I scored 380, but plan to secure a target of 740 in 3months ?

Question

Hello 
I am an engineering graduate with a humble 65% when completed my graduation in 2015. Now for last 5 years I have been working very hard to build a profile suitable for B-school :- I have worked as a Business Analyst(BA)->Sr. BA ->Lead BA, in companies like EY, Unilever ETES, Incedo and collected a lot of appreciation for my work .

Now, I plan to pursue my next goal that is get a GMAT score of 740. So that I can attend one of the best B-schools (Not yet decided).

To accomplish the same, I have decided to quit my job (done) and focus completely on GMAT score. I initially planned to take 3 months preparation and give my test (in Dec 2020, not finalised yet) and hopefully get admitted in 2021.

I gave my first practice test today and scored a 380 (V18 & Q25), even though the score is not motivating but I have realised a few things :
- I need help to prepare 
- I need to re-learn the basic formulas and study the course (Quant)
- I need to focus become faster on reading with understanding (verbal)
- I need some strategy to overcome my challenge to solve/answer a question faster (quant & verbal)
- I need to work really really hard in IR

Well I am feeling a little excited for the distance I have to cover to reach my goal and realize my long dream. 
Steps I have taken so far
- I have interviewed all the major institutes : Crack verbal, Jamboree, Career Launcher, Top one percent, Princeton review, Haydon & Renotts, Floating GMAT, e-gmat and a few personal trainers as well. 
- I have shortlisted & hired a quant trainer (personal tutor).
- I am in process to hire a verbal tutor (Batch/personal tutor), max 2-3 days.

Now,For you amazing people who have found yourself in my situation or could relate to it. Can you help me with some actionable advise or your comment, on how should I better approach towards my GOAL of 740 ?

PS
All advise is most welcome/even criticism (ASSUMPTION: I will give my all to the GMAT prep for next 5-6 months, i.e March 2020).

About me : linkedin -> Anshul Parkash (Process Excellence Enthusiast | Worked with EY, Unilever ETES, VMware, North West Bank)

homersimpsons · Answer

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XyLan · Answer

Hi theanshul , Glad you reached out! Since you want to target from 380 to 740, you must be consistent and thorough with your approach. A jump of 360 points is achievable, yet would require a tremendous amount of hard work and smart work - The graph and preparation are NOT linear. The higher you go, the difficulty level increases because the exam is inherently adaptive in nature. It's great that you have done your homework by exploring the GMAT preparation options both online and offline. Thus, I would suggest the following actionable items - 1) Stick to one, just one, structured course and stick to the plan. 2) Check out this GMAT 2020 Preparation Plan post. 3) Follow the experts on this forum - to tame the beast, you MUST learn from the best: GMATNinja, Nightblade354, generis, eGMAT, Bunuel etc. All the best!

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi yinka1,

Since you recently scored 380 (360 points off your score goal), moving forward, you need to follow a study plan that allows you to learn GMAT quant and verbal from the ground up. In other words, follow a study plan in which you individually learn each topic, starting with the foundations and progressing to more advanced concepts. Let me expand on this idea further.

If you are learning about Number Properties, you should develop as much conceptual knowledge about Number Properties as possible. In other words, your goal will be to completely understand properties of factorials, perfect squares, quadratic patterns, LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, and remainders, to name a few concepts. After carefully reviewing the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions, practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. 
Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see, types that you would rather not see, and types that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

Follow a similar routine for verbal. For example, let’s say you start by learning about Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to fully master the individual topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken The Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you learn about each question type, do focused practice, so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you get a weakening question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. Keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to analyze such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the New York Times, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. 
 
Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, you likely will have to work on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not really a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning the grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.
 
This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending less than two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.
 
There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and none of those reasons are that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answers were always the ones that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.
 
As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey logical meanings. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice until you start to see the differences that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to take the time to see the differences between answers and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.
 
To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off, and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did to arrive at that answer and what you could do differently to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could do differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your skills improve, you will want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple Sentence Correction topics.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses . You also may find it helpful to read the following article about  The Phases of Preparing for the GMAT .

Feel free to reach out with any further questions. Good luck!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi theanshul,

Many GMATers are unhappy with their initial practice scores, but you really shouldn't be. That 380 is just a measure of your skills right now - and you'll improve on that result over time as you learn more about the content, Tactics and little 'secrets' of the Exam. That having been said, raising a 380 to the point that you can consistently score 740+ will require that you commit to at least another 3 months of consistent, guided study - and you'll have to make significant improvements to how you handle BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections. Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level. Whether you actually "need" a 740+ or not will depend a great deal on your OVERALL profile and the Schools that you plan to apply to. As such, you might want to set aside a little time to put together a list of Schools/Programs that offer Degrees that fit with your career goals. Once you have that list, an Admissions Expert should help you to determine what if your profile would be considered competitive and the type of GMAT Score that you might need to apply.

Since you quit your job, I assume that you plan to put in a LOT of study time each week going forward. You have to be careful about confusing "quantity" of study with "quality" of study. I've never asked anyone to study 30+ hours a week - and while it's great that you might now have the available time to study that much, with that number of study hours, you would run the risk of 'burning out' before Test Day (and that is something that we want to avoid). If you are going to try to study that much, then I suggest that you take one hour "off" for every two hours of study. For example, you could study for 2 hours, then stop for an hour, then study for another 2 hours, then take an hour off, etc.

Before I can offer you any additional advice for your studies, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) What study materials do you currently have access to?
2) What "brand" of practice CAT/mock was this first Test?
3) You mentioned wanting to take the GMAT in December (re: less than 3 months from now), but you also mentioned committing 5-6 months to your studies. Are you planning to take the GMAT more than once?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

GMATWhizTeam · Answer

Hi Anshul,

To improve your Verbal score, it is important that you learn the concepts and the methodology to solve those questions. Because Verbal questions can be very tricky as test makers set a lot of traps by using similar words in the answer choices. So, to eliminate the incorrect answer choices on solid grounds and choose the right one, you need to have a strong conceptual understanding and need to use the right strategies.

And as you are looking for a private tutor, make sure you select the right one who helps you with both the things. I suggest you to decide only after taking a demo session because everyone has unique requirements and it is important that you choose an expert who helps you identify your weaker areas and work on them. So, if you are open to suggestions, I would like you to check the private tutoring of GMATWhiz.  I can arrange a free demo session for you . You can just write back to me or mail me the suitable slots so that I can arrange one for you. Or you can book a free session using the below link as well.

Click here to schedule a free demo session

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