My GMAT story.

My GMAT prep started sometime around Nov ‘21. I gave a mock and scored 670 (Q47V35) which I knew was nowhere close to the target score which I had in mind.
So, I immediately got to work and diligently started preparing every day for a couple of hours in the morning before I began office work. I started with practising questions from OG and would select 20 questions each from quant and verbal and test myself in a timed environment. My quant accuracy was good and I gradually got better with time. With Verbal my accuracy was poor and more importantly, I had huge conceptual gaps.

So I decided to start learning verbal concepts and since I tend to do better with video-based learning, I started looking for an online course to help me with this. I enrolled in eGMAT based on a recommendation from a friend and because I was impressed with a lot of their answers on GMATClub. What I liked about their answers was the fact that they followed a structured approach for solving SC questions wherein, the first emphasis was on meaning followed by litmus testing the sentence against a fixed set of grammar rules. I found this quite effective because I felt this method was easy to replicate on the exam and left very little to chance.

After completing the course, my verbal score improved to V38 but it was still far from my target verbal score of V42. It was quite puzzling for me because I was solving questions every day but my score wasn’t improving. I reached out to eGMAT for help and they responded to me and gave me a customised plan which targeted my conceptual gaps and addressed issues in my approach. In a very short amount of time(2 weeks), my verbal score jumped from V38 to V42. I booked a test and scored 740(Q49V42).

Here is a list of things which I did that helped me immensely in acing the GMAT.
SC and CR: Knowing the grammatical concepts that the GMAT tests on is crucial. You can learn these concepts from a good test prep provider like eGMAT. Once you master these concepts, start practising questions every day in a timed environment and make sure you spend a good amount of time on questions which you failed to answer correctly. Be honest with yourself and introspect on why you got it wrong. Identify whether it is a conceptual gap, time issue, or anything else you might have faced. Once you identify your problem, take corrective actions to fix your mistakes. Making mistakes in GMAT is fine but making the same mistake twice is unacceptable. For CR, what really helped me was pre-thinking. It is a practice where you read the question stem and try to prethink the answer that could answer the question. This was helpful to me because it eliminates the need to evaluate and introspect every option in depth because once you’ve pre-thought the answer, all you need to do is mark the answer choice that is closest to your pre-thought assumption.

RC: Being a lifelong reader, I thought RC would be a piece of cake to me. I couldn’t be more wrong. Casual readers tend to skim through content a lot but skimming equals death in the GMAT. You have to understand every sentence clearly before moving on to the next sentence. The two things to always keep in mind when you read a sentence are a. What does this sentence mean? b. What value does this sentence add to the passage as a whole? This can be a bit time taking in the beginning, but with practice it will become second nature and your RC accuracy will soar.

General tips:
Error log: I solved nearly 600 questions before reaching out to eGMAT for help. I solved only 150 questions when working under their tutelage. I’ve learned more from solving those 150 questions than I did from the 600 questions I solved earlier. The differentiating factor was an error log. If you make an error log and regularly refer back to your notes, you’ll make a lot more incremental progress than you would if you simply solved questions without introspection. Quality matters more than quantity when practising.
Read: Spend at least 15 minutes a day reading good quality content on the internet (The Economist, FT, etc.). Imagine that you are going to be questioned on the essays that you’re reading. Doing this improves your reading comprehension and will work wonders in RC and CR
Use analytics to track performance: eGMAT offers Scholaranium which is an excellent tool that contains 100s of good quality questions and amazing analytical tools to track your performance. You can very easily track your performance and check your accuracy and pace w.r.t topic, difficulty and section. I earlier did this in Excel when I was practising from OG but it can be quite time taking and having the analytical tools in Scholarinium saved me a lot of time.
Mocks: Take mocks periodically to track your performance. While practising quizzes regularly helps in improving accuracy and conceptual gaps mocks help you in learning time management, train your brain to stay active for long hours and help you stay in touch with GMAT’s adaptive algorithm. I did 5 mocks in Scholarinium and I felt that the scoring and quality of questions were quite similar to the actual test.
Stay calm: It is good to push yourself to the limits of your capability but don’t let this affect your mental wellbeing. In the end, GMAT is just an exam. If you crack it, good, if not, life goes on. No big deal.

Happy Learning!