Overcoming the Verbal – (760 Q50, V42, AWA 6.0, IR8)

I received my official score a week ago, and here’re my experiences and learnings.

I am an Engineering grad, working in one of the top FMCG firms. I have completed CIMA and CFA (all 3 levels).

I am not a native English speaker. The Quant questions were really challenging, but with sufficient practice, I could somewhat tackle them. The Verbal section was my Kryptonite. My strategy may not work for all, but may work for those who find Verbal tough.

Strategies

I had different strategies for each component:

Quant – Know the various types of questions and the common pitfalls.
The mistakes I made were always careless ones, and it never stopped, even though I only used to make generally 2-8 mistakes in a test. (Negatives, Zeros, forgetting the starting words of a question – e.g: Forgetting that X is a positive integer and answering assuming that X is an integer – including 0, and negatives)

Verbal –
CR - Practice as many types of questions as possible.
RC - I was really slow on RC, so I powered my way through many challenging passages – specially the Kaplan ones which always had an array of unfamiliar words.
SC – SC was not time consuming, but on my 1st attempt, they were demoralizing, as I didn’t get some of them right and I knew I was wrong when I hit submit for every question. I overcame this by memorizing the idioms – which contributed to most of the errors.

There were 2 strategies that helped me a lot –

Strategy 1 – Taking as many tests as possible, as many times as possible. Yes you heard me right; taking the same test thrice actually helped me.
From the list below, you can see that I have tried 4 types of tests, and to tell you the truth, I even did all the Verbal sections a second time when I retook. E.g – I took the MGMAT Verbal sections twice just on my retake. You may think that the point is lost when a person faces the same question which he/she just answered 2 weeks ago. I won’t disagree, but the learning comes when your mind feels the exact time pressure and recalls what went wrong the first time, and what the correct method is. This is much better than passively revising the error log.
I always made it a point to time my tests, and always included the IR and AWA sections. Including the IR and AWA is vital, as these are there mainly to take your energy away. So specially if its towards the end, always practice with AWA and IR, and learn to increase your endurance and mental stamina.

Strategy 2 – Error log
Everyone talks about the error log, but here’s my two cents worth anyway. I wrote the errors and the learnings. I noted the ones which were tough and the recurring errors. These I transferred on to another book. Then I used to go through this shortlisted error log very often.

I wish I knew –
I regret having been too cautious on taking the entire practice exam, including AWA and IR. This was good to build stamina, but on my first take, it drained too much of my valuable energy which I could have used on studying my PRECIOUS - Verbal.
On my first take, I focused more on mastering the test format, before mastering the individual components. So I mixed up PS, DS, SC, RC and CR questions every time I did questions and made it into timed question banks. Say breaking the OG questions into 10 of SC, 10 of RC, 10 of CR, 10 of DS and 10 of PS in 100 minutes. Doing all questions at once prevented me from mastering individual components of the test – SC/CR/RC. On my retake, I did SC only at a stretch, followed by RC only and CR only respectively. I never thought I could form a pattern for SC and RC. But on my retake, as I practiced a string of questions at a stretch, I found everything falling into order ( Not perfect order, but at least something acceptable).

Period of study –
1st time – 2.5 months.
Retake – 1.5 months.

Books used
GMAC – OG 13th Edition, Verbal review 2nd edition, Quant review 2nd edition.
Manhattan – GMAT Complete Strategy Guide Set 5th Edition, Advanced Quant.
Kaplan – GMAT premier 2013, GMAT premier 2014, GMAT800.
Powerscore verbal bible.


Actual and practice test scores
1st Time
Actual – 710, Q51, V34, AWA 6, IR 8
MGMAT
Test 1 - 640, Q48, V30.
Test 2 - 620, Q48, V28.
Test 3 - 710, Q50, V36.
Test 4 - 750, Q51, V41.
Test 5 - 720, Q51, V37.
Kaplan
690
690
700
710
740
GMAT Prep
740
740

Retake
Actual – 760, Q50, V42, AWA 6, IR 8
MGMAT
Test 1 - 740, Q51, V40.
Test 2 - 720, Q45, V43.
Test 3 - 690, Q47, V37.
Test 4 - 730, Q51, V39.
Test 5 - 720, Q49, V39.
Test 6 - 720, Q51, V37.
MGMAT After resetting for the 2nd time
Test 5 - 740, Q46, V45.
Test 6 - 760, Q49, V45.

Kaplan
760
760
710
760
760

GMAT Prep
740
740
GMAT Prep extra tests pack
720
770

Kudos + special mention – I took 15 of the GMAT Club tests. I think the Quant helped me a lot by throwing up various types of questions. The verbal was good for understanding different concepts, but confusing at times. I always had 4-6 Quant questions left when the timer was done.

GMATCLUB Quant, and MGMAT Quant were extreeeeemeeely tougher than actual. But I guess this was one of the reasons, I finished Quant way before time was up. Kaplan RC passages were incredibly challenging, and specially for me, there were too many unfamiliar words. But the more Kaplan RC passages I did, the more I learnt about paraphrasing and summarizing in my mind and on paper.

Here's my timing strategy

Time to go ---- Minimum questions complete
Quant
60 ----------------------- 8
45 ----------------------- 15
30 ----------------------- 23
15 ----------------------- 30

Verbal
60 ----------------------- 8
45 ----------------------- 17
30 ----------------------- 25
15 ----------------------- 33

If you're a bit behind planned number of questions, take a few guesses and get back on track. Remember that GMAT penalizes more for 2 wrong answers back to back, rather than 2 spread out wrong answers. Furthermore, GMAT's greatest penalty is for not finishing the test. So if you go slow, get many correct questions but don't finish the exam, then your score will drop drastically.

I’d be more than happy to answer any queries.

Good luck