My GMAT journey to 760!

­Hello GMAT Club,

I'm here to share my GMAT journey with the hope to offer some insights that might prove to be of value for future aspirants.

I work at a multi-national firm as a software developer and it all started with me realizing that I was developing an interest in the various aspects that drive a business. I got to attend a seminar conducted by Indian School of Business around the same time and it spiked my motivation to get into a B-School. That was when I decided to take the GMAT.

I talked to a couple of my friends who had been through the journey of GMAT prep and landed up on the eGMAT prep course. I started with the free-trial of the course and it convinced me to get the complete version. I had started the preparation in July'23 and considering my work schedule and the fact that I wanted to take the GMAT Classis Edition, targetted to take the test in Dec'23 - Jan'24. Here is a detailed review of the course.

Platform:
The eGMAT platform has a user-friendly and easy to navigate structure. The division of sub-sections in Verbal and Quant, the Study Planner, the Bookmarked Questions and the Scholaranium with its comprehensive analytical dashboards are some of the tools that help you plan your preparation and pay special attention to your improvement areas.
eGMAT also conducts webinars over the weekends on specific topics, which can help you in various situations like staying in touch with a previously prepared section, re-iterating the importance of applying the process, etc.

Course Content:
Verbal
1. Sentence Correction: The content begins with basic concepts and moves on to the advanced ones. After a point of time, when you hit a plateau in your accuracy, the meaning based approach and visualization become your saviours in overcoming it. These strategies are the sure shot way to ace 700+ level questions and this was proven when I gave my first SigmaX mock with a 99 percentile in SC.

2. Critical Reasoning: The pre-thinking approach comes in handy when solving Medium to Hard level questions. Though one might not be able to come up with specific pre-thought scenarios for Hard questions, coming up with atleast the framework is what improves the accuracy as well as the time taken to identify the correct choice and eliminate the others on solid grounds. The negation test for assumption questions, variance test for evaluation questions and three-R approach for bold face questions helped to confirm if the chosen choice was indeed correct.

3. Reading Comprehension: Written english is very different from spoken english and I realized this when I landed on the RC sub-section. It used to take me around 7-8 minutes to read a passage and answer the subsequent questions. Even with this amount of time my accuracy was very poor. I then came across the reading strategies which included focusing on keywords and making notes while reading, and that not only drastically improved my accuracy but also reduced the time taken for one passage to around 5-6 minutes (including answering the questions).

Quant
The quant section starts with foundational concepts, moves on to the application of those basic concepts in GMAT style questions and then tests and cements your understanding in the practice quiz files. The Quant Basics sections lists down strategies which, if kept in mind, can lead you to a perfect Quant score.
Apart from this, the PACE engine is what proved to be the most useful for me in the Quant section. Since I was pretty confident with the basic concepts and since the PACE engine judged the same, the time taken for me to be done with the Quant section was almost half of that without the PACE engine.

Mentorship and Last Mile Push Program:
Rashmi, an eGMAT mentor, along with her colleagues, has been by my side for the entire duration of 6 months, coming to my rescue at each stage of the journey. She helped me with study plans suiting my needs at each milestone. Her aid was the most valuable in the final stage of my journey when I was done with the course and needed constant polishing of my weaknesses. This stage required more analysis than question-solving.
We realized that I was pretty good in the individual sections but faltered when it came to taking the test as a whole. The major reason was not concept gaps but test-taking issues. This made me realize the importance of not rushing through the process and being diligent with it. Rashmi made me understand how to strike a balance between accuracy and time taken and when to apply the skipping strategy.

Results:
My work sometimes demanded more than usual attention and hence, there were times when I needed to step back from the preparation for a while. Nevertheless, the proof of all of the above mentioned data points lies in a score of 760 in my first GMAT attempt.

Tips:
1. Be consistent with your preparation.
2. Trust the process to improve your accuracy and time taken.
3. Brace yourself and un-learn and re-learn.
4. Stay in touch with your mentor.

All the best!­­­­