From 650 to 740: What made the difference!

From 650 to 740: What made the difference!

My Background: I am a working professional with a normal job. I end up spending 11 -12 hours out of my house on a normal working day. I studied 1 hour in the morning and about 1-2 hours in the evening. Thus, I ended up doing most of my preparation on the weekends. I have almost 6 years of experience. I love my job and want to fly higher. So I started looking at MBA as an option and GMAT to start with it.
I am married and I had never realized that it was so difficult to concentrate on studies after marriage. I have always dismissed anybody who even comes close to saying that it would be difficult to do X or Y after marriage or kids, etc. Well it’s definitely difficult, NOT IMPOSSIBLE !

The First Attempt – 650 (V34, Q45), IR 7, AW 6.0
This was in March 2013. I had prepared for about 6 months.
Books/ Resources referred - OG, MGMAT guides, Power Score CR Bible, GMAT Club
Mock test scores
MGMAT 1 – 590
MGMAT 2 – 640
MGMAT 3 – 640
MGMAT 4 – 620
MGMAT 5 – 690
GMAT prep 1 – 700

Well, it did seem that I would be able to break the 700 barrier. But then, there was a twist. Just a week before the test, I got a mail for an interview (I had applied with my earlier GRE score). I was excited, but the interview was scheduled on the same day as my GMAT. The adcom gracefully agreed to postpone the interview by a few days. But I couldn’t concentrate on either GMAT or the interview and messed up both.


Mission Possible Part 2- Taste of Success- 3 years later, April 2016

I started preparing again in August, 2015. This time I decided to take a more planned approach. I quickly researched reviews on GMAT Club and jotted down several resources. Some resources that really helped

eGMAT Free Strategy Sessions 1 and 2
eGMAT Verbal Live Prep
GMAT Club for full quant preparation
MGMAT guides- both quant and verbal
MGMAT CAT tests

What made the difference?

1. Super Planning- I budgeted my time. I fixed time for almost everything- Office, study, play/ exercise, food, sleep. It is very important to realize your own body cycle. I have to sleep 6 hours to be able to concentrate. Likewise, I can’t study 2 hours at a stretch. I need breaks.

2. Planned breaks – As I said, breaks are important, but they have to be time bound. 10-15 min break is enough to relax your mind and get ready for the next hour. Gradually, I realized that a break for more than 20 min tends to get prolonged to an hour or beyond. There is more wastage than relaxation.

3. Disconnect – I had to sign off from all social networks, mute all https://gmatclub.com/chat groups, keeping only important communication like family calls on most of the times during the day, and totally switched off during study. Family plays a big role in this regard, I would like to thank my wife for bearing with me for 9 months.

4. Focussed Study, strong foundation- I picked one area at a time, started from foundation. Being an engineer, I knew Quant was my strength and I have leverage it. I challenged myself with 1 month and target score of 49. I brushed up all basics again, completed all MGMAT guides, OG sets, and maintained error logs. I took a free evaluation by eGMAT and scored 80%, which translates to roughly 85%ile (or scaled score of 49). I knew I could improve further, but it was time to move on Verbal, the weak point.

5. Verbal, the weaker link- In summary, I figured out (although late) that I definitely need help to improve on verbal. I again checked reviews on GMAT club, tried Princeton review and a couple of test preps at Bangalore. Finally, eGMAT seemed to be a good choice since I didn’t want waste time and energy travelling and the reviews were great. Besides, I was convinced by the strategy sessions attended. To keep it short, I joined eGMAT Verbal live prep course and it helped me a lot. SC was my weakest section in verbal and it took me 4 months (yes, you read it right- 4 months) to make it my strongest section in verbal. Refer my earlier review on eGMAT verbal live prep and how it helped me. Subsequently, I picked CR and RC one by one, work on each type of question, focus on weak areas, improve and take ability quiz. Repeated the iteration a couple of times to gain confidence.

Link to eGMAT Verbal Live Prep Review --> https://gmatclub.com/reviews/comments/e-gmat-verbal-live-prep-345350838

6. Focussed testing – I can’t emphasize more on the importance on identifying your weak areas and working on them. If you start taking full tests early on, you are diverting your attention on too many aspects- all 4 sections, all levels of questions, timing, etc. Besides, you waste a precious resource- a mock test. Here, individual module quizzes, practice quiz and scholaranium played a vital role. You need to take individual section quiz, attempt difficult questions, understand the depth of the question, fill in gaps in understanding and build a solid foundation.

Wondering, when did I take the mocks? I actually did not take any mock test till the final leg. Read on.

7. Error logs- I always maintained detailed error logs of each question I could not answer in the first attempt. But I went one step ahead this time and noted the following
a. My pre-thinking/ understanding of the question and answer choices.
b. The correct logic and gap in my understanding.
c. Whether or not I could attempt the same question correctly the second time.
The third one is tricky. So I attempted the same set of difficult questions (the ones in error log) and see how many can I do correctly. I found that I couldn’t do some questions right even the second time. Shocked? But that's the truth. There are always some concepts that are difficult for you and you need to revise them at regular intervals to understand and digest them completely.

8. Mock test strategy- It is very important to REVISE all concepts and error logs before the test. This is just to make sure that you don’t repeat common mistakes and get into the traps. Also, you need to revise everything in 3-4 mins (remember, you have only 8 min break in the real test!). For this, I made super short summaries for each section. Let me explain a “Super Short Summary” with an example for SC

a. The question structure and your attempt strategy- For eg, SC question presents a sentence for which you need to understand the meaning, identify grammatical errors and correct these errors to convey the intended meaning.
b. Break down of attempt strategy- for eg, understand the meaning, break the sentence into independent clause, verify SV pairs (exist, agree in no, make sense), Verbs (correct tense, subjunctive, if then statements, etc), pronoun usage, modifier (adjective, adverb, modified entity, placement, etc), comparisons, parallelism, idioms, meaning.
c. Few traps and repeated errors from error log
d. Strategy to double check the answer, if any. (Eg, Negation test in CR-assumption)

I went through all super short summaries (all sections including IR and AWA) before the test and once again before the individual sections.


Final Leg – I took a week off from office, and focused entirely on GMAT.
Just before the final leg, I took GMAT Prep Test 1 and scored 730. I was pleasantly surprised but I know that GMAT prep can sometimes give you over confidence. So I decided to take MGMAT free CAT the next day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t since there was lot of power fluctuation and I decided to take another GMAT prep and scored 750. I took the rest of the day understanding the mistakes, creating a error log of the tests, and got a 3G connection to avoid interruptions in broadband.
The next 5 days, I took 5 MGMAT mocks. Below is a detail of all mocks I took.

GMAT prep 1- 730 (Q50, V38)
GMAT prep 2- 750 (Q49, V44)
MGMAT 1- 700 (Q47, V38)
MGMAT 2- 680 (Q44, V38)
MGMAT 3- 700 (Q46, V39)
MGMAT 4- 680 (Q45, V37)
MGMAT 5- 710 (Q49, V37)

The day before the exam. I didn’t take a mock, but the day was as rigorous as any other day in the final leg. I revised every concept I had learnt in the last 7 months, checked all error logs, went through all the mistakes I made in the last 7 mocks. Revised IR and AWA. Made a strategy for the final day, although there wasn’t much difference except the logistics of travelling.

D –day
I had good breakfast (good doesn’t mean heavy!), carried some cut fruit, juice and water for the break. I reached 45 mins early (you don’t want to get stuck in Bangalore traffic!). After reaching, I revised my super-short summaries and headed for the test.

AWA and IR went well, but I knew that the real test is about to begin. I saw the time immediately after coming out of the test, made sure I use the rest room, have water and some fruits, revise my super short summary in mind and get back in 5 mins. I finished my quant section 6-7 mins ahead of time. I couldn’t believe myself. I decided not to select the answer to the last question and started revising my verbal super short summaries. Finally, I took the break. This time I forgot to see the time immediately (big mistake ). I came back from wash room, saw the time, and discounted 2 mins for wash room. By this time, I was more hungry. I had some water and fruits and went inside at the 6th minute. I was shocked to see that I had exceeded 30 seconds. I clicked through the initial screens before the first question without a breath and jumped right into the first question. I think I took around 3 mins on the first question just because I took some time to come to the right frame of mind (bigger mistake ). The rest of the section went on smoothly, I had to guess one question though.

I was too nervous to fill in the demographic details and my hands were literally shaking . The lady sitting outside came in and told me that most details are already filled and that I had limited time for filling this section too. I just clicked through and closed my eyes.

The final score - 740 (Q51, V39, IR 8, AWA 5)
AWA score was received after a few days.

Wow!! I knew I could have done much better in verbal. I wanted to reverse those 30 seconds and the 3 minutes I wasted after that !

The BIG learning

Life isn’t fair every time. For me, the big learning from the experience is that “Don’t keep burden of what has happened, whether it was 30 seconds or a few questions you couldn’t figure out. Focus on what is front of you (the present question) and give it your best shot.

Hope my experience helps someone!