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15 Mar 2021, 08:43
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Through this post i just wanted to share my gmat journey with the hope that it will help someone.
I started my gmat preparation sometime around September 2019. One of my friends who took GMAT suggested that I check out gmatclub, manhattan guides and e-gmat. After spending some time on the gmatclub, I decided to take a mock test to see where I stood.
To be honest, i did go through some quant and verbal concepts before i attempted Gmat prep 1. This must have skewed the score to higher one (ofcourse, not crazy high over 700). I attempted the test in Q-V-IR/AWA order. After seeing my score, I kept a target score of 720 (100 point improvement sounded nice, haha).
Analysis and lessons learnt
1. Quant section
1. In quant i could only finish 28 questions before I ran out of time. As others have mentioned, I learnt that if all questions are not attempted, GMAT penalises heavily.
2. Although I come from an engineering background, I needed a serious revision of concepts.
2. Verbal section
1. I answered 15 questions incorrectly ( 7 in SC, 4 in RC, and 4 in CR). I looked into answers for all the questions on gmatclub, and I realised that mistakes I made on RC and CR questions were careless ones and that SC was a total wreck for me.
3. IR and AWA
1. I have never done IR before. I looked up the answers on gmatclub and realised my errors were because of lack of focus on question stem.
I am a person who loves hybrid study method. Therefore, I decided to purchase both online course and some books. After a lot of pondering, these are the courses and books I bought.
1. Quant
1. Wizako
- I saw some of their videos on youtube and I liked their videos and their explanations. And most importantly the course was quite cheap. I found the course to be quite useful to get the basics right. Tbh, i only did the course and the questions that were discussed in the video, even though they had a lot of questions in question bank. This was because I wanted to focus on solving official questions.
2. Verbal
1.egmat
- I bought e-gmat course on suggestion from a friend. I found the sentence correction module quite useful for me but I did not really enjoy the CR or RC module. I did use scholaranium but I have mixed feeling about the question bank. Personally, I would stick to official questions.
2. Powerscore CR bible and Manhattan CR strategy guide
- These books are gems . I used them in detail for CR.
3. IR and AWA
- For IR, i practised questions from gmatclub
- For AWA, i referred to chineseburned AWA guide.
4. Practise tests
- Before my first attempt, I did not take any practise tests. Having read a lot about how demoralising practise tests were for many people, paranoid me decided to skip practise tests and sail directly to my first attempt.
5. Practise questions
- I am very grateful for Gmatclub. Big thanks to the founder (@bb) and all the contributors. Before my first attempt, I did quite a lot of official guide questions and some gmat prep questions available on gmatclub. I also searched for solutions on other forums such as beatthegmat and manhattanprep to get different perspectives on solving a problem.
- One other website that I used a lot was gmatwithcj [dot] com. I used this forum for SC questions. ChiranjeevSingh has done a splendid job with the portal. Big Thanks!!
6. Note taking
- I made hand-written summary for both quant and verbal for quick revision before the exam. Apart from the theory, the notes also included solution to questions for new concepts that I learned. These notes remained the same apart from minor additions through out my gmat journey.
7. Error Log
- This is one of the best thing one can do. For my first attempt, I did not keep a strong error log but I used it before my third attempt. I only kept track of questions i found challenging and interesting. You can use gmatclub error log and it is more than enough.
After I went through most of the study material, I decided to book an exam. Long story short, COVID happened. Finally after some cancellations, I got a date for 23-06-2020. I attempted the exam in the following order: V-Q-IR/AWA.
Analysis and lessons learnt
1. Quant - q48
- I started quant really well. But exam stress caught up with me around 10th question I started to double check solution. This was such a bad idea. I remember that for the last 8 question I had only 10 minutes left. 25th question was a PS question, which I found quite challenging and spent another 3 minutes on that question. i repeated this mistake for the next question ( what was I thinking, time is not a luxury). In the end, i had to guess last three questions. Looking at the ESR, I got all the questions wrong in the last section but had only two questions wrong in the first three sections combined.
2. Verbal - v35
- With verbal I noticed that I was stuck with two options for many questions especially in SC and CR. Also, I did not have a strong structure on how to approach RC questions. I was re-reading passages for each RC question. As in quant, in verbal also I had to guess last 4 questions. Looking at the esr, I scored in 70th percentile for CR, 68th percentile for SC and 85th percentile for RC.
3. IR-AWA
- IR and AWA was ok, but I was exhausted after quant and did not focus much on AWA.
I was doubting whether I should take GMAT once more. Reflecting on my first attempt, I decided to go for one more attempt. My thought process was very simple. When i guessed question in the end, I saw questions that I could have solved easily both for quant and verbal. Then I was like, maybe I should give one more try and see.
1. Quant
- This time, i did not use any course for quant and spent more time on solving official question. I used only gmatprep questions this time around.
2. Verbal
1. EMPOWERgmatRichC
- I did not purchase empowergmat course, but I used one hour free trial provided by empowergmat for getting a better idea on the RC strategy. This was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
2. As with quant, with verbal also i stuck with gmatprep questions.
3. IR and AWA
- IR and AWA nothing much changed. For AWA i did refer to free material provided by Magoosh and gmatprepnow.
4. Practise tests
- Before my second attempt, I did take one practise test. I scored 720 with q50 and v38 and I felt quite prepared.
5. Error Log
- I started focusing more on error log and used to revise them quite often.
Unfortunately, I procrastinated a lot on taking the test date and ended up getting a date 5 months after I started studying. Please don't do this. Have a hard deadline and take a date once you start practising. While practising CR on days very close to the test date, I could see myself making silly mistakes, which I never would have made two months into my preparation for the second attempt. These mistakes were clearly reflected on my second attempt. I attempted the exam in the following order: V-Q-IR/AWA.
1. Quant - q50
- This time around also, I ended up guessing last two questions as I had only 20 seconds on clock.
2. Verbal - v34
- Verbal was another story. Although my timing on RC passages came down, I wasted a lot of time on CR and ended up scoring at 55th percentile for CR. I remember that while doing CR, I was not at all focused, and was choosing answers without going through the options properly. Also, interestingly I had a boldface CR question near to the end. I was quite happy to see a boldface question but unfortunately, this happiness lasted only until I saw my score. Never ever try to evaluate the difficulty of any question. Focus on solving one question at a time and not on how my overall score will be.
3. IR-AWA
- IR and AWA was better this time around. I enjoyed the AWA given this time far more than the AWA in my first attempt.
Same old question popped up in me, should I or should I not give another attempt? To answer this question, I asked myself the question that i ask whenever I reflect on something, did i give my perfect effort? My answer was no, and all I could think of was the silly mistakes I made and lack of focus. And hence, I decided to give one more try.
1. Quant
- This time also, i did not use any course for quant and spent more time on solving official question. I used only gmatprep questions this time around.
2. Verbal
- For SC, this time around i solved questions from gmat prep, question of the day and also questions from awesome-compliation-of-700-sc-questions-to-build-concepts-160107. Also, i stopped eliminating options because the sentence sounded absurd and focused on eliminating options based on concrete reasons. Another thing I did this time around was, I focused more on solving questions that were answered by a particular person whose problem solving approach I liked.
- For CR, I went back to powerscore CR and revised the concepts. After that I started with 600-700 level CR gmat prep questions on gmatclub. The dividend on these questions is quite higher than that of harder questions. Once I did 600-700 level questions, I attempted 700-level questions from both gmat prep and LSAT. Until and unless you exhaust gmatprep questions, don't do any other source.
- For RC, I focused solely on gmatprep questions.
3. IR and AWA
- IR and AWA nothing changed.
My third attempt was a chaotic one. I booked a test centre gmat for sometime in January 2021. One week before my attempt, the government here announced a lock down till February 2021. I rebooked my exam for the day after the lockdown was supposed to end. Unfortunately, government decided to extend the lockdown. Again, rebooked the exam for first week of March. Lockdown extension happened again and I had to rebook again. After multiple delays, I decided to give the online gmat a go. I picked the date four days before my exam. The day after booking the exam, I became super sick with fever, cough etc . Fortunately, it was common cold, nothing a couple of paracetamol could not cure.
Since I worked in the morning, I chose the night time slot. Check-in process was quite smooth. This time around to activate my lethargic brain, I decided to solve some questions before the test. 30 minutes before the check-in process began, I solved 5 questions from SC, 5 questions from CR and 5 questions from quant. When I choose these questions, I made sure that I could solve these questions correctly and that these questions were little tricky and contained concepts that i would not recollect immediately without any revision. For example, in SC i choose one question that has absolute modifier another one that has 2-part parallelism. This helped me a lot during the test.
1. Quant - q50
- I was on track to repeat the same mistakes I made in previous gmat attempts. When the timer showed 50 minutes left, I was still solving the 4th question. I kind of forced myself to randomly pick an answer for the fourth question and move on. After that I picked up my pace and when i reached last few questions, I saw a question that made me stop for a moment and look twice to make sure it is not a tricky question. Automated mental evaluation of the difficulty of question informed me this was a very easy question and i was like did i just tank my quants. Somehow, I kept my composure and finished quant with a minute to spare. Again, I appeal to my fellow test takers, please don't try to evaluate the difficulty of a question.
2. Verbal - v42
- First few questions were on SC and they looked very similar to some of the gmat prep questions I have practised. This boosted my confidence. On CR, I was very focused and was reading questions clearly. This time around I read the question stem first and then the premise. This change in strategy helped me to focus on what the question expected. I did not find any RC to be particularly challenging. I got a mix of long and short RCs, and these RCs covered various topics such as history, science etc.
3. IR
- I did not have much trouble with IR this time also.
The score was announced after 60 hours. Since I had a gut feeling that I screwed up quant, after mentally evaluating the difficulty of questions, I waited couple of hours before checking the result. Seeing the score of 760 was a surreal moment. Never in my wildest dream I imagined I will score a 760, a score 40 points greater than my target score of 720.
Before I sign off, I would like to re-iterate some of my learnings.
1. Focus on official questions only. Analyse each and every question you solve, even if you spend half an hour on analysing one question. I did only 10 SC, 10 CR and 1 RC questions daily. I also did 10 PS and 10 DS questions.
2. Don't evaluate the difficulty of a question on exam day. Also, just because you saw a boldface question, does not mean you are scoring at a higher level. Some bold face questions are very direct and simple.
3. Keep in mind scoring low on GMAT does not mean it is the end of the world. On my third attempt, I could really focus on questions because in my mind I was telling GMAT is only one of the components required to get into a good bschool.
4. Find your own method of learning. I only did one mock because I know how it will impact my morale. But this might not work for you.
Some shout-outs in no particular order
1. GMATNinja - Big thanks for all your videos and solutions you post on sentence correction.
2. Erika - Your video on modifers on youtube with gmatclub helped me a lot to understand some concepts that befuddled me a lot , especially to understand how to use prepositional modifiers.
3. Magoosh mikemcgarry - Many thanks for the articles on usage of `with plus noun participle` and on `more vs greater and less vs fewer`. They are life savers
4. @VeritasKarishma- Shout-out to your quarter wit, quarter wisdom series. Thank you
5. @Empowergmat- Your approach to RC helped me a lot. Thank you.
6. egmat- Your articles on verb-ing and verb-ed modifiers helped me a ton. Many thanks for your articles and videos.
7. Last but not least, big thanks to god almighty, my girlfriend and my family.
All the best fellow learners. I wish all of you make your dreams a reality one day. If anyone has any question, please feel free to ping me/ comment on the post etc.
I started my gmat preparation sometime around September 2019. One of my friends who took GMAT suggested that I check out gmatclub, manhattan guides and e-gmat. After spending some time on the gmatclub, I decided to take a mock test to see where I stood.
BASELINE-GMAT PREP (16-11-2019) 620(q46, v28, IR-5, AWA-)
To be honest, i did go through some quant and verbal concepts before i attempted Gmat prep 1. This must have skewed the score to higher one (ofcourse, not crazy high over 700). I attempted the test in Q-V-IR/AWA order. After seeing my score, I kept a target score of 720 (100 point improvement sounded nice, haha).
Analysis and lessons learnt
1. Quant section
1. In quant i could only finish 28 questions before I ran out of time. As others have mentioned, I learnt that if all questions are not attempted, GMAT penalises heavily.
2. Although I come from an engineering background, I needed a serious revision of concepts.
2. Verbal section
1. I answered 15 questions incorrectly ( 7 in SC, 4 in RC, and 4 in CR). I looked into answers for all the questions on gmatclub, and I realised that mistakes I made on RC and CR questions were careless ones and that SC was a total wreck for me.
3. IR and AWA
1. I have never done IR before. I looked up the answers on gmatclub and realised my errors were because of lack of focus on question stem.
Time between Gmat Prep 1 and First Attempt
I am a person who loves hybrid study method. Therefore, I decided to purchase both online course and some books. After a lot of pondering, these are the courses and books I bought.
1. Quant
1. Wizako
- I saw some of their videos on youtube and I liked their videos and their explanations. And most importantly the course was quite cheap. I found the course to be quite useful to get the basics right. Tbh, i only did the course and the questions that were discussed in the video, even though they had a lot of questions in question bank. This was because I wanted to focus on solving official questions.
2. Verbal
1.egmat
- I bought e-gmat course on suggestion from a friend. I found the sentence correction module quite useful for me but I did not really enjoy the CR or RC module. I did use scholaranium but I have mixed feeling about the question bank. Personally, I would stick to official questions.
2. Powerscore CR bible and Manhattan CR strategy guide
- These books are gems . I used them in detail for CR.
3. IR and AWA
- For IR, i practised questions from gmatclub
- For AWA, i referred to chineseburned AWA guide.
4. Practise tests
- Before my first attempt, I did not take any practise tests. Having read a lot about how demoralising practise tests were for many people, paranoid me decided to skip practise tests and sail directly to my first attempt.
5. Practise questions
- I am very grateful for Gmatclub. Big thanks to the founder (@bb) and all the contributors. Before my first attempt, I did quite a lot of official guide questions and some gmat prep questions available on gmatclub. I also searched for solutions on other forums such as beatthegmat and manhattanprep to get different perspectives on solving a problem.
- One other website that I used a lot was gmatwithcj [dot] com. I used this forum for SC questions. ChiranjeevSingh has done a splendid job with the portal. Big Thanks!!
6. Note taking
- I made hand-written summary for both quant and verbal for quick revision before the exam. Apart from the theory, the notes also included solution to questions for new concepts that I learned. These notes remained the same apart from minor additions through out my gmat journey.
7. Error Log
- This is one of the best thing one can do. For my first attempt, I did not keep a strong error log but I used it before my third attempt. I only kept track of questions i found challenging and interesting. You can use gmatclub error log and it is more than enough.
ATTEMPT 1 (23-06-2020):GMAT 690 (q48, v35, AWA-4, IR-6)
After I went through most of the study material, I decided to book an exam. Long story short, COVID happened. Finally after some cancellations, I got a date for 23-06-2020. I attempted the exam in the following order: V-Q-IR/AWA.
Analysis and lessons learnt
1. Quant - q48
- I started quant really well. But exam stress caught up with me around 10th question I started to double check solution. This was such a bad idea. I remember that for the last 8 question I had only 10 minutes left. 25th question was a PS question, which I found quite challenging and spent another 3 minutes on that question. i repeated this mistake for the next question ( what was I thinking, time is not a luxury). In the end, i had to guess last three questions. Looking at the ESR, I got all the questions wrong in the last section but had only two questions wrong in the first three sections combined.
2. Verbal - v35
- With verbal I noticed that I was stuck with two options for many questions especially in SC and CR. Also, I did not have a strong structure on how to approach RC questions. I was re-reading passages for each RC question. As in quant, in verbal also I had to guess last 4 questions. Looking at the esr, I scored in 70th percentile for CR, 68th percentile for SC and 85th percentile for RC.
3. IR-AWA
- IR and AWA was ok, but I was exhausted after quant and did not focus much on AWA.
Time between Attempt 1 and Attempt 2
I was doubting whether I should take GMAT once more. Reflecting on my first attempt, I decided to go for one more attempt. My thought process was very simple. When i guessed question in the end, I saw questions that I could have solved easily both for quant and verbal. Then I was like, maybe I should give one more try and see.
1. Quant
- This time, i did not use any course for quant and spent more time on solving official question. I used only gmatprep questions this time around.
2. Verbal
1. EMPOWERgmatRichC
- I did not purchase empowergmat course, but I used one hour free trial provided by empowergmat for getting a better idea on the RC strategy. This was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
2. As with quant, with verbal also i stuck with gmatprep questions.
3. IR and AWA
- IR and AWA nothing much changed. For AWA i did refer to free material provided by Magoosh and gmatprepnow.
4. Practise tests
- Before my second attempt, I did take one practise test. I scored 720 with q50 and v38 and I felt quite prepared.
5. Error Log
- I started focusing more on error log and used to revise them quite often.
Attempt 2 (03-12-2020): GMAT 690 (q50, v34, AWA-5, IR-8)
Unfortunately, I procrastinated a lot on taking the test date and ended up getting a date 5 months after I started studying. Please don't do this. Have a hard deadline and take a date once you start practising. While practising CR on days very close to the test date, I could see myself making silly mistakes, which I never would have made two months into my preparation for the second attempt. These mistakes were clearly reflected on my second attempt. I attempted the exam in the following order: V-Q-IR/AWA.
1. Quant - q50
- This time around also, I ended up guessing last two questions as I had only 20 seconds on clock.
2. Verbal - v34
- Verbal was another story. Although my timing on RC passages came down, I wasted a lot of time on CR and ended up scoring at 55th percentile for CR. I remember that while doing CR, I was not at all focused, and was choosing answers without going through the options properly. Also, interestingly I had a boldface CR question near to the end. I was quite happy to see a boldface question but unfortunately, this happiness lasted only until I saw my score. Never ever try to evaluate the difficulty of any question. Focus on solving one question at a time and not on how my overall score will be.
3. IR-AWA
- IR and AWA was better this time around. I enjoyed the AWA given this time far more than the AWA in my first attempt.
Time between Attempt 2 and Attempt 3
Same old question popped up in me, should I or should I not give another attempt? To answer this question, I asked myself the question that i ask whenever I reflect on something, did i give my perfect effort? My answer was no, and all I could think of was the silly mistakes I made and lack of focus. And hence, I decided to give one more try.
1. Quant
- This time also, i did not use any course for quant and spent more time on solving official question. I used only gmatprep questions this time around.
2. Verbal
- For SC, this time around i solved questions from gmat prep, question of the day and also questions from awesome-compliation-of-700-sc-questions-to-build-concepts-160107. Also, i stopped eliminating options because the sentence sounded absurd and focused on eliminating options based on concrete reasons. Another thing I did this time around was, I focused more on solving questions that were answered by a particular person whose problem solving approach I liked.
- For CR, I went back to powerscore CR and revised the concepts. After that I started with 600-700 level CR gmat prep questions on gmatclub. The dividend on these questions is quite higher than that of harder questions. Once I did 600-700 level questions, I attempted 700-level questions from both gmat prep and LSAT. Until and unless you exhaust gmatprep questions, don't do any other source.
- For RC, I focused solely on gmatprep questions.
3. IR and AWA
- IR and AWA nothing changed.
ATTEMPT 3 (10-03-2021): GMAT online 760 (q50, v42, IR8)
My third attempt was a chaotic one. I booked a test centre gmat for sometime in January 2021. One week before my attempt, the government here announced a lock down till February 2021. I rebooked my exam for the day after the lockdown was supposed to end. Unfortunately, government decided to extend the lockdown. Again, rebooked the exam for first week of March. Lockdown extension happened again and I had to rebook again. After multiple delays, I decided to give the online gmat a go. I picked the date four days before my exam. The day after booking the exam, I became super sick with fever, cough etc . Fortunately, it was common cold, nothing a couple of paracetamol could not cure.
Since I worked in the morning, I chose the night time slot. Check-in process was quite smooth. This time around to activate my lethargic brain, I decided to solve some questions before the test. 30 minutes before the check-in process began, I solved 5 questions from SC, 5 questions from CR and 5 questions from quant. When I choose these questions, I made sure that I could solve these questions correctly and that these questions were little tricky and contained concepts that i would not recollect immediately without any revision. For example, in SC i choose one question that has absolute modifier another one that has 2-part parallelism. This helped me a lot during the test.
1. Quant - q50
- I was on track to repeat the same mistakes I made in previous gmat attempts. When the timer showed 50 minutes left, I was still solving the 4th question. I kind of forced myself to randomly pick an answer for the fourth question and move on. After that I picked up my pace and when i reached last few questions, I saw a question that made me stop for a moment and look twice to make sure it is not a tricky question. Automated mental evaluation of the difficulty of question informed me this was a very easy question and i was like did i just tank my quants. Somehow, I kept my composure and finished quant with a minute to spare. Again, I appeal to my fellow test takers, please don't try to evaluate the difficulty of a question.
2. Verbal - v42
- First few questions were on SC and they looked very similar to some of the gmat prep questions I have practised. This boosted my confidence. On CR, I was very focused and was reading questions clearly. This time around I read the question stem first and then the premise. This change in strategy helped me to focus on what the question expected. I did not find any RC to be particularly challenging. I got a mix of long and short RCs, and these RCs covered various topics such as history, science etc.
3. IR
- I did not have much trouble with IR this time also.
The score was announced after 60 hours. Since I had a gut feeling that I screwed up quant, after mentally evaluating the difficulty of questions, I waited couple of hours before checking the result. Seeing the score of 760 was a surreal moment. Never in my wildest dream I imagined I will score a 760, a score 40 points greater than my target score of 720.
Before I sign off, I would like to re-iterate some of my learnings.
1. Focus on official questions only. Analyse each and every question you solve, even if you spend half an hour on analysing one question. I did only 10 SC, 10 CR and 1 RC questions daily. I also did 10 PS and 10 DS questions.
2. Don't evaluate the difficulty of a question on exam day. Also, just because you saw a boldface question, does not mean you are scoring at a higher level. Some bold face questions are very direct and simple.
3. Keep in mind scoring low on GMAT does not mean it is the end of the world. On my third attempt, I could really focus on questions because in my mind I was telling GMAT is only one of the components required to get into a good bschool.
4. Find your own method of learning. I only did one mock because I know how it will impact my morale. But this might not work for you.
Some shout-outs in no particular order
1. GMATNinja - Big thanks for all your videos and solutions you post on sentence correction.
2. Erika - Your video on modifers on youtube with gmatclub helped me a lot to understand some concepts that befuddled me a lot , especially to understand how to use prepositional modifiers.
3. Magoosh mikemcgarry - Many thanks for the articles on usage of `with plus noun participle` and on `more vs greater and less vs fewer`. They are life savers
4. @VeritasKarishma- Shout-out to your quarter wit, quarter wisdom series. Thank you
5. @Empowergmat- Your approach to RC helped me a lot. Thank you.
6. egmat- Your articles on verb-ing and verb-ed modifiers helped me a ton. Many thanks for your articles and videos.
7. Last but not least, big thanks to god almighty, my girlfriend and my family.
All the best fellow learners. I wish all of you make your dreams a reality one day. If anyone has any question, please feel free to ping me/ comment on the post etc.
15 Mar 2021, 09:48
Kudos
Bookmarks
Congratulations on getting 760. Your have articulated it perfectly.
Good luck for the next leg!
Good luck for the next leg!
HoneyLemon
15 Mar 2021, 10:59
Kudos
Bookmarks
atom45
Congratulation !!
Any mock test you were taking other than official mocks ?
