I got a 780 - Q49 V49

Gratz on the 780. All the best going forward.

I am assuming that you are taking the GMAT exam for getting into the top Business schools. It serves as a means to an end.
I mostly suggest my clients to target the school and then target a score that takes care of the statistical requirements of that program. Of course the claims are that the process is holistic but who's willing to take a risk like that with an increasing competition! 780 is a brilliant score and I have no doubt that admissions team would look at it in positive light. I would hope that you'd take time out of your schedule to celebrate the accomplishment. Personally curious though-

How did you feel about the pressure built up over the months?
Did you set target scores on your way to a 780? Did you use some specific resources or just official material?

Yes, it's for bschool.

Not much of a pressure buildup. I just studied until I figured I was ready, then booked an exam with 2 days' notice. Not until the exam was bought and paid for did I feel any pressure. Those final two days, however, were quite nerve-wracking.

I did not set a "goal". Instead, I set up a system that would be effective for learning, and purposefully withheld/banned myself from taking mock exams until I felt ready. Months of preparation later, I haphazardly took an official mock and had gotten a 740 (which I was angry at; I knew my CR and SC were unready), I should not have taken this mock exam so soon. Then, a 770 (with a bunch of preventable mistakes), at which point I knew I was ready - I just needed to work on the common theme among these preventable mistakes. Not until literally 2 weeks before the exam did I set myself a "goal": >=780 - want; 760 - good enough; 750 - must retake exam. Had I made the mistake of setting a goal very early on... I probably would've set myself a goal of 740, and asymptotically approached that number. Instead, I got a 780, and only didn't get a 790 because of bad luck. Expectation management matters!

Quant: Once I was consistently getting 19/20 questions correct in a category (untimed), I moved to the next one. Repeat for the twenty (?) different chapters of quant. And by untimed, I mean 20 minutes per question if necessary. Used TTP, Bunuel, OG... but mostly owe it to my excellent math teachers at regular school. TTP is excellent if you are learning for the first time (one or two chapters were a novelty to me); Bunuel quant questions - like LSAT verbal questions - are significantly harder than GMAT questions, and I do recommend practicing with harder questions (just ignore the timer); OG questions are obviously the closest to the real thing, but limited in number. In the final weeks, I did nothing but timed OG sets.
Verbal: Read the entirety of MGMAT verbal before doing a single practice question, and did TTP's fantastic SC section. Then I just did LSATs (untimed) over and over again. Never did third-party verbal questions (except TTP SC), only did OG verbal and LSAT questions. In the final weeks, I did nothing but timed OG sets.

Nice work!

Apparently, on test day, you didn't have any of the mental block issues you experienced when taking that recent practice test.

It's been fun playing the GMAT game with you.

Congrats on the 780.
How did u improve IR and which questions did u practice?
What was your process after spending 20 minutes per question?
Did u maintain an error log or note down careless mistake?

Indeed not. The fatigue dulled me a lot on quant, and I just couldn't "notice" solutions to geometry questions, for example. But I never locked up. I suppose I did better on verbal because it's more formulaic/has only one possible path to a correct answer.

Thank you, and likewise. Your advice has been very helpful on this journey



Thanks.

I'm an engineer with formal experience in scientific research. IR is exactly the kind of stuff I had to do academically and professionally. That said, the online/wiley app for the Official Guide has a lot of IR questions, and you really have to do IR on a computer. I also own the Manhattan Prep All the GMAT books, so I read the IR book, and did a bunch of MGMAT Atlas IR question sets. They're harder than the OG ones.
PS: Surprisingly often, IR will have question sets where the correct answer is FALSE FALSE FALSE or TRUE TRUE TRUE. I went through my education with test-makers avoiding such patterns, but the GMAT creators do not avoid it.

By "20 minutes per question", I meant to emphasise that I would do the questions completely untimed. If a single question took me 20m, I would not skip it. I also tried very hard never to look up answers, but instead to go through the upheaval of discovering the answer. Gruelling, but worth it.

Error logs are extremely important. I wrote down every question I had gotten wrong, along with the date, question type (e.g., Q-Inequalities, or CR-Evaluate Argument) and the mistake type (Don't know how to do, know how to do but failed to notice, careless mistake, misread question). It's especially important when you look at you error log, and you see that 90% of your errors are inequality data sufficiency. Then, you can easily get +30 points by just focusing on that problem. Or, in my case, virtually all verbal mistakes were CR-Evaluate and CR-Assumption. It's funny how clumped-together the mistakes usually are, but you'd never notice unless you had written it down.

Congrats on this humongous score!

Interesting.


Sure thing.


Yes! Totally worth it.


Great info.

Wow, fantastic score. Congratulations!

Wow. Amazing job!
I guess I’m glad you did not rescheduled

Did you take the test at the test center or online?

Amazing job 😍




Posted from my mobile device

Thanks! Luckily, I live within walking distance of a test centre. I think the online variant is too risky.

Congrats for the stellar score !

Can you share some tips on the resources you used to practice RC and SC.

I read that you stuck to Official Resources and to TTP. Are these enough to master RC, or do you recommend LSATs as well ?

I can't comment on TTP RC and CR, I only tried TTP SC.
You are guaranteed to run out of OG Verbal questions - their only downside is their limited quantity.

RC: In my opinion, LSATs are the best resource for learning RC because they are more difficult. However, when you move from the learning phase to the revising/reinforcing phase, then you should switch to OG Verbal questions.
(I also read the Manhattan Prep 'All the Verbal' book).

CR: LSATs are primarily the best for RC, but they are also useful for CR.

SC: Manhattan Prep 'All the Verbal'; TTP SC course; GMAT Ninja videos - these all helped a lot. You need to build an intuition specifically for GMAT SC questions. After you do a few hundred SCs - they will become formulaic. (PS: it helps to already have had hundreds of idioms memorised...)