GMAT Club Debrief : 675 - 715

Question

GMAT 715 (Q88, V85, DI83) from a 675, while juggling office and coursework

Why retake a 675

I sat the GMAT in December 2024 with just a couple of weeks of preparation and got a 675. That is a score most people would take, but I applied to the schools I actually wanted, but did not get the shortlists. Profile evaluations suggested the biggest lever left was the test. A friend who had scored a 715 told me to use e-GMAT, so I enrolled in January 2026.

Then I did nothing for four months. Work got heavy and I was going for a promotion, so I froze my subscription. I got the promotion and restarted in May. If you are sitting on a paused plan worrying about skill decay: it recovers. You practise and you are back.

Verbal, and the notes I stopped taking  
  This is the change I would actually point at. I write slowly. Even my shorthand was too slow to survive a timed section, and I was losing time to the writing rather than the thinking. The gap was clear in practice: on untimed sets I was around 90 percent, and on the same difficulty under standard timing, around 60. That is not a comprehension problem. That is the pen.

So I stopped writing. I moved the paragraph summaries into my head, one line each, and let go of detail I knew I could scroll back and find. What you hold is what each part of the passage is doing, not what it says. Same for Critical Reasoning: premises, conclusion, drop the fluff. There is far less to carry than you expect.

Two things made that possible. I had completed the entire Verbal course, so the process was well practised, and I had spent a month doing it on paper first. You build the skill with the pen, then put the pen down. The sectional where I first left the notes alone was my highest Verbal score anywhere.

Data Insights, where the points actually were  
  Data Insights was the largest movement on my report, and Data Sufficiency is the biggest lever inside it. If DS is weak, that is where your points are sitting.

The course runs DS as a fixed sequence: statement one alone, then statement two alone, then both together. Nearly every miss I logged came from skipping ahead. The other thing is almost too small to mention and it cost me time for a year. The five DS answer options are identical on every DS question in existence. I had been reading them each time.

On Multi Source Reasoning, the common advice is to decide in advance that you will skip it if time is short. I disagree, because some MSR sets are easy and you have just donated them. Look at the set, then make the call. You do still need to abandon a question mid solve when it is clearly not working, because the damage is never that question. It is the four you then rush.

Error logs, and how I misused mine  
  More than half my prep time in the early weeks went into the error log and I would spend it the same way again. The template does not ask which answer you got wrong. It asks which step of your own process you dropped, which turns a vague sense of weakness into something countable. My Critical Reasoning log ran to 37 entries and the pattern was not subtle: 15 of those misses were one habit, eliminating the correct option before I had tested it.

One warning from my own mistake. I carried the log into the questions, trying to remember every past error while solving. That is a second clock in your head. Review it before a mock, then leave it alone.

Mocks, honestly  
  Mine were bad and there was no clean upward line. Three weeks out I scored a 475, having lost the clock and left Data Insights unfinished. On the official mocks in the final fortnight I went 625, 695, a drop, 705, then a 675 on the last one before the exam, so I walked in expecting to repeat my 675. Two caveats. The e-GMAT mocks are harder than the real thing, medium and hard questions only, so treat them as training load and not as a forecast. And I was fitting this around a 45 hour work week and an MIT MicroMasters, so a fair few of those numbers measure how tired I was rather than how ready.

Exam day  
  I took 11 days of leave (including the exam day and weekends) as I was also giving an exam for my MIT Micromasters, exactly a week before the GMAT. The break was much needed to keep my mind fresh and to focus on preparation. I am a morning person, and by the time I booked, the only slot left was 3 pm. So I moved my practice mocks to the afternoon, found I was sleepy after lunch, and fixed it with a light lunch and black coffee three hours ahead. Practise at the hour you will actually sit, then fix whatever that exposes.

My order was Verbal, Quant, Data Insights. I came out of Quant, my strongest section by far, convinced I had thrown it away. The questions were not shaped the way I expected, and I spent the break standing in the washroom thinking I had lost the exam. Quant came back an 88.

So the one thing I would pass on: do not resign in the middle of the test. I decided in that break to give Data Insights my best regardless, and Data Insights turned out to be my most improved section.

If you are starting  
  Commit to a date and stop renegotiating it. Take the pressure off the outcome: the one time I walked into the CAT exam (for admission to Indian B schools) telling myself I had to hit the 99th percentile, I performed badly for exactly that reason. Keep something in your week that is not prep. Focus on your health and exercise. It improves mental cognition. And expect doubts. I had real ones about crossing 700 right up to the morning. But you need to keep your doubts aside and simply focus on giving your best without being attached to the outcome.

bb · Answer

Congratulations on a significant improvement!
675 in a couple of weeks is also pretty amazing - glad you spent a few more 😂

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