From below 700 in my mocks to a 740 in my GMAT

I appeared for my GMAT on the 10th of September 2019 and scored a 740 with quite a balanced score of Q50 and V41. It was quite a pleasant surprise owing to the fact that I couldn't even cross the threshold of 700 in the 6-7 odd mocks I gave before the D-day.

A little bit of background on me. I'm a final year engineering student from a Tier-1 government college in India. The reason I chose to give the GMAT was because of it's flexibility and the curriculum with which I was pretty comfortable. Also my main goal was the Young Leader's program of ISB. When I decided to start my GMAT prep, I had no clue about the staggering presence of resources available online and like every other exam, I thought about enrolling in an offline class for the same. The classes went on in a rather mundane fashion and I slowly lost interest. It was then that I discovered GMAT club and started exploring it's forums. My classes were over by April end of 2019 and as expected they didn't help me in any way in my prep. I had my Pre final year internship in the next 2 months which was at an outstation manufacturing industry and I lost touch with my prep almost completely. I subscribed to GMAT club's 2 quant and 2 verbal questions a day and kept at it during my internship. I realized that my Quant, owing to my engineering background, was pretty strong and just needed a little bit of fine tuning. I realized though there was a gaping hole in my concepts in SC and CR and that i'd have to start my verbal prep from scratch.

It was July end by the time I came back from my internship and I booked my test date for the 10th of September. Before I could start my prep, I decided to give a diagnostic mock to reaffirm my areas of improvement. I gave the free Sigma-X mock test of E-gmat and scored a 690 with a pretty skewed quant and verbal score. I didn't want to take part in any online courses and decided to utilize the gem that is GMAT club to the fullest. After the mock, I started brushing up on my verbal concepts using Manhattan SC for sentence correction and Powerscore CR for critical reasoning. While at it I kept solving 600-700 level and 700+ level quant questions on the GMAT club forums and maintained an error log using the website's in-built tool. I gave my first official mock two weeks into my prep and scored a 680 with the same scoring. This left me disheartened as there seemed to be no improvement in my scoring. Once I finished my SC and CR basics, I started solving OG questions on the GMAT club website of 700+ difficulty. Though initially I fared miserably but overtime, I became a bit adept at CR and SC but my mock scores still hovered around the 670-690 mark. For the RC I simply solved as many passages as I could find on the GMAT club forums. I'd say around 25-30 RC passages is enough for RC prep and a lot of time need not be invested for the same. By august end, My accuracy in SC and CR for the 700+ questions was around 80-85% Between this period, I also had regular college, exams and placements going on so time management was pretty hectic for me. I gave my final mock test (a Veritas free mock) 2 days before my GMAT and again scored a 680. By then I had mentally prepared myself for a score in a similar range and to my surprise I scored a 740 on the D-day. The only thing I'd want to change about my prep was my focus towards the IR section as I scored a measly 4 on the IR.

A major factor behind my score is GMAT club. It's engaging forums and the plethora of resources available helped me become comfortable with the test and it's components and I'd like to thank all the moderators and the content contributors sincerely. I'd also like to advise test aspirants on a tight budget to utilize the free resources available online as much as possible. With a little bit of planning and patience you would not have to waste a penny on the GMAT prep.