My story of GMAT from 520 - 740( Q 50, V 40, IR 6, AWA 6)

This post is for people who struggle and struggle in their efforts to improve the GMAT (the horror )

For me it all started in 2014 , prepared for my first attempt for around 3 months ,was going good on my mocks for around 690.

Gave exam in october 2014 and got horrible score of 520 (Q 33 V 31),only consolation was my verbal did not suck at least

So terrified and exhausted with the outcome( my specs number increased by -2 ),I decided to never give this exam again only to learn further that I was fooling myself.


Next year or so kept thinking whether I can improve my GMAT but never had the courage to delve myself again in this monster's preparation. One day was doing the Economist GMAT test for fun and scored 680 and felt amused. Slowly went back into the gears but this time I told myself not to prepare and suffer for long and just gave myself one month.Only thing I did was to give and give more mock tests and learn from my mistakes( such as why stupid RC accuracy was getting my verbal down below 35 etc.)

I attempted all the mocks there in space such as Kaplan,Veritas,MGMAT,GMAT Club and GMAT Prep and was again scoring around 700 on average.Finally the day came and I attempted Mr. GMAT again in April 2016 and again suffered from the outcome - 620( Q 45, V 31). I really got agitated with myself as my math really isn't poor and I keep getting 47 in all mocks,so must be something stupid I was doing. I knew something wasn't right ,so I immediately booked the exam 16 days after and just redid GMAT prep mocks again and gave the exam ,this time got a better result of 660 ( Q 46 , V 35).

I was not very happy with the result but at least content with the improvement in Quant. I thought what the hell,let's use this GMAT and apply to the schools I was targeting. This opened my exercise of how schools fool candidates around saying GMAT is just one criteria because trust me my overall profile has everything work ex,GPAs, international work ex, extra curriculars, startup experience, well aligned career goals with exceptional stories for essays but after I applied to top 3 schools ,one rejected straight away and other two interviewed,with one rejecting after interview and the last one put me on waitlist after interview. I had enough by then, so I withdrew my application from the school waitlist finally. I spoke to myself that this exam can not be the end of story for me when I have every other thing in place.

So there you go again and I scheduled the exam for next 16 days in October 2016,only thing again I did was redid the GMAT PREP ,gave a economist gmat test,one veritas and free MGMAT to see how I stand,scores are got are below

MGMAT - 700
Veritas - 680
Economist - 730
GMAT Prep1 - 710
GMAT Prep 2 - 730


I have seen those scores before so was not very much excited about them,I knew only thing that can get me a good score was if I can hold the stupidities I have been doing all through the previous exam. So came the D dayb,I walked into the test center and reached almost half n hour early,so just sat enjoying my coffee and suddenly realised that I was not carrying the passport. So,panicked and rushed to the test center upstairs and asked them, they said if you have driving license then its fine and god i was relieved when i found the DL somewhere in my bag.Well could not really enjoyed the coffee very much

The exam started and AWA and IR was not any issue,just kept it simple. Then started the Quant ,first 4 questions i knew the answers looking at the questions.so felt good that exam is atleast going good in start,then i started seeing some heavy questions from geometry,coordinate geometry,probability which i was so busy doing that i did not realise that exam is really getting hard,which actually was good for me as if i knew i am doing good i would have panicked and would have done something stupid. So in the end i had 3 minutes and 4 questions left,the speed i picked in the section helped me answer all of them except one where i guessed ,which when the section got completed i really knew the answer and was bit disappointed. Anyways took the break and somehow crazy enough spent 5 minutes more than 8 minutes required. I did not know what happened where the hell those extra 5 minutes went. Anyhow the reality was I had 70 minutes to do 41 questions and i said to myself what the hell,lets do it.

got SC first two and then got the CR ,gave me indication all is well and then came RC ,now I was very conscious of the fact that If I need to get anything above 35 ,i need to do RC accurately,so became very slow deliberately to improve the accuracy,spent like 5 minutes on the passage and then 2 minutes in answering the questions,which was 2 minutes extra than my normal but I was happy that i did them knowing what were the best answers,then came CR one after another for next 5 questions and my focus again diverted to clock which was showing 25 minutes and I had 31 questions to go and i picked up the speed as last thing i wanted was to leave questions unanswered.Came RCs at 16 and then 22nd questions.I was feeling very good about RCs but was not very sure about SCs which were occasionally coming in between. but somehow moved to last phase of my exam where I had 7 minutes and 11 more questions to go and damn came the RC which was so big and I was like whoops and for a second I sat back and laughed and said to myself damn this exam. picked up my steam and did that passage in 3 minutes ,then i had 4 CRs and 1 SCs in the last which were not the issue except one CR which really gave me headache in 1 minute that I spent on it

Well,finished the section and moved on to score screen knowing I have again wasted one more chance and hitting myself for those 5 minutes I saw the screen flashing scores of 740 and I was like wow man( kind of shout from my mouth with examiner watching). Well hell yeah,they do not know what I went through in those bloody 4 hours there,it was a sea of war,considering i was only expecting to barely reach 700 i surprised myself that day. Only thing that hurts me is if i had not wasted those 5 minutes that day, I would have got around 45 in verbal as i was on the verge of something great which got converted into something very good.

Well there you have it and am sorry if I soaked you guys too much in my emotional battle with this monster but now I can use this score to approach the schools even better than my target with some self respect without falling for their ridiculous comments that GMAT is not a big deal but fact is it is a big deal as it acts a gate keeper and no b school wants to impact their average gmat score of batch as seems like they feel proud of it which I never saw the point in first place. But hey someone once told me if you do not think this exam is big deal then how come you can not score what you want in it

My key takeaways from this experience of 2 years

a) Use GMAT PREP and never shy away from doing them over and over again,as trust me you would learn every time something new.The questions may remain same and you may have seen them before but the way you approach them every time is completely different as those questions come at different places at different time. Do not trust me? Try yourself.I bet you can learn lot more from this exercise than doing 1000 sets of new questions.

b) Please spend some money in buying the extended report GMAT is providing now a days,as its so cool and tells you exactly where you are lacking and what actually happened during the exam. I am such a fan of it that I have ordered even the one for my latest score to experience that experience again ,so I know my evaluation of exam is correct. By looking at report for my 660 exam i saw where i actually did mistakes in form of time,my stupidities or my thinking such as exam is not going good as RC is not coming etc. This report really breaks all confusion and gives you exactly what you need to work on during the actual exam.

c) About the other mock tests Kaplan,Veritas and MGMAT,i think they are all not what GMAT represents,so do them just for practice and do not bother about their scores at all.Only score you need to check is GMAT PREP,which I covered in above point already.

d) The study materials for SC I did MGMAT SC study guide,well it opened my eyes in terms of grammar.For CR I did read Powerscore once in 2014 but actual accuracy comes by developing pre thinking ,it really nails the CR section trust me. I just did few free session from egmat and that pre thinking I always had in me just woke up i suppose. But guys use this approach,it will improve your accuracy by 30-40% but of course with practice.For RC ,I just read newspapers and any content with the objective of understanding the gist of it,i guess i am not bad at this,it was just my stupid mistakes which were marring my RC score.

e ) Lastly about the quant,just never take any question at your ego as all questions count,so if you can not solve a question in 2 minutes ,no matter how easy it is and how much you think you can solve it,just move on with intelligent guess. trust me you are doing no good to your quant section if you hold on to it.My math skills are ok so I do not have any inputs here ,just solve the question on its merit and do not challenge your capability ,if the question is from area which is your weakness,just make a guess and move on. At least that is what I did.Even if you do 7-8 questions wrong ,you would still end up with 50,just think this way. but try not making careless mistakes such as just after you guessed hard question wrong and next question is simple,do it very carefully else exam will punish you harder.

Lastly GMAT club has been my sole source for every thing I need for GMAT,the debriefs,the content which is available free of cost and views you guys present on each and every topic is just amazing.I loved the GMAT club tests for Quant but it did not help me much as my Quant actually got worsened when i started focusing on hardest questions.For me the key was just take things easy and dont worry about hard questions as I do not have to get all the questions right and this is what exactly worked for me.

Well this is it for now but am happy to help anyone who needs any input.GMAT is logical exam and if you approach it in logical way, the returns will be as you hope for.

Cheers!