730 in first attempt. If I can do it, anyone can! (ESR Added)

I have attached my ESR report

Hi All,

Brief Introduction

My name is Mayank Agarwal and I an Electrical Engineers with over 10 years of experience. I have done MSEE in US and have been in US for almost 15 years. The reason I am giving these details is that I rarely see people posting here who haven't been in academics for that long and have kids and other responsibilities.
I appeared for GMAT exam on March 3rd and achieved 730 (V40, Q49) and this was my first attempt. Since I am a very average engineer, I feel that if I can do it then anyone can with hard work and determination.

I am applying for part time (Evening/Weekend) programs for Fall 2018. Fingers Crossed. Here are some details of my preparation for GMAT and test day experience. Hopefully it will help people, since it was great help for me to read some of the debriefs here.

Resources

1. e-GMAT Verbal Live Prep
2. e-gmat Quant Online Prep
3. GMAT club tests
4. 800 score tests
5. GMAT prep

Preparations

The idea of going for part time MBA came into my mind in Sep 2017. First step was of course GMAT exam.
1. First thing I did was bought the Official GMAT2018 guide. For first couple of weeks after receiving the book I read some of the material and tried solving few verbal and quant questions. Verbal was so bad that I thought it was going to be almost impossible to get a decent score. Quant problem solving was not bad and being an engineer I thought I can handle quant anyways (this was one of the biggest mistake I made), more on this later in the post.
2. A friend of mine recommended to take a date, since that will force me to get serious. So beginning of Oct 2017, I registered for the exam for March 2018, thinking 4-5 months should be enough.
3. Another couple of weeks went by(early October) and I was starting to get worried as I was not able to understand Verbal explanations in OG. Same friend who recommended to register for exam, told me about e-gmat.
4. I went to e-gmat website and registered for verbal live course and attended their free SC-1 webinar. That was the game changer for me. First thought I had after the webinar was "hmmm this is totally doable, hard but doable". I think that was great positive re-inforcement.
5. After signing up for Verbal live e-gmat course I attended couple more live classes over the weekend but was still not consistent in my preparation during the week.
6. All Nov went by and after thanksgiving 2017 break it hit me that I have barely 3 months left for the preparation. Thats when things got serious and thanks to my wife and son for their support. I made sure to attend all the verbal classes for next 6-8 weeks and also go through the material before the live class over the weekend.

For the month of Dec 2017 and Jan 2018, I made sure to study few hours every day including weekends. During weekdays 5-7 in the morning and 8:30 - 11 in the night. I think one fo the driving force was the course material provided by e-gmat. They don't provide any tricks or shortcuts which I loved. It was all logical and resonated very well with my approach. One of the advantage I had was that I work from home, so save lot of time by not commuting.

Verbal SC

When I started looking into SC via e-gmat, my first impression was that these are just way too many rules to remember. I had to force myself to follow e-gmat's 3 step approach and as soon as I started spending time on understanding the meaning of the sentence, rules started coming into my mind automatically. I could see and feel the improvement in my approach to the SC questions.

Verbal RC

I always dreaded RC before the first live webinar from e-gmat. After the webinar I realized that all that is needed is practice to read in a way that you understand the meaning clearly. Following e-gmat's approach to summarize each paragraph in the mind was an awesome tip. Immediately following this approach I saw improvement in my scores in e-gmat scholoranium. I think I read at least 40 RC passages during 2 weeks and my average reading and understanding time for a long passage came down to under 4 min and I started with well over 6 mins.

Verbal CR

Now this was the tough one. My initial assessment of CR before any lessons was that is doesn't seem hard. But, when I started solving OG questions especially weakening and strengthening the argument, I realized it will need some work. During first round of prep using e-gmat I didn't pay much attention to pre-thinking aspect. Around middle of feb when I was giving mock test, CR was always in the range of 40-50% ability. Then I realized that to cross 700, I would need to improve in CR. I went through the concept files in e-gmat CR section again and literally forced myself to come up with falsification condition and pre-think assumptions. It was very tempting to look at answer choices but by that time I had already realized that without pre-thinking I will end up wasting valuable time. Within a week I started seeing score improvements in CR practice quizzes. Looking at the ESR report, I scored 91 percentile in CR . Once again make sure to pre-think assumptions, it really matters.

Biggest Mistake- Quant

My biggest mistake was to take Quant for granted. My day to day job in AI domain involves lot of math, so I thought last one month for Quant would be enough. One of the planning resource from e-gmat recommends that prepare the section you are strong in first. I completely ignored this because I was too worried about Verbal and over confident in Quant. Starting Feb 1st I started looking at Quant and a week into it I was ready to postpone my test date. I was completely freaked out since I didn't remember any of the formulas and less than a month before the exam and I still had to spend some time on verbal everyday.
Instead of postponing the exam, I told my wife to just forget about me for 3-4 weeks, I had to spend at least 6-8 everyday for last 3 weeks before the exam. I only managed to get 49 in Quant. If I had spent more time on Quant early on in the preparation I am sure I would have easily got 51. Lesson learned: do not take things for granted.

Practise

Verbal

My main sources of practicing for verbal were
1. OG 2018: one of the great thing about e-gmat courses is that after each verbal subsection section for e.g. verb tenses, modifiers etc. they provide list of OG questions related to that sub section. This worked as a great confidence booster while going through the material.
2. e-gmat scholoranium: I think this is one off the greatest resource out there for practicing. Not only it gives you accuracy score, but also provides ability scores which I really appreciated. One thing I made sure to do was to look at wrong answer choices even if I had answered the question correctly. This automatically helped in learning all the SC related rules. I started going through verbal scholoranium at the end of Jan and made a point to practice every day.
3. GMAT Club tests: Early feb I started attempting gmat club verbal quizzes which you get free access to once you sign up for e-gmat. My first 3 attempts were V26, 22 26. This was very disappointing considering less than a month left in the exam. Main reason was CR and as I got comfortable with pre-thinking I got 32 and 34 in next 2 attempts.
4. 800 test: You also get access to five 800 tests when you sign up for e-gmat. I read someone else's debrief that 800 tests are closer to actual tests. Week before the exam I only attempted one verbal test in 800 and score 36.

I believe as long as you stay at good level or keep getting better, you are on good track. If mock scores are going down as it was the case with me initially, its important to analyze the weakness and work on it.

Quant

1. OG: As I already mentioned I started working on quant quite late, it took me first 2 weeks of February to go over all the e-gmat quant lessons. While going through the lessons I was attempting related OG questions. For some sections I was scoring quite well and for others not so well.
2. e-gmat Scholoranium: Due to lack of time I didn't even complete 10% of scholoranium quant questions. I didn't score above 60% in any of the ability quizzes. I felt hard and very hard questions in Scholoranium quant are much harder than actual GMAT questions. That's good for practice though, I wish I had spent more time on Quant scholoranium.
3. GMAT Club test: last weeks of feb, I made sure to attempt at least one quant quiz in GMAT club every day. I started with Q38 and eventually reached Q47. For some reason questions seemed harder than OG but that was good in my opinion. Since, attempting harder questions in same time would definitely help.
4. 800 test: During last week before the exam I attempted 3 quizzes in 800 score, and scored 46, 45, 47. There questions were similar to OG in terms of difficulty level.

All the mocks at GMAT club and 800, I never scored above 700. Highest I scored was 680.
Last but not the least, day before the exam I attempted one of the GMAT prep full test and scored 710 (V39, Q48). This was highest so far and was a great confidence booster since it was day before the exam.

Test Day

My exam was at noon on March 3rd. In the morning I tried not to take stress, I only looked at my notes to go over quant formulas. After practicing so much for last 15-20 days, I knew that only thing which will result in my failure would be to panic during the exam.
Quant was still the stronger of 2, so I choose quant, verbal, IR, Essay.
Quant questions didn't seem hard at that point. One thing I made sure was that if I am stuck and its been already 3 mins, then make a guess and move on. Also, I made sure not to think about previous questions while concentrating on the one on screen. I remember, for last 2 questions I only had 3 minutes left. Second last question took around 2 mins, which left only a minute for last questions, and to make things worse last question was not difficult but needed some calculations. I was not able to complete the calculations, so just had to pick a closest choice I thought was correct at the last second. As I said earlier if I had given more time to quant early on I would have easily score 51. But, 49 is still decent I think.

Second section was verbal. 3 out of 4 RC passages seemed really hard. I had to read 2 of them twice. But I knew that not understanding the passage would be disastrous since each passage has 3-4 questions. All the practice and analyzing the mistakes helped a lot, I did not panic at all in tough questions. Time was not an issue at all, according to my ESR report average attempt time in verbal was 1:46 .

In the end it was a great feeling to see 730 on screen. I was expecting somewhere around 700 but definitely not 730. Its very rewarding when you see your hard work and determination paying off. Now that I look back, most important aspect of my planning was to continue analyzing the weaknesses and making sure to work on them. This is not rocket science, if I can do in 3 months, anyone can.

Hope this will be helpful to people who are currently preparing for GMAT. All the best to fellow test takers.

Please feel free to post here if any questions. Happy to help.