TL;DR - IT engineer with 14-hour workday scores 720 (Q48, V40) on GMAT thanks to CrackVerbal.
Greetings to one and all!
It's always a delight to read success stories on the GMAT Club, but when you are on the other side, you realize that it’s your responsibility to share one to help the other aspirants. I will attempt to document every part of my GMAT journey. I hope you find this useful.
My Background:
I am Pratyush and I joined
CrackVerbal GMAT Coaching in Feb 2020.
I work in the IT industry as a Technical Consultant.
My Initial Journey:
Before joining
CrackVerbal, I had attempted the GMAT twice in 2019 based on self prep alone. However, I couldn't go beyond 610.
After joining
CrackVerbal, I was very very dependent on the previous self prep that I had been doing since I firmly believed that I wasn't practicing more but my knowledge and strategy was foolproof. This resulted in a 640 again.
Here is the turning point - My typical workday starts from 8/9 am and continues well into 10/11 pm and even 1/2 am in the night on many occasions.
Most of my work in 2020 involved mentoring many of my juniors in the team. And when they keep asking me questions based on the work that I assign them, I will calmly explain to them what is expected and constantly tell them to trust me.
After my 3rd GMAT attempt I put myself in their position and this time, I decided to heed Arun sir's words "Trust the process". Since I anyway had nothing to lose I just decided to UNLEARN everything I knew and start over fresh - this happened in September 2020.
I got access to the
CrackVerbal class recording from Arief (since I couldn't attend either the prepathons or the weekend sessions thanks to my office work) and therefore whenever I used to get time I'd go through the videos and then practice from the
CrackVerbal textbooks. Once I felt confident enough on a particular topic I'd immediately select all the official questions and finish them off in a day or so.
This routine continued from 1st September till November 2nd week. Because the performance evaluation was also going on at the time of COVID-19 and because too many people were randomly getting fired from the office so I gave it all in my office and I studied from 1-5 am daily and then again woke up at 8 am and the cycle continued.
Kindly note that since in the last 3 attempts I had exhausted all the official mocks (1-6), so I decided to go ahead with complete error analysis and streamlining the strategy of the prep rather than just see where I stand.
From November second week till December 31st, I had decided to improve my timing. Thus, every day I started practicing official 100 SC (600-700 & 700+ level), 50 CR (same level), and 20 RC passages from the GMAT Club options.
Once I found that my timing was fine I decided to write a mock test on 1st Dec from the official mock and ended up with a 760, which was obviously an inflated score since I did practice many official questions from before. So even though I didn't remember the answers yet somewhere this would've definitely affected the score. Hence, on the same day, I took a
CrackVerbal mock test and ended up with a 750.
The scores did give me a boost in confidence and I started expecting an upwards of 680+ in the actual GMAT.
Finally, on New year's eve, I decided to take another mock test, and this time it was from Manhattan and ended up scoring 720 (Q48, V40). My scores were more or less the same throughout since I had decided to focus heavily on verbal as the weightage on verbal is much higher. I practiced well enough to correctly mark any SC question within 40-50 secs to save time and utilize the additional time on RC(since RC was my weak spot).
After the mock test, I completely dedicated myself to error analysis especially in RC big picture questions and in Coordinate geometry (this was the only weak spot I had in quants).
However, here was the mistake. 2 days before the exam, somewhere around 1 am of 7th Jan ~ when I was going through the
CrackVerbal Videos I decided to write a mock test again just to see where I stand. I decided to go with one more mock test. I ended up scoring a 640 on this mock test. Luckily for me since I had already developed the mentality of "Nothing to Lose" and I already had a 640 from before hence in the worst-case scenario I'd be applying to ISB with that score only.
On 7th Jan, I decided to catch up on my sleep, and luckily I was able to restrain myself from even thinking about the GMAT or ISB at all.
On D-day, I had breakfast and then decided simply to just not think about anything at all. Keep a blank mind - no music, no social media, no GMAT, nothing at all.
With a very blank mind but a well-charted plan I went into the test center and as usual, started off with the Verbal section and then moved on to Quant and so on.
For the Verbal section, I would say that I got a hint that I was on the right track when I encountered 3 long passages and each had 2 CR type questions in them. Same for CR when I found myself facing Evaluate and Boldface CR questions (something that I hadn't faced before in any of the previous attempts).
For the Quant section, also I got the same hint when I got back to back 4 difficult probability + combination questions.
Finally, after my AWA section when the score flashed in front of me I felt my hard work had finally paid off.
Credit: Verbal
After my 3rd attempt when I decided to trust the
CrackVerbal process I decided to clarify all my doubts with Shreeleena ma'am. I really can't thank her enough for helping me allay my fear of RC.
One very useful suggestion I got from her was regarding the mapping in RC. I used to focus too much time making elaborate maps and lost out on the Gist. When I had asked for her help she realized that I had a good short-term memory to remember what exactly the passage tells, so she advised me to create a story-based mental map and stop writing it down. I did much better using this strategy. This had an instantaneous effect and I could see quite a huge improvement in RC(earlier I was getting only 30-35% accuracy) and this jumped to a 70% accuracy within 2 weeks.
Note: This is a customized strategy based on my solving style. For SC It was just a logical approach using the level 1, level 2, and level 3 checklists. But nevertheless understanding the meaning first always gives an advantage.
For CR, the
CrackVerbal Videos are really helpful. This was perhaps the only section with which I never had much difficulty.
Credit: Quants
Like Shreeleena ma'am, I had also asked Aravind Sir to help me out with the weak sections. Typically I expected that Coordinate Geometry, PnC, Probability will be my weak sections. However, he showed me very clearly that even my arithmetic and statistics need improvement.
He was kind enough to help me with the exact strategy of improving the above-mentioned areas, improving my critical reading skills by improving SC and RC sections which in turn would help me solve word problems faster and better. He also pointed out some basic flaws like how in a hurry I would miss out on key details in the questions.
Even when I finally started improving in areas such as PnC and Probability, in case I got a question wrong, I would immediately reach out to him and he used to encourage me by saying "Pratyush, if you're able to solve this far then you're actually on the right track and I don't really see a red flag here".
In the end, I would like to thank all the mentors of
CrackVerbal who not only helped me with my GMAT but also with my application to ISB.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed 🤞 for the interview call now.
I wish everyone in this forum the very best in their GMAT journey & I am thankful to GMAT Club for providing a forum to practice, discuss, and read such inspiring GMAT success stories.
If you have any questions about the course, strategies, or anything related to the GMAT Preparation, then just drop a comment below & I’ll know about it.
Thanks & Regards,
Pratyush
24 Jan 2021, 08:18
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