GMAT 685: How I Turned Data Insights and Verbal Into My Two Strongest

Question

I took Data Insights lightly, and it humbled me. Fixing that, and treating Verbal as the technical section it really is, is what got me here, with e-GMAT.

Here is the one thing this debrief is about: my two proudest sections this time, Data Insights at the 97th percentile and Verbal at the 96th, were the exact two I had underestimated before. My previous attempt was a 645, and I got here to a 685 not by working harder in general, but by respecting the two sections I had been careless with and fixing them properly. This is how.

Data Insights: from underestimated to my best

My honest mistake with Data Insights was that I took it lightly. I told myself it was just graphs and tables, the kind of thing I do at work anyway, so it barely got my attention while I poured everything into Quant. Then on exam day I hit a wall of intimidating pie charts and unfamiliar graph types, and it rattled me, because I had not seen enough variety to stay calm. The real problem was not ability but exposure. What fixed it was the e-GMAT sectional mocks and what I did between them. My first few were genuinely bad, but the turning point was realising the corrections matter far more than the score. After each sectional I went back through every wrong answer and saw most were not hard at all, I had made small mistakes or misread. The mocks were tougher than the real exam, which was exactly what I needed, because they exposed me to so many varied questions and traps that by test day I recognised the traps for what they were, and the real section felt comparatively easy.

The error log I finally did properly

I had kept an error log in my previous attempt too, but it was useless because of how I did it. I would vaguely note "got this wrong because I misread the numbers" and move on. This time, after you pointed it out, I changed the whole approach: I logged the exact question, how long I took, and wrote out in my own words precisely where my thinking went wrong. Writing it yourself is what makes it sink in. Between every two mocks I would go back over that log so I would not repeat the same mistakes, and that single change is what turned my practice into real improvement rather than just more volume.

Beating the ego to manage DI time

My biggest time problem in DI was not strategy, it was ego. I would hit a question I knew I could solve, just not in two or three minutes, and I could not let it go, sometimes sinking seven minutes into one because I refused to walk away. The fix was a conscious script I repeated: this is one question in exchange for the ten ahead, and most of those are easier. You reminded me repeatedly that even five wrong still lands an 83 in DI, and drilling that permission into my head is what finally let me let go. Going against your own instinct to stick with a question takes real effort, but it is what kept my whole section on track.

Verbal: treating it as the technical section it is

With Verbal, my mistake was the same shape as DI: I had treated it as a soft, non-technical section, when it has just as much structure as anything else. What changed my score was working through the e-GMAT application files and starting to approach Verbal from a genuinely technical angle, pinning down exactly what the conclusion is, what the question is really asking, and where the traps are hidden. That shift is what moved me from an 83 to a V86.

The RC habit that removed my traps

The specific trap I kept falling for in reading comprehension was not verifying against the passage. I would find an option that sounded right and mark it, when the test had quietly changed a single word that flipped the meaning. The fix was a rule: after choosing an answer, go back to the exact sentence in the passage and confirm it truly matches. Alongside that, I jotted a two-line summary of what each part of the passage was doing, a statement here, the author countering it there, which gave me clarity fast and let me answer quickly even when my timing was tight. Reading more books over the past year quietly made all of this easier.

Test-day mindset and one small ritual

The last piece was mental. What steadied me was the simplest reframe: this is not that deep, and if it goes badly I can retake it in a couple of weeks, which is not true of the high-stakes exams many of us grew up with. My first section actually went poorly, I lost ten minutes to one stubborn question, but instead of spiralling I told myself I could still do well on the rest, and I did. One tiny ritual helped more than it should: I used a fresh page of scratch paper for every question, so each one started clean and whatever happened last stayed behind me.

What the mentorship added

I was part of the Last Mile Push program, and my mentor Dhruv is a big reason these two sections turned around. Beyond the strategy, it was the confidence: hearing him tell me again and again that even a few wrong answers in DI would still land a strong score is what let me quiet the ego and play the section properly. And simply having someone to show my scores to and ask "where am I going wrong," instead of drowning in conflicting advice from the internet, kept me pointed in the right direction. If you have been preparing alone and second-guessing everything, that is the gap a mentor fills.

If you have been underestimating a section

If there is a section you have been quietly dismissing as easy or not worth your time, that is exactly the one to look at again, because for me it was the two I underrated that had the most room to grow. Get real exposure to varied questions, keep an error log you actually write out by hand, learn to walk away from a question your ego wants to win, and treat every section as technical. That, far more than raw effort, is what took me from a 645 to a 685.

SwiftMonk · Answer

is there only verbal course available, as i need to work on my verbal section

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