Journey of 2 years for MBA Preparations- 580 to 730 (4 attempts)

Hello everyone!
This preparation story will be focused on the Verbal section.
My GMAT journey, or preparation for MBA journey, has been pretty long. I have loved solving quant since childhood, and I was under the impression that my “English” was good. I gave my first GMAT in July 2019, without any serious preparations, and scored a 580 (Q46V26).

I soon realized that GMAT is not going to be an easy task for me. I began my GMAT preparations with the egmat course (both Verbal and Quant). I even went through the Manhattan guides and PowerScore Bible (for CR). I gave my second attempt (Center Based) in August 2020, scoring a 650 (Q49V31). My Official mock scores varied between 680 and 710. The eGMAT course is really detailed and really helps on initiating with the SC section. The Quant course is brilliant and the scholaranium questions really get you thinking.
Test experience: I started with the Verbal section and faced test anxiety for the first 15 minutes of the exam. It was really difficult to recover, leaving me with 10 mins for the last 10 questions. Quant section went well, but I did goof up towards the end. It was evident from the ESR that I had critical issues in Verbal section and that I messed up my last block on Quant.

After this attempt, I started working with [b] ChiranjeevSingh [/b]. I started off with a private session on CR in September '20. That session was an eye-opener for me, showing me the flaws in my approach. I went on to take the @GMATIntensive course for Verbal only which is conducted by AnishPassiTGC and ChiranjeevSingh. This course was true eye-opener and completely changed my perspective towards the GMAT preparations. I started looking at the exam as MBA preparations rather than exam preparations. The course focuses on developing skills and abilities. Both CJ and Anish are so patient and make sure that even the smallest doubt is cleared in the session. For re-takers who lose the hope and think that GMAT is not meant for them, just give this course a shot. It worked for me.
After the course, I took a good break till February and got back to the preparations.

I gave my Third attempt of GMAT on 12th July 2021 (Online) and scored a 710 (Q48V39).
Test Experience: The difficulty level of online GMAT seemed to be way higher (for both Verbal and Quant) than the OG and Mock questions. I faced several connectivity issues since the beginning of the exam. I had a good internet connection and despite of that, it took at least 10-15 seconds to move to the next question. Moreover in the IR section, the proctor could not see me and refused to pause the exam. Lost a lot of time there too.
I did not face any test anxiety, probably because I was annoyed at the connectivity throughout the exam :p

Finally, I gave the fourth and final attempt of GMAT within 4 days at the Centre on 16th July 2021 (no 16 days gap required between online and center based exam). I scored a 730 (Q49V40).
Test Experience: The difficulty level of Center based exam seemed to be easier than the Online based. Maybe I was less anxious during this exam with a 710 on my hand.



Learnings from the Business School preparation


1. Treat the GMAT Preparations as business school preparations. Trust me, once you start relating the importance of each question type to real life corporate world scenarios, the preparation turns out to be really enjoyable. In fact, whenever I used to read any article on LinkedIn, my brain used to automatically focus on the SC part and find the errors.
2. Go slow when working on abilities. The only way to increase the timing is to increase the ability. Once you turn confident on your abilities, your speed will increase automatically. But if you prepare with the intention of increasing the ability and of solving questions within 1.5mins or so, it will be really difficult to increase the accuracy. I personally started off with taking 10 mins on each CR question (my weakest part in Verbal). I never timed myself throughout the preparations for GMAT. Timing portion began only with the mocks.
3. You have to build your own strategy for test taking. This strategy develops in the mock phase of the preparations. I struggled a lot with the timing on Verbal section, and I scored a V28 on the very first mock I gave (June 12th), even after having 80% accuracy in Medium & Hard level Qs in practice. In fact I scored a V33 on 6th July (a week before the Online exam). Scores are irrelevant during preparations. It literally took me a month to replicate my practice abilities into the mocks, hence trust your preparation process.
4. Each section of Verbal requires a different mental space. CR requires you to go slow and find gaps in the argument while reading. Whereas RC requires you to read with the mindset of getting the outline and motive behind the passage.
5. This one would be helpful for those people with anxiety issues. Since I faced a lot of anxiety issues during the GMAT and even the mocks, I did not make GMAT the only goal of life. In 2020, I had stopped enjoying my time and just focused on the GMAT throughout. This time, I lived my life normally, watched Netflix and NBA regularly and worked really hard at office as well. This practice avoids the building of unnecessary pressure which results in anxiety during the exam.
6. Once you achieve high abilities in practice, start trusting your gut in mocks. Constant re-reading to make sure that the selected option is correct consumes a lot of time in the exam. This approach helped me improve on timing portion.

Materials used for GMAT

1. Strictly OG material. All the official questions are available on GMATCLUB. There are so many experts out here who will be helping you out throughout. Special thanks to ChiranjeevSingh AnishPassiTGC GMATNinja GMATIntensive egmat VeritasKarishma bb Bunuel. Your solutions and replies to doubts have really helped me understand the questions clearly.
2. For SC, I believe you can learn the most from Easy and Medium questions. There are multiple reasons to reject an option choice. When practicing, I suggest all the errors should be identified. I just practiced 200 SC questions whose detail solutions are available on https://www.gmatwithcj.com and whose solutions are also available on GMATCLUB. Tracking down the reasons for rejection and identifying all problems in each option choice helps a lot.
3. For RC, I understand that the same topics will never appear on the GMAT, but reading good quality articles does help in getting used to the reading and in improving the comprehension. I read the WSJ and the Economist. Moreover, I just followed the practice of solving 3-4 RCs daily for 1.5 months.

P.S I think the story is really really long. Apologies for the same. I hope this helps people by giving them the motivation that GMAT is indeed learnable. For some people, GMAT can be done in a span of few months and is a cakewalk. If you are a person who has been struggling since years, you just need the right mentor and approach to follow. You can reach me out anytime.

Huge credit to [b] GMATIntensive ChiranjeevSingh and AnishPassiTGC [/b]
Your approach, the daily thought of the day and daily Linkedin posts offer so many life lessons.

It is sad that the GMAT journey has come to an end. It has been a really enjoyable journey.

I think this will be a good article to perform sentence correction. :p