My GMAT journey (last 2 week's journey) : 650 to 720

I prepared for around 3 months and the score with which I started after a month of preparation was 660 in MGMAT.
However, then I never improved till the 75th day of my prep...But I managed to score a 720 in the actual GMAT ...

Here is the narrative of what I did in last few days (2 weeks to be precise)…

I got a 650 in a GMAT Prep test and immediately after that got a 38 in Quant in a GC Test …totally shattered …
Then read a couple of debriefs on GC..dont remember which ones …

Then started doing this :
1. SC question from OG Only (this was like kind of a revision as I already finished all the question once while doing the concepts)..

But this time I didn’t timed myself (though was noting the time but without any target of 90 sec or 120 sec) and the sole focus was to identify the concept tested in a question and what is wrong in each incorrect answer choice …

After doing this, I reviewed the explanation given in the OG and wherever it was mentioned “awkward or wordy” I referred to GMATCLUB discussion on that particular question ..

Also, I read most of the experts comments and explanation on that particular question ..

Like this I must have done around 50-70 question …

One more thing ..I did this topic wise ..like I started with Subject Verb agreement and did all question pertaining to the topic in the above mentioned fashion …and before starting this I revised each topic & my notes in detail..

(This was mentioned by Souvik – one of the Verbal forum moderator who scored 770/760 something)



2. CR : Again I started with concept revision for each topic …then started with some standard questions per topic and then did few GMAT prep questions & Mangoosh on each topic from GMATClub…

Idea was to recognize a pattern & make myself comfortable with the language of the prompt (as my problem was understanding the prompt in most of the cases)..

What helped most was this man’s post https://gmatclub.com/forum/members/member-252884.html

Refer to the links in his signature ..(Verbal Attack and CR revision are the best for revision and understanding the pattern)

This I did for each type of question and solved around 25-30 question for most common types like weaken / assumption / strengthen and around 15 question for other types

My problem in CR was timing ..I was able to solve most of the question in 3 mins but if you ask me to do it in 2 mins I will falter ..

After a week of above exercise..I was able to solve easier question in around 90 sec and hard question 150 sec ( I stop bothering about timings and thought would leave a couple (if required) in the example)..

P.S : Though I got some really tough RCs in the GMAT..I managed the timing well and only for 1 CR I had to rush (and NOT blindly marked) and marked the answer immediately which felt right..



3. RCs : This is where I gained most and got my confidence back in the last few days …Yes very surprising as RC is not supposed to be an asset in GMAT …

By this time, I had all the Verbal review (VR2) RCs untouched..so I started doing it from the beginning but the initial ones are pretty easy with short passages and 5-6 question ..then I begin from the last one …which is around 4 paragraph and 6-7 question…

My problem in RCs were :

1. Understanding the RC (most the Humanities, Economic and History specially the Women Emancipation)

2. Accuracy in “Detail” questions

3. And would normally start yawning by the end of the second paragraph

So the first thing I focused on was understanding the passage (didn’t bothered about time but noticed that for short passage I was able to finish understand and solving 1st question in 4-4:30 mins and long passages in 6-6:30 min) and started getting good accuracy and also this increased understanding and good accuracy helped me maintaining my concentration …
This kind of became my formula to approach all the RCs…
And by the end of VR2 passages, I was able to maintain accuracy of around 80-85% with average 2min/question
But the problem with OG and VRs passages is that they have around 5-7 questions per passage and in actual exam max 4 question / passage ..
so while practicing by the end of the 3rd question I would have consumed something around 8 mins (for short passage) and 10-11 mins (for long passage) which is NOT at all acceptable for the exam..
So I started targeting 6 mins by the end of the 3rd question (I used E-gmats scholaranium for this part) and with another 15 passages (in last week prior to exam) I was roughly there …

All this was done between 15th to 7th day prior to exam…in last 5-6 days I solved as many question as possible from E-gmat scholaranium and few from GMAT Prep (available on GMATClub) in all three sections (SC, CR and RCs)..
In between I tood one GMAT Prep -1 repeat and got V36 (very few question were repeated) and on last day prior to exam GMAT Prep-2 repeat I got V38 (with few extra repeats than GMAT Prep-1)
I also gave one GMAT CLUB Quant exam in the last 10 days in which I got Q50 and then decided not to touch quant…(though I did quant concept revision on one of the days)..