Going to take GMAT on monday

­Hey Hoehenheim . I wanted to answer your questions in a separate message. So here they are.

1. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, a week before my 645 attempt, I gave my 2nd free official mock test, and got a 695(98%ile). Which is why I am now convinced, that the original was a tad bit harder than the free mocks. For the 645 attempt, my plan entailed the following,

• I am from an Engineering background in India. So Math was by no means unfamiliar to me.
• Magoosh was recommended to me by a family member who had used it a few years back. The reason for recommending Magoosh over others, was mainly because it just focused on the test-taking aspects, and less over data analysis of your prep.
• This helped me first build a solid platform, conceptually wide and deep enough, before I started focusing/worrying on other aspects of my prep.
• After I went through magoosh, I started solving the OG, especially for verbal. As I believe, nothing comes closest to simulating actual GMAT verbal questions as the OG. That and there being only a scarce presence of quality DI questions in Magoosh.
• I did section tests by concocting a mix of medium, hard questions by mimicking the question difficulty split of my free mock tests in other GMAT-prep platforms. Then did every possible free mock tests, took the 2nd free official mock in the end.
• Also I did the GMAT Olympics event religiously , as the event luckily coincided with the last weeks of my prep. So it did keep me sharp, and aware of different difficulty levels in the GMAT.

2. Non-math related DI questions, are such a hack really. What I picked up on was, merely by reading through all the options before you start evaluating them will save you most of the time. 7/10 times, it becomes dead obvious which pair of options will fit the MSR, after your first read. This obviously worked out very well given my Non math DI score. This by no means, is a viable strategy for verbal though. I tried to put in some effort into improving in verbal, but I realised that I was getting a pretty good accuracy across 23 questions, and my time would be more impactful if spent on quant and DI, and hence didn't spend much time exclusively for Verbal. But I can say the GMATNinja playlist, is the single best resource to get your verbal strategy down. Magoosh verbal was by no means, satisfying, and I for one was left with more questions than answers. So to sum it all up wrt verbal, GMAT ninja for test strategy, OG for practice.

PS: Also, if you are not comfortable with your english in general, reading through Business Sections of your local newspapers, would certainly help familiarise yourself with the kind of language used in GMAT(got this idea from magoosh btw). Try to focus on connectors, like "however","nonetheless", "In addition to",etc and their usage.


3. I think the first attempt was a bit more difficult than I anticipated, which is why I was a bit startled mid way through the test, because my initial plan of "get all the first 10 questions right in each section" was a flop in the first section already. So learning to identify your target score, and altering your test taking strategy according to it so that you reach that minimum score no matter what, in an accurate simulation of the test environment(buy mocks 3 and 4), is what I'd keep as the bottom line to why I got the score jump I did.­