My GMAT and MBA journey (short version) –
https://e-gmat.com/blogs/gmat-success-s ... holarship/I started my GMAT journey seriously sometime in September of 2018. Before that, I was on and off about the whole MBA and GMAT plan. But once I finalized my plan in Q4’18, I started off with Official guides to get an idea about the overall format and different question types. Before I started preparing for specific sections, I took an official mock to set up the benchmark and see what sections I was good at and what sections do I need to focus on during my prep. I quickly realized that I was good in quant (given I always loved solving quant related problems) but verbal was something which I thought might be a roadblock for me to get to a good score.
So, I started looking for online courses which would help me improve my verbal section. I went through multiple successful GMAT stories and found a common theme that for non-native speakers
e-GMAT has been effective in improving their verbal score.
e-GMAT was also one of the most highly reviewed courses for verbal prep. So, I went for one of their Verbal live prep courses
e-GMAT – One of the best courses out there to improve your verbal especially for non-native speakers (I am another testament to this fact now ?)Since I was good at quant, I wanted to do refresh that first and get it over with – I made a mistake here which I will get back to later. I refreshed my quant skills in 3-4 weeks of time. Mainly solved
OG (Main and Quant guide)
Once I was done with my quant prep. I started working on my verbal. I focused on going through one section at a time. Since I had prior experience of giving GRE back in 2014. I knew my RC and CR skills were okay to begin with. Going into the course my major focus was to improve my performance on SC. But anyways, I went through all the sections starting with RC, then CR and finally going to my Achilles heel – SC. Before
e-GMAT my verbal score was in range of V25-27. I found out that RC and CR approaches in their course were working well for me as it helped me improve my RC and CR further. This helped me pushed my verbal score to cross the 30 mark.
Then I started off my SC prep by first going through the different modules. I was finding it very difficult to follow
e-GMAT’s 3-step process for SC. I was still finding it more comfortable with the normal SC approach i.e. splitting options into 2/3 and then answering but that approach wasn’t proving consistent for me as I was sometimes getting Hard questions correct and Easy questions wrong which led me to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with my approach. I had already put 1-2 months effort on SC. And rescheduled my exam date once (Dec’18 to Feb’19). So, I decided to give exam anyways in Feb’19.
Fun fact – I scored Q51 in every mock before my first GMAT attempt ?
Exam day – I was not that nervous on the day as I was confident in my test taking skills. I chose Q-V-IR-AWA as the sequence as I wanted to start off with my strong suit (Quant). Little did I know that my confidence will soon take a hit as I was 20-25 minutes into my quant section. I was finding some of the questions to be difficult in nature therefore had to guess some of them to complete the section on time. This really made me lose my focus a little bit, but I tried to keep my composure so that I do not lose focus and screw up the rest of the sections. ~3 hours later – I finished my exam, 680 flashed on my screen – Q49 V33. I was disappointed with my score as I was expecting something in the range of 700-720. I was especially disappointed with my quant score Q49.
Now coming back to the mistake I was talking about during my quant preparation. Even though my prep for quant was good, but while preparing for verbal I did not practice quant much and that made me lost my touch of solving quant questions. This was one of the major reason for my Quant underperformance. In verbal, I scored in the similar range as my mocks so I knew if I can improve my SC approach, my verbal score can improve by a lot.
Key takeaways and action items from my first attempt –
• Keeping in touch with the prep you are done with is crucial
• Try to adopt
e-GMAT meaning based approach to solve SC questions
Start prepping for the next attemptI thought giving the exam again will not only give me another opportunity to gun for Q51 (which I thought I was capable of given I keep in touch with me prep), but I will also have the chance to change my approach for SC. So, I booked another date for GMAT now in end of March’19 giving me ~1.5 months to work on these two action items. But due to a couple of important family functions I was not able to prepare much during these 1.5 months, and I had a planned international trip in April for 2-3 weeks. So, I knew that I would not be able to prepare regularly till April end. So, I gave myself 2 months for prep and rescheduled my date for June end.
Although I started my full blown prep in first week of May but I made sure that I don’t lose the touch with my prep so I was making sure to solve some questions alternate days and when I couldn’t do that I went on to GMAT Club and went through some of the threads. I know this might not sound important but for me even thinking about GMAT was helping me mentally to be in touch with my prep even though I was not solving any questions per se. When I started my prep in May my major focus was SC but along with my prep for SC I was solving a fixed number of passages and questions for other sections on alternate days. For SC my main focus was to improve my approach. This time around since I had time on my hand so, I went for Quality vs Quantity. Initially I was solving just 6-8 questions on weekdays. But these 8 questions took me more than 2 hours. You would ask yourself 120 for 8 questions, something is wrong with this guy. Reason for so much time is, I was not focused on getting the question correct but understanding the question and 4 options, and then deep diving into why one option is correct and the other 4 options are not. This is where
egmat process for solving SC questions really worked for me. If you follow this, you will realize it is time consuming at first. But if you follow this with discipline and regularly enough, you will benefit two-fold. Firstly, you will not only ingrain the
e-GMAT process which will have increased your accuracy and efficiency, but since you also studied wrong options, you will start to see a pattern in the questions as well which can help you anticipate the options and hence making it more time efficient.
At end of my prep I had improved my SC skills but to get to my target score of 750 I was still 10-20 points short in the mocks. So, I was thinking of postponing my June end exam date by a couple more weeks. But my family convinced me to go for it saying that if it does not pan out you can anyways give another attempt in 2-3 weeks. I though it makes sense and I can actually test myself in the exam environment. So, in a way this was a mock exam in my mind, so it took some of the exam pressure off from my mind.
Exam day – Reached the center on time. Went for the same sequence i.e. Q-V-IR-AWA. I breezed through my quant. To be honest some of the questions in later half of the section were looking very easy for me (contrary to my first attempt) but I was majorly focused on solving a question at the time. After that verbal came, I was following the same strategy i.e. solving the section question by question. To my surprise when a couple of questions were left at the end, I had 5 minutes left on the timer and eventually I finished my verbal section before time. This has never happened to me in my mocks. After finishing up the IR and AWA. My score flashed on my screen- 760. I was shocked to see that number on the screen. It took me a couple of minutes register this in my mind that I in fact have scored 760 which was way above I was expecting to. I think one of the major reason for the extra 10-20 points was the no pressure factor during the exam.
Finally, I would like to conclude that with right strategy and diligence it is possible to reach your goals or even surpass them as well (even though it might take a lot of time. ~10 months in my case). So, I would suggest all of you to not get demotivated or lose hope and keep walking on the path, and sooner or later you will reach there. ?
I would like you to know that I will be heading to Tuck this Fall as a T’22 and I am planning to write a debrief soon about how I prepared my B-school applications and prepped for the interviews. I will add the link here once I post that as well.
Hope this debrief is helpful to you prospective students. Please feel free to reach out in case you have any questions regarding the debrief or anything else as well
Farman Singh Garcha