in production of the same goods in a neighboring country which would increase exports). This is what e-GMAT calls a ‘specific pre-thinking framework’ and while not always possible to find, the process of looking for one is what solidifies your understanding of the author’s logical reasoning and helps you therefore reject the illogical or irrelevant ones. Again, that’s the aim of the game. This would leave me with a couple options (or best case, just one) to assess further and I would ask myself again “would this new information increase my belief in the author’s conclusion” . 3. Reading Comprehension (RC) I always had a hard time with reading comprehension questions and my starting ability (~50-60%ile) confirmed that. My take is that in an UNTIMED setting, I would get most RC questions right since the answer is in the passage and does not rely on any prior knowledge of the topic in question. The way the GMAT makes this hard is with complex vocabulary and convoluted sentences, oftentimes in an unfamiliar field of study, and the time pressure of reading a long passage on a clock. The trick is to find the right balance between speed of reading and comprehension- how fast to read vs. how well.

Note-taking FTW: The process of note-taking is vital to a crystal clear understanding of the passage. When you attempt to write notes, you end up summarizing and paraphrasing the argument, thus forcing you to understand it. After going through the course, I got the hang of the kind of notes I should be taking and quickly saw a massive improvement in my accuracy on passages where I took notes as compared to the ones I ‘winged’.

Timing is everything: Initially, my notes were pretty detailed and basically just a restatement of the passage and were thus extremely time-consuming to write. I found myself spending upwards of 6 mins on a long passage (especially a humanities one) and this was not possible on the actual exam. I knew that I had to improve my speed without reducing my level of comprehension and this came through trying the same process over 10-20 passages. I would try to write more succinct notes that essentially only captured the overall gist and no particular details of the passage. I think that somewhere between 4.5 to 6 mins on understanding the passage thoroughly is the goal and if you have done that with conviction and truly ‘immersed’ yourself in the content, then about ~30 seconds on each subsequent question should be enough. Sometimes you might have to go back to the passage for some details or a second glance, but as your level of comprehension grows, you’ll notice you’ll have to do so less frequently and typically only for small details (which you’ll know where to quickly look for)

The e-GMAT Mastering Comprehension (MC) course was valuable in defining my process by getting to watch experts work on a passage. I would see that even the instructors wouldn’t fully comprehend every sentence on the first attempt and watch out for when to re-read a sentence a second time or when to go back a couple statements to summarize. At the end of the day, everyone will have their own winning strategy but going through the course exposed me to the instructors’ process and thus helped calibrate and shape my own. 4. Quant As an engineering student who has completed a bunch of math courses, I did start at a relatively high ability level- scoring Q47 and Q48 on my first two mocks without any preparation. I had to leave quant for pretty much just the last week since I was on a strict timeline and therefore only skimmed the e-GMAT course by doing the application (video) files. This gave me a good sense of the process skills to use, refreshed concepts like compound interest or slope-intercept form of a line and exposed me to various types of problems I wasn’t comfortable with. However, if I had more time, I would have used the PACE feature of the platform that essentially allows you to do a quick (5-7 min) quiz in each subsection and then tells you which files of that particular module to cover (or not cover). Overall, I think the content is great and everything you need to know, but the real value addition here is the six process skills of analyzing a question, visualizing the details, etc. If you ctrl+F “process” on this post, you’ll see 13 results because I genuinely believe that the right process is key to acing the test. Quant is no different. Try to use the analysis tools to look into the sections where you are weak and expose yourself to as many practice questions as possible since I think the most productive learning comes from questions you got wrong- I would sometimes spend 10-15 mins working out a problematic question because if I didn’t understand this one, I’d get all similar such ones incorrect. 5. Overall Learnings

I cannot stress enough the importance of reviewing the questions you get wrong in depth and maintaining an error log with discipline- I covered less than 25% of the questions available in the e-GMAT course (both Scholaranium and OG) but the questions I did see and the mistakes I made, I really learned from. Hope I convinced you to focus on doing the same!

When I hit a score plateau in a subsection (for example, taking two 10Q Algebra quizzes and not getting the accuracy I needed to close out the section), I would spend some time identifying the types of questions and topics I was getting wrong, and create a 10Q OG quiz with just those question types. At this stage, I went back to parts of the course and my error logs, cheat sheet, etc to solidify and then do at least two such quizzes before going back to assess the level of my improvement.

Studying for the GMAT can get monotonous and lonely but there are tons of other students in the same boat and even just reading about their experiences on GMATclub and Reddit can be a good source of motivation.

Two days before my GMAT, in my fourth and final mock, I scored a 710 which was not only 50 points below my target but also 10 points below the mock I’d taken a month prior! Undeterred by this, I attributed this to the pressure of a test setting (timed and without the “pause” button) making me nervous and therefore not follow the process(es) I spent the last 60 days mastering. I kept the belief in myself that I had done everything I could and in the last 36 hours before the test, did nothing but watch TV with my girlfriend and get a ton of rest. On the day of the exam, the only thing you can control is your mindset. So even if you don’t particularly believe it, be confident in yourself and don’t let anything get to your head- especially not the disappointment of a prior question. Between questions, reset back to this state of confidence because if you don’t you’ll end up making mistakes back-to-back or in clumps, which you cannot afford to do in a block-based adaptive test like the GMAT.

Shoutout to the eGMAT Last Mile Program and my mentor Rashmi for the constant encouragement and motivation from making a plan, to regular check-ins and ad-hoc ones when I felt stuck or fell behind the plan. If you are closing in on the test and qualify for the LM program, I would definitely recommend signing up! They’ve helped many students across the finish line and genuinely take the effort to give you the tools to achieve that target score- whether it be drafting an improvement plan, analyzing your performance on quizzes to help pin-point areas of improvement or sharing additional resources to bridge concept gaps.

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

Gratz on the 770. All the best going forward.

joohwangie · Answer

thank you for your post. I feel motivated!

egmat · Answer

Dear adidixit10,

This is what dreams are made of – a 770 on the GMAT with a V47! My heartiest congratulations on this massive score😊   As your mentor, it has been a pleasure working with you on this journey toward success and what a journey it has been! I thank you for sharing the learnings from your journey with other GMAT aspirants out there. I am sure your story will inspire and motivate them to achieve greater heights.

Rocky start:

You did not have the best of starts when you first got started with GMAT preparation in 2021. Due to various reasons, you were not able to concentrate on the preparation but when you restarted your journey in 2022, you gave it your all!

As you have mentioned, given the looming application deadlines, you had limited time with you, but through sheer grit, dedication, and a single-minded focus on the target, you were able to surpass your target score to get where only the top 1% of the test-takers get to.

Journey to 770

I am glad that you started the second stint at preparation the right way – by assessing your starting abilities by taking a diagnostic mock – in which you scored a 700 (Q47, V38).

This allowed you to identify that you need to focus on verbal, starting with Sentence Correction. Identifying that the ‘intuition-based’ approach that you had for solving  SC  questions was not enough to help you get to 95th %ile + ability, you started from scratch. You built your foundation – by learning the concepts and applications - and then mastered the ‘meaning-based approach’.

It is commendable how you reviewed each of the questions you answered – no matter whether correct/ incorrect – and used this as a learning opportunity and captured the learnings in the error log. Here is a snapshot of your error log to show how diligent you were while reviewing the solutions and capturing the errors and corrective actions:

https://success.e-gmat.com/Learning-through-error-log

See how this structured feedback-driven approach helped you get to that 95th percentile ability in SC:

https://success.e-gmat.com/Feedback-driven-approach-results-in-top-percentile

In CR,  despite starting out at a higher ability, recognizing that you need to shift your process of answering CR questions to get to that 90%ile plus ability, you spent time learning and internalizing the ‘pre-thinking’ approach. See how the time that you invested in building a good foundation helped you to a 92% accuracy for assumption questions:

https://success.e-gmat.com/strong-foundation-equals-top-ability

Even in RC , I appreciate that you used a similar iterative, feedback-driven approach to perfect your note-taking process to find “the right balance between speed of reading and comprehension”. I am glad that the foundational module of Master Comprehension helped you refine your approach to reading RC passages.

I know that we did not have much time to focus on  quant  – but you made the most of the limited time and through a data-driven improvement plan, focussed on identifying and fixing weak areas, you were able to make it to a Q49.

The hiccup before the test:

Given our limited before D-Day, there was just time for one mock – unfortunately, this did not go too well🙁 But the remarkable thing is you did not let this set back daunt you.

With all the questions that you had solved and the data from these, you knew this was a one-off case and reviewed the mock in detail to understand the reason for the low score and took the necessary corrective actions. You trusted in the data, in the effort that you had put in, and believed in the ability you had built – and with this confidence, took the test.

The result – The most wonderful success – 770 (V47 & Q49):

Hard work, diligence, and a belief in oneself always pay off in the end, and how? This perfect score as seen in your ESR is a testament to the fact that success comes to those who work towards it:

https://success.e-gmat.com/near-perfect-ESR

I would like to thank you again for sharing your GMAT preparation journey and your insights into what the pathway to success looks like. I am sure a lot of people out there will take a leaf out of your journey and get to their dream score too.

I wish you all the very best in all your future endeavors on behalf of the entire GMAT journey.

Best Regards, 
 Rashmi Vaidya

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