NEED HELP

Hi Vivek,

I am an Indian and recently scored a whooping 750(Q51 and V40) on my GMAT(see verified score on GMAT Club Profile) last month. I understand that scoring a high GMAT score can be a daunting task for many, it was certainly for me, and at times all you need is a clear direction to navigate your path. Also, for most Indian students it may be difficult to afford costly teaching services and spend hundreds of dollars.

I am offering a 30 min session at a meagre cost, literally peanuts, to happily clarify each and every doubt of yours, and will be sharing how I improved my score from 660 to 750. I took my Quant from Q48 to Q51 and Verbal from V31 to V40. I did not spend insane amount of money nor took in person coaching. I created my own plan, used the available resources wisely, and meticulously carved my path to 750. I am not a tutor, and hence I think from a student’s perspective and I know what works in real life and what not. I also know that all those generic study plans and widely spoken about books are highly ineffective.

Rather than writing a long generic post to share my experience, I believe a one-to-one discussion is always more fruitful. If you have doubts regarding your preparation and need a strategy specific session, if you want to know how to use all the free GMAT resources available, if you want to know which resources to spend your money on and which to avoid, if you want to discuss how to fix any specific area in Verbal to score V40, or if you have exam specific doubts and need a detailed overview from a recent test taker, just DM me and I will be more than happy to help. I will also share few very useful and unique insights from my ESRs, how I modified my test taking strategy, and things to avoid on actual GMAT.

You can either go through infinite number of but extremely helpful(each post of GMAT club is just marvelous) posts on various forums and spend insane number of hours researching GMAT specific tips/videos, or just talk to me to personally clarify your specific concerns

PS. I am not a teacher. I am just an extremely hard working individual who explored every possible resource in the last one year to crack GMAT and my efforts finally paid. I believe everyone can crack GMAT and all you need is the correct plan

Hi vivek1810971,

I've sent you a PM with some notes and additional questions.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Contact Rich at: Rich.C@empowergmat.com

Hi vivek1810971,

Sorry about how things went with your GMAT. The key to scoring well on GMAT is to focusing on the right aspects. If your score are inconsistent even after months of prep, then that means that there's something wrong with the preparation strategy. I see that you are focusing more on practicing questions, than on the process, which is not the right way to prepare for GMAT. First let us understand the right way to prepare for GMAT.

How to prepare for GMAT in the right way?

Before you start preparing for any test, it's important to understand the structure of the test, what is tested on it and then prepare accordingly. In this case, GMAT is a test which focuses on your application skills along with the conceptual knowledge. So, just learning the concepts and practicing questions without focusing on the right methodology will not do any good. So, I suggest you to first focus on the methodology to solve questions of a particular topic and only then move to practicing questions of that topic.

So, the right way to prepare would be to first

• learn the concepts of a topic,
• learn the right methodology to solve questions of that topic
• practice a few questions of that topic to solidify your learning and then move to the nest topic
• Repeat the process for all the topics

And working on weak areas is equally important. You move to the next topic only if you get a decent accuracy in the previous topic. If not, you revisit the concepts, fill the conceptual gaps and then move to the next topic only when you are 100% confident. There are a couple of articles which you might find helpful.


And you can go through the recording below to understand how to strategize your GMAT prep in an effective way.

What might have gone wrong?

As we have understood the right way to prepare, now let's analyze what could have gone wrong with your previous attempt. You must have learnt the concepts of the topics and you must have practiced questions as well. But did you focus on the methodology part? Did you focus on working your weak areas?

These two could be the major reasons for you not scoring well on GMAT. So, this time make sure you do your prep in the right way by focusing on all the above parameters. And regarding the resource, choose a resource which can help you with not only the concepts, but the methodology as well. And the questions to practice and their detailed solutions are equally important as the solutions help you understand where exactly you are making the mistake. And a study plan would be an added advantage as you will have clear deadlines being a working professional with limited time in hand.

And regarding how to proceed further and the study strategy, I think it would be better if we can get in touch over a call and discuss the same as I would like to ask a few questions about your current preparation strategy and your weak areas. If you have an ESR with you, that will be even more helpful to get the insights about your performance. You can use the below link to get in touch with me.

Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than 560. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation, particularly for verbal, probably needs to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant and verbal courses.

You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:

how to score a 700+ on the GMAT

Why Was My GMAT Score Lower Than My Practice Test Scores?