GMAT Online Debrief - 760 (Q50, V42)

Phew - finally finished.

My GMAT journey lasted just under a year, but has proven to be worth all of the time and effort that I put into it.

I took my first practice exam with no prep in May 2019 and received a 590. I bought the OG books and casually read them over the summer, spending around 1-2 hours per week reviewing forgotten formulas and grammar rules. In the fall I decided I wanted a more structured approach and dedicated around an hour per day after work to GMAT studying. I felt that my self study was not the best use of my time, but also did not have the time to attend a class in person each week (work late/unpredictable hours), so I went through the Economist GMAT prep course and found it to be helpful for studying at your own pace/time of day, drilling the quant fundamentals and building a solid verbal foundation. During this time I also used the manhattan prep books and worked through a few chapters per week. The two weeks prior to taking my first GMAT, I was aggressively studying around 1-3 hours per day on weekdays and at least 5 hours per day on weekends.

I took my first GMAT exam in January 2020, but had a rough experience caused by proctors not understanding an approved accommodation - this created a ton of test anxiety so I underperformed and cancelled my scores. Pretty upset, I took time off to give myself a break and resumed studying in late February. This time I focused mostly on OG online test bank as I noticed, verbal especially, other question banks are too different from the GMAT's style. I thoroughly reviewed the questions I got wrong, read through GMATClub posts, and reread the manhattan prep books. I rescheduled my next in person exam for mid-April, but it was cancelled due to the Corona virus. I am based out of NYC and did not want to wait potentially until mid/late-summer for testing centers to reopen, so I scheduled the online GMAT.

While working from home and not having as many social commitments as I did pre-Corona, I was able to study more often. I also received some virtual tutoring to help improve my consistency with sentence correction which definitely helped me from overthinking on those problems.

The weekend before my exam, I used a manhattan prep CAT and OG Mock #6 to practice using the online whiteboard. Initially, I thought the whiteboard was going to be ridiculous, but I think that it may have actually helped me slow down and not make dumb mistakes. I crushed my last OG Mock with a 750 and felt pretty confident and relaxed going into the actual exam which helped with testing anxiety. The week leading to my exam, I reviewed my incorrect answers to OG mocks and noticed that the majority of my incorrect quant answers were simple mistakes from either not reading the question properly or arithmetic mistakes from trying to solve the problem too quickly.

My online GMAT experience went pretty well. I read a lot of the recaps here on GMATClub Forum and knew that the proctors may interrupt if you mouth questions to yourself or put your hand on your chin, so I made sure not to do any of that. The whiteboard is very manageable if you can practice with it beforehand. I thought that the 30 seconds between the Quant and Verbal section was the worst part - they should include a 5 minute break in between those sections to give your mind a break. My mind was pretty drained by the IR section, received three of the question types I normally guess on to save time, but pushed through and finished. Overall I felt that I did similar to my last OG Mock so was glad to be finished. I received my scores 3 business days later and was thrilled to score a 760!! I went from a 590-760 in just under a year, 6 months of hard studying (Oct-Dec) (Feb-April) paid off big time with a score way beyond what I would have imagined I finally ended my GMAT journey with.

Your Official GMAT™ Online Score Results:
Quantitative Section Score: 50
Quantitative Score Percentile: 85
Verbal Section Score: 42
Verbal Score Percentile: 96
Integrated Reasoning Section Score: 6
Integrated Reasoning Score Percentile: 68
Total Score: 760
Total Score Percentile: 99

Materials Used:
OG Guides/Question Banks
Manhattan Prep Guides
Virtual tutoring sessions
GMAT Club Forums
Economist GMAT course



Practice Exams:
OG Mock #1: 590 (Q40, V30) 5/16/2019
OG Mock #2: 630 (Q39, V38) 8/20/2019
Economist Mock #1: 650 (Q42, V37) 10/4/2019
Economist Mock #2: 660 (Q45, V35) 11/9/2019
Economist Mock #3: 690 (Q40, V44) 12/7/2019
Economist Mock #4: 730 (Q47, V43) 12/23/2019
Economist Mock #5: 710 (Q42, 45) 12/28/2019
OG Mock #3: 730 (Q48, V42) 3/7/2020
OG Mock #4: 710 (Q49, V37) 3/13/2020
OG Mock #5: 710 (Q45, V42) 3/27/2020
Manhattan Prep CAT 1: 670 (Q44, V37) 4/24/2020 (used online whiteboard)
OG Mock #6: 750 (Q48,V46) 4/25/2020 (used online whiteboard)