From 630 to 720 : All about keeping yourself motivated !

Hi everyone,
I just gave my first attempt at GMAT and scored a 720 (Q49, V40, IR8 ). I am actually a little bit disappointed as I was expecting a 740, but I believe 720 would do just fine. Also, If I was told in the beginning of my preparation that I am going to score 720, I would have happily taken that.

Background :
25, Male Engineer from a tier 2 university in India. I completed my bachelors in electronics and communication in 2016 and currently working as a data scientist at an analytics service company for last 3 years. MBA was never something I was very attracted to the idea of, and I am still not. My target is to do masters in data science/analytics. A lot of you might think why I did not go for a relatively "easier" option of GRE and I am going to answer that in a short while. So hang on as this is going to be a long rant of my GMAT journey.

My first stint with GMAT ( futile )
I first started exploring GMAT right after I graduated. I had some 3 months before the joining date of my first job after graduation. That was a time, I was majorly interested in Masters in Management course and hence started preparing for GMAT.
Resources used :
Quant: Manhattan quant guides for concepts ( free pdf )
OG for practice
Verbal: Manhattan Sentence correction ( free pdf)
Powerscore CR Bible ( free pdf )
As seen, the only resource I bought were official guides. I prepared for a month and gave a mock GMAT PREP exam and scored 630 ( don’t remember the Q-V breakup ). At the same time, my joining date got preponed and hence, I decided not to pursue GMAT anymore and focus on my job.

My second stint with GMAT ( futile )
I had started my job in analytics and was loving the work ( still am ). Therefore, I decided to pursue masters in analytics. Since I was fairly familiar with GMAT, I did not even consider GRE. One thing that I did this time was schedule the exam before preparation. I thought this would keep me motivated, only to know how wrong I was. Unfortunately, I was overloaded with work at that time and could not find any time to study. Hence, after a couple of months of trying, I canceled my exam. This was a time when I had literally given up my pursuit of Masters and thought GMAT is not my cup of tea.

My third stint with GMAT
A couple of years later, I decided to give another shot at GMAT. I used to occasionally read a lot of GMAT debriefs on gmatclub and was motivated enough to think that GMAT is not something that I cannot do.
I had heard a lot about E-Gmat and how it is a must-have for non-natives, therefore after a bit of research, I decided to buy E-Gmat full verbal course. Started with sentence correction, and just a couple of days later bought their quant as well. Here is a detail of the 3 months scheduled I followed :

7th March -27th March: 20 days on E-GMAT verbal SC. Made sure I did all the exercise and questions along with the video lectures. Also, made extensive notes.

At this time I scheduled GMAT for 10th June, giving myself around 3 months from the start of the preparation. I knew there was no option of postponing the date since I had a 3-week trip planned to London on 12th June and hence I had to give it my all.

28th March - 11 April: 14 days on quant concepts from E-Gmat. I had read a lot of average reviews of their quant, but believe me, their quant is worth every dollar. I think I was aware with around 80 percent of the concepts they teach but still was a good refresher. The practice questions were of average difficulty.

12 April - 25 April: This might surprise some of you, but instead of going to CR and RC, I spent another couple weeks on SC (AGAIN !). I revised all lectures and practice questions. The only thing I added was OG questions. I did all OG questions, topic-wise while revising SC lectures.

26 April - 2 May: With less than 45 days remaining, I started E-GMAT CR. I must say their CS and RC are not even close to SC and quant. But I made sure to quickly skim through all CR practice concepts and questions in EGMAT.

2 May - 6 May: I was not a reader and hadn't read much books, newspapers, etc. Hence I was a bit dreaded with long RC questions. But I thought if I can focus on the other parts, I can still score a 700 plus without scoring good in RC. I spent 3-4 days on EGMAT RC concept and questions.

10 May - 31 May : Practice Practice Practice !
At this time I was just a month away from GMAT and still hadn't practiced much with the timer. I had a lot of question banks ( Scholaranium, GMAT club, etc.). This is how I scheduled my practice :

Morning 8:00 - 9: 30: GMAT Club quant test: There are a bit hard tests but I strongly recommend these if anyone wants to score Q50-51. I completed 22 out of the 25 quant CATS and was consistently scoring Q50-51.

10: 00- 12: 00: 15 RC questions and 15 CR questions from scholaranium with timer. These were probably a bit hard and my accuracy in these was around 70%, but a very good resource to practice with timing.

22:30 - 01: 00: I used to alternatively do either another GMAT club quant test or 15 CR or SC questions from scholaranium.

1 June - 7 June : Did a mix of scholaranium questions, gmat club quant questions, OG RC questions ( the only RC questions I practiced)

I started giving mocks around 20th May and bought all 6 GMAT prep official mocks. These are the only mocks I did and I strongly recommend these. Here are my mock scores :

GMAT PREP 1 ( 15 days prior): 740 ( Q50 V 40 ) There were a couple of seen questions
GMAT PREP 2 ( 12 days prior) : 740 (Q50 V 40 )
GMAT PREP 3 ( 7 days prior) : 730 (Q50 V 38 )
GMAT PREP 4 ( 6 days prior): 700 (Q50 V 35): timing issues and could not complete verbal
GMAT PREP 5 ( 2 days prior) : 720 (Q50 V 37 )
GMAT PREP 6 ( 1 day prior) : 760 (Q51 V 42 )

A couple of days prior to the exam, I was very confident of getting at least a 720. I felt my quant was very strong as I was able to complete it with 3-4 minutes to spare and never got below Q50 in any of the mocks. The only issue was with verbal, which I was not able to finish on time. I was able to solve this timing issue as well in the last 2 mocks. I did this by changing my strategy toward RC ( Yes, the one thing that I did not focus).
Earlier I was just reading the passages, going to question, coming back to the passage again. This consumed a lot of time, and I was still not able to get the right answer. I started making notes and this helped a lot. Note that I did this just 2 days prior to GMAT and it worked.

G-DAY :
My test was scheduled at 09:00 AM and I reached the test center at around 8:1. Unlike a lot of test takers, I carried no fluids, no energy chocolates. I experienced during the mocks that my bladder is very active and drinking fluids between the break did not help! :D

The exam was scheduled at 9:00 but the test center did not open until 8:55. Even after the coordinator reached, he told us that the servers are down and hence, it might take some time. He even told us that we might need to reschedule the exam. It took about one hour to get the servers working and we were made to wait outside in Delhi heat the whole time.

Finally the exam started at around 10:15. Quickly filled 5 programs, and started with quant.
And IT SUCKED! I was not able to get 3 out of first 5 questions and had spent a lot of time on those.
I thought and I have bombed it, but kept my calm, thinking they might be those 5 questions that may not contribute to my score ( as I said, think of anything that keeps you motivated). Post 10 questions, I got comfortable and the question was getting solved easily.
Took 3-minute break before the quant and started off with verbal. Verbal went pretty smooth. I was able to complete verbal a minute before.
Took another 3minute break and started with IR. IR never troubled me in mocks, even though I never practiced it. I think I have seen enough graphs and numbers at work that IR questions don’t bother me. Out of 6 mock tests, I got a perfect 8 on 5 of those. So was always confident about IR.
The essay was smooth. The ChineseBurned template is all you need!I am still to get AWA scores, but I think it should be fine.

Finally, the screen flashed: 720! I had mixed emotions. Considering how my quant went, I was happy to break the 700 barrier. But, then I had never scored below Q50 in quant, and seeing a Q49 didn’t please me much.
I still think if that server problem and a wait of 90 minutes hadn't occurred, I could have done better at quant and scored a 740.

I am thinking of retaking the GMAT as soon as the 16 days cooling off period gets over. But, in no mood to study on my UK trip. Will start working on essays and LORs.

Finally, a big thanks to GMAT CLUB and E-GMAT! The number of debriefs I read during the 3 months prep really kept me motivated and I believe I owe one de-brief back. As I already mentioned, E-GMAT SC and quant are wonderful and stood up to the expectations.