Going to take GMAT on monday

Question

I've been preparing for 3 months using Magoosh, official gmat materials and gmat club. I got a 695 on the 2nd offiical mock(I took my first mock midway of my prep). With 3 days to go, I'm just planning on redoing old mock tests, and section tests with difficulty split similar to test experience. Would be helpful if someone can point me out to free mock test resources that I'm missing out on. These are the mock tests I've taken so far

2 free official GMAT mock tests
GMAT club mock test
Magoosh test
TTP diagnostic(got a 685+ estimate on that )
ExpertsGMAT
Egmat-Sigma

) ExpertsGMAT Egmat-Sigma

AjiteshArun · Answer

Hi nate_vj,

Personally, I wouldn't use nonofficial material this close to the GMAT. However, if you want to take more practice tests, you should maybe consider using one of the paid official tests. Or retake one of the free official tests. Or just don't take a practice test at this stage.

Also, 695 is a very good score! All the best.

VirenderSingh092 · Answer

Re-taking tests may not be very productive since you have already been exposed to these tests until unless the questions are new.

Anugmat740 · Answer

All the best.Let us know how it went.

nate_vj · Answer

Hey all. I managed to score 89%ile. Lesser than what I expected. Here is my score report. From what I could understand from this, not being to answer early questions in Quant and DI, hurt my score a lot. During my prep I never seemed to have a weakness for any particular question type. But I think, any weaknesses that I might have will become more apparent as I practice more hard questions. I have booked another appointment for reattempt on Aug 9th (gives me 18 days). My plan for these 18 days is to practice all questions from the OG, that have taken me more than 2.5 mins to solve and questions that I haven't got correct before. I will probably take one official mock , 1 week before the retest. It would be helpful to get opinions from the experts on this

nate_vj · Answer

IanStewart  ,  KarishmaB  ,  avigutman  ,  chetan2u  Can you take look. Would really appreciate it if you guys can provide some insight.

chetan2u · Answer

nate_vj

I would have following quick points

Data Insight: A great work on DS and MSR questions. Surely you would have got the MSR in the initial half when you had just one wrong, so MSR would not have been easy. Now, graph and table should generally be easy ones, they do not test too complex a thing, but missing out on important words makes all the difference, so be more careful on the wordings. Next you have to understand the types of non-math related TPA and practice more on them. Timing of course is a concern. Spending 4.5 minutes on just the second question and still getting it wrong is as bad as it could be. Anything more than 3 minutes requires to be guessed and moved ahead.

Verbal and Quant: You clearly seem to be good at certain parts while there is a scope of improvement in other fields. Probability/ series is something you should be concentrating on

The questions for which you have taken the maximum time in each section have gone wrong. So, do not spend more than 3 minutes under any circumstances.

satyam.ss219 · Answer

All the best and be calm and dont panic

Posted from my mobile device

nate_vj · Answer

I think that is fair. My usual reasoning behind spending time on earlier questions, is to try and get them as accurate as possible, because I assume that they have a big influence on how the rest of the test goes. But I think this attempt was an eye-opener for me. I should probably not spend more than 3 mins on a question. That time is probably better spent on another question or in review. I will identify and work on my weaker concepts as well. Thank you for your insights!

KarishmaB · Answer

Your score report is quite useful. It reveals your strengths and weaknesses quite clearly.

Focus on Arithmetic - Ratios, Rates, Percentages - topics important foro math related DI too (for graphs and tables too)
and on Sets, Stats and Probability - Again topics very useful for DI too.
Focus more on non-Math DI and real life context questions, and infer questions in Verbal. Essentially the ones that make you think beyond theory and are more application based.

Early questions are important but we cannot spend an inordinate amount of time on them. If unable to solve, mark for review and move on.
Practice tests are good to help you strategize but they won't improve your score. Fix the issues and then you can take 2 fresh/repeat official tests. Don't take any in the week before the actual test. You must go to your test with a fresh mind.

egmat · Answer

nate_vj  - you have some good recommendations here. You may also benefit from the analysis presented in this video. Watch the video, download the excel, and fill in the data to draw inferences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tJpyphaQH0

-Rajat

nate_vj · Answer

KarishmaB   egmat   chetan2u   AjiteshArun

Hey all! gave my 2nd attempt today. The screen showed a 97%ile at the end😊. Will update score report here when made available.

bb · Answer

Congratulations! Awesome Result!
What did you do in the last 15 days? Anything? was the first score just a fluke?

KarishmaB · Answer

Congratulations! Great improvement!
And yeah, I would be interested in knowing your focus areas in the last couple of weeks too. Good job!

Posted from my mobile device

nate_vj · Answer

I wouldn't call the first score a fluke. I was making some mistakes, which were reflected in my score. In regards to what I did to fix them, I'd put it down to 3 things mainly(explained further in detail below).

1. Refining conceptual weak points
2. Altering Test Taking strategy
3. Proper mocks and test simulation

1. I learned to analyse my score reports from previous mock attempts and the first official attempt. The video mentioned in this thread by  egmat  , was certainly useful for that. As  chetan2u  suggested, I mainly spent time improving on Counting and Probability. It happened to be a lucky occurence, that The GMAT Olympics had just gotten over, and I was an active participant in Team Orange, and hence got a month's subscription of the Forum Quiz. I did a few question sets of 655-755 range difficulty questions in Counting, Probability for a couple of days. And analysis of these questions, was more than sufficient to boost my confidence in this topic. I also tweaked my approach for verbal-MSR questions, which earlier used to be a problem for me, but now aren't😊.

2. As pointed out by   KarishmaB   and   chetan2u   I was being too stubborn with questions, and spent too much time on ones I couldn't crack. I had to rewire myself to move on, especially when the question had already sucked too much of my time in the section. I practiced this by doing section tests, with the OG prep material. I also tested it out by taking 2 official  paid  mocks(3 and 4), one 4 days before the exam(got a 96%ile in mock 3), and the other a day before(got a 98%ile in mock 4) the official test. I'll talk more on them below.

3. I majorly felt that the first 2 free mocks from GMAT seemed to be of  easier difficulty  than the official test. Which is why during my initial attempt, I was so confident that I'll be able to crack every question that the test would throw at me, which hence led to me being stubborn mid test. But the mocks 3 and 4 were certainly more representing of the actual experience, and hence made me humble enough to skip a few questions I deemed as  "too-difficult to solve within the available time frame".  I also tried out increasing my verbal speed, and experimented with DI a bit. This helped me nail down my final test strategy, before going into the reattempt.

chetan2u · Answer

Congratulations nate_vj ! That's an impressive improvement in a mere 15 days. This would not have been possible had you not realized your weak areas and worked on them.

egmat · Answer

nate_vj - congratulations on the improvement. I am super happy for you. Thanks a lot for taking the time to detail out what you did. Curious question - what was your score split? Second curious question - what would you do if you were to improve to 715+.

Congratulations once again!

-Rajat

Congratulations once again!

-Rajat

Hoehenheim · Answer

Gratz on the 97%ile!!

Time permit, could you dive deeper on the following?

1. What was your initial diagnostic score (or an estimate)? How was your prep like for the 645?
2. How did you upgrade on the Non-Math related and Verbal (analysis/critique, inferred idea) elements?
3. A significant jump in score in such a short while has certainly grabbed the attention of many experts... Is there anything else about your prep in the past two weeks you could identify, apart from the three shared insightful inputs?

AjiteshArun · Answer

That's an awesome score! Well done, and all the best for the application process.

nate_vj · Answer

Here's the score report😊. Ngl I'm quite surprised that it's verbal that's the lowest. But it does make sense in a way as verbal was my last section and given that I was a bit eager to get the exam over with😅, I might've been a bit hurried in my attempt(Quant-Verbal-Break-DI was my order). But quant is funny man, I got 3 questions wrong this time as well, but landed a much higher percentile, proof of the importance of the initial 10 or so questions ig. I don't think anyone would deny that the DI score saved my attempt overall, and fixing my strategy for Non-math DI certainly did the trick. I got only 1 Data sufficiency question wrong(Number 20), so not sure why I was penalised so much for it.

Big shoutout to   AjiteshArun ,  for being super encouraging in analysing my initial attempt, and assuring me of my competence in verbal reasoning based on his inference. Bit anti-climatic given my final verbal score ik😅, but nonetheless I think the confidence I gained from the conversation with you had a role to play in my better attempt. Thank you for that 😊🤝. Hope this forum continues to benefit many other people like me.

Now to answer questions.

egmat  - Hey Rajat, big fan😄.
1.Attached my score slip with the post.
2. I am just going to speak on DI and quant here, because I don't think I have a plan that would be useful for verbal. 755+ difficulty questions are of a different strata of gmat questions, and I don't think you should be preparing for them for the way you would do for 750 and below difficulty questions. So to improve my scores, my strategy would be to analyse solutions of these ultra-difficult questions and see if the issue lies in conceptual lacking, or in the methods undertaken to solve(quicker methods the better obviously). Would use the gmat Forum quiz, to repeat exposure to continous sets of these questions. And eventually build up to doing 7-8 in a row within a 17-18 min timeframe. And would try to test my mettle out in a mock, infer, adjust and re-aim.😇

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Going to take GMAT on monday

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