Hello everyone! hope you are doing good. I wanted to share my gmat story, how I scored a 770!
To start with my background:
After completing my mechanical engineering, I was an average guy working at TCS as a team member. At that time I was hardly motivated to do anything big. Although I had always wanted to do an MBA, I had for 3 years in a row unsuccessfully attempted the CAT to get into good MBA institutes. Though I did not want to give up, I was definitely not very motivated to try the CAT again. Around that time, I heard that several decent Indian schools offered MBA programs based GMAT score, also I attended an info session organised by S.P Jain Global school of Management, with campuses in Dubai, Sydney and Singapore. That was when I started seriously considered GMAT. At that time my best hope was to get at least 700 on GMAT and try to get a decent Indian school or at best into SP Jain global school with a good scholarship.
Preparations for GMAT; how I scored 770:
Luckily I was aiming for June admission window for SP Jain and started my GMAT Prep early in January itself. I first wanted to try the GMAT without attending any coaching classes and prepare myself. So after extensive research online, I stumbled upon
Expert’s Global GMAT(
https://www.expertsglobal.com) training services. Their guidance program was very much like what I was looking for, I could get the materials and tests, while I could prepare myself. I enrolled for the guidance program, although I never knew or talked to anyone who had used their services, and I had hardly read any reviews before I decided to go ahead. Looking back it was one of the best decisions had taken in my life, certainly a life changing one.
(a) Study Materials: Once I enrolled, I received the hard copies and study materials by courier, and also pen drive full of soft copies of books and practice test software. The study materials were vast, exhaustive and self explanatory and very easy to understand. Practice books were provided for each of problem solving, data sufficiency, RC, CR and SC and each was divided into 3 stages based on difficulty levels and the package also included around 20 mock GMAT tests. I never had to refer or even touch any other material throughout my preparation.
(b) Study Plan: This was the best part of the program, since I was working, I needed a flexible but detailed study plan. I was provided a detailed study plan by my mentors for the first phase of my training, accommodating my work schedules. Also I was asked to take a diagnostic test before the schedule was drawn and based on that more time was allotted to verbal section, since I was struggling with that. Now all I did was I just tried to follow the study plan. It was easily manageable, it was never more than 15 or 20 questions from each section every day, and mock tests in the weekend. After solving 15 to 20 questions, when I verified the answers, the materials were such that I had to go through an entire paragraph, explaining why the right answer was right and other answers were wrong, and this helped me learn everything faster. As I made progress with my prep, my study plan was updated. In the first month when I started the preparation in February I was scoring in the low 600s and I was able to answer only 20-22 questions right in the verbal section. But I simply continued what I was doing, I tried to solve 15-20 questions on SC, CR and tried to solve 3-4 RCs everyday and thoroughly reviewed the answers and tried to understand why I was wrong, slowly my accuracy improved in the verbal section and I started scoring in the 650-680 range in the mock tests by the end of March. Each time I made a mistake, I went through the answers, and tried to understand why each wrong answer was wrong, not just the option I selected. This made my learning much more efficient in that , net time I was able to avoid the mistakes I had done previously and also other mistakes. By mid-April I crossed the 700 barrier in mock tests. After that it was all about mastering what I had learned. It was all about trying to solve as many difficult questions as possible consecutively and as quickly as possible. Again the way the study materials were prepared, made this easy.
(c) Test day: I took the test in May last year after 3 months of preparation. Although I had scored up to 740 in mock tests, which was well above my initial target, I was still a little anxious. But I was able to sit though the exam without a problem and I was calm throughout. That was the advantage of taking couple of mock tests very week, I was so used to sitting for hours solving problems in test environment that, the actual GMAT felt very much like a practice test. Even then I was not prepared for what I saw on my screen after my test. A 770!! Q50, V45. Way above anything I hoped for.. It was a moment that changed everything for me.
Some tips, I'd like to share
(A) keep practicing everyday,at least 15-20 questions everyday, especially the section in which you are not very good... too much gap during prep is not good and you'l lose momentum
(B) Review the answer key after each exercise or model test and understand why the right answer was right and the wrong answers were wrong.
(C) Take as many practice tests as possible, more than practice, this gave me exam stamina, on the real day, I was able to sit at one place for 4 hours without losing my attention and helped me concentrate on the test with a cool head..
and a strategy I'd like to suggest for RCs, It worked for me, I never read the passages completely, and I nver took more than 2 mins to skim a passage. what I tried to do was to form a skeletal structure of the passage in my head, like the first paragraph is explaining something and the author is contradicting that in the 2nd paragraph etc. This gave me enough time to understand the questions that followed and I knew which part of the passage I should look for the answer. of course it was difficult to start with, but my accuracy was near 100% after a few weeks.
In conclusion, I think continuous practice and critical review of my own performance after every practice session was the most important factor behind my success. I'd also like to thank my mentors at
Experts Global, who provided me excellent materials and support and guidance including working out my study plan and helping me achieve my goals.