Overview: Hi guys, I went from 510 (Q42 V19) to 710 (Q49 V38) in 5 months time and I'll be sharing my strategies and my ups and downs throughout this Journey. Please note I definitely wouldn't consider myself extremely smart or solid in Math and English fundamentals as I scored a 510 with V19 at first. I just want everyone to know, as long as you put in the time and effort, you'll be able to get your dream score. Please see my breakdown below:
Resources: Lawhub subscription, GMAT NINJA youtube videos, GMAT club SC questions, GMAT Official Practice Exams 1-6, 2019
Official Guide, Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide 8, The LSAT trainer (by Mike Kim)
1st Month: I took my first GMAT practice exam on 9th July 2021 and scored a 510 (Q42 V19). I didn't see my breakdown until later so I thought I'd work on my Quant first. I got the 2019
Official Guide and went through almost half of the questions on the
OG. (I later realised this was a mistake, but it's spilt milk under the bridge..) After casually working for 1-2 hours for just a few days, I finally saw my breakdown and realised I need to buckle down and start grinding if I want to get into my dream school.
At around the end of July after I finished writing my Thesis for MBA in Japan (this is mandatory for some MBA programs in Japan) I decided to take GMAT seriously. I followed a routine of 5.5 hours of studying + 1 hour of reading everyday without break. During the span of the next 4 months I read 'Memoirs of a Geisha', 'The Economist', and parts of epic fantasies during the last month. I'd say 'The Economist' was extremely helpful as the language and vocabularies used in the magazine was just like the reading comprehension passages in GMAT or LSAT if not harder.
2nd-4th Month: After the 1st month of doing questions, mostly Verbal after I realised my breakdown, on GMATclub and watching videos from Charles (the GMAT ninja), I went back and tested my knowledge on GMAT by doing the 2nd official practice exam UNTIMED. I achieved a 650 (Q49, V30) and I was ecstatic, but V30 is still not enough to get me a 700+
I realised there's simply not enough questions to go around for Verbal. I look at some suggestions from others and decided to pay a one-year subscription of LawHub, which gave me access to around 70 practice exams full of logical reasoning questions and reading comprehension questions similar to those of GMAT. I'd say the LawHub subscription is definitely one of the key components for my improvement in Verbal from V19 to V38. In these 3 months, I completely dropped my Quant and focused on my Verbal since I won't be able to get a 700+ without a high Verbal. My daily routine consisted of 1 timed practice section in LawHub (of around 25-27 questions of either reading comp or logical reasoning), blind review of the entire section, review after I checked which ones I got wrong from the section, and some random sentence correction questions from GMATclub.
At first my LawHub practice sections were horrible since my English fundamentals were weak, and I always skimmed through the passages. But after following strategies from GMAT Ninja, who told me to read each passage carefully, and going through the RC and CR or LR sections in Mike Kim's 'The LSAT Trainer', my verbal dramatically increased! I'd highly recommend 'The LSAT Trainer' to anyone who's weak at Critical Reasoning. The book is revolutionary in terms of strategies and training for your mental discipline that's needed for CR or LR.
For SC, I went through the Manhattan Sentence Correction to strengthen my knowledge on SC, but I have to say, SC was my weakest section out of all the Verbal sections, and I was still unconfident about SC even after I finished the entire book, and looked at more SC questions from GMAT Club and went through all the
verbal OG questions in the 2019 edition.
Near the end of the 4th month I took 2 more practice exams (still reusing the first 2 practice exams at this point) and got 690(Q47, V38) and 710(Q49, V37) and I was happy about my results! I was somewhat confident I'm able to
Last Month: In the last month, there was a bit of a hiccup. I purchased the rest of the official GMAT practice exams (3-6) and took one of them and got a 670 (Q48, V34). I was devastated and technically I only had 17 days left until my GMAT test. I realised my SC was pulling my score down and my original V37 and V38 were a bit of a fluke as my Verbal score was not consistent. I had to make sure my score was consistent, so I dropped all the GMAT club unofficial questions and went back to the
OG SC questions. I have to say, I'm not sure how helpful it was to do do the unofficial SC questions as my score actually dropped after looking at all those unofficial SC questions... In the last 2 weeks or so, I did 1 GMAT unofficial practice test every few days after I went through all of the Verbal questions again. I realised my CR was falling off a bit even though my understanding of CR was pretty solid at that point. I scored 690 three times, but my verbal started increasing from V33 to V35. In the last practice exam I took 2 days before my exam, I scored a 710 again with Q49 and V35. I was still worried since on different raw score conversion websites, Q49 V35 could either be a 690 or a 710. But luckily after a good nights rest and on the exam day, I scored a Q49 V38 and got a solid 710!
Thanks for reading thus far. Please let me know if you have any questions about my experience, and I'll do my best to reply. Thank you!
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Updated on: 06 Jan 2022, 22:54
