Attempt 1As a non-native speaker, I required a lot of effort to improve on verbal. On a positive note, Quant was fairly straight forward and I only worked on certain topics and DS type questions; I regularly scored between 48-50. I used the
e-gmat course to study for GMAT. I spent July and August studying sporadically and did not make much progress. Keeping in mind the R2/3 deadlines, I scheduled my exam for 30th Oct and started to concentrate my efforts starting Sept and took a month off in October. I was scoring between 650 to 710 in mocks, thus a 700+ target was pretty much left to luck. (In hindsight I realized studying full-day is less beneficial than studying regularly for 3-4 hours each day. This strategy did not work for me but can work for someone else.)
Exam Day - The 1-hour journey to the center and the waiting time made me so anxious that I could not concentrate on the exam. My reading and retention skills dropped to a maximum of 3-4 sentences. As a result, I could only solve CR and SC questions and guessed all 4 RC passages
. I just could not bring my attention back to those lengthy RC passages. Dejected from the verbal section, I just considered the attempt to be an expense mock and gave the remaining sections with a heavy heart. Got a score of 650(Q48,V31) and had to put my MBA dreams on-hold.
Attempt 2 - GMAT OnlineI took a break for a few months, changed my role, talked to people on their GMAT experiences, and explored GMAT Club. Again targeting R1 deadlines for the upcoming admission cycles, I made my study plan from April to June.
Things I did differently this time
- Chucked e-gmat course as it did not work for me.
- Studied Sentence Correction basics from scratch (using GMAT Club Grammar book and Manhattan guide)
- Revised Quant basics from GMAT Club Math book.
- Read other's strategies and debriefs to build and perfect my own.
- Practiced questions using GMAT Club's timer and error log. Made custom pivots in excel using the error log information to identify areas of improvement.
- Perfected consistent accuracy starting from 500 level in all sections. Aimed for 90% accuracy before moving to the next difficulty level.
- Again solved all 3 GMAT OG books (2020) on GMAT Club. Solved all of the official questions (OG2021, old official questions), and GMATPrep questions for additional practice in weak areas.
- Used GMATClub tests to perfect my quant score (they are really good) and practice timing for verbal (not so good)
- Perfected strategies for RC, SC, and CR and practiced questions to strengthen those strategies (more on strategies at the end).
GMAT Online Debrief Signed in at 10:15 AM for 10:45 AM exam. Downloaded PearsonVUE software, uploaded a selfie, passport image and room photos using mobile. Once uploaded, the webcam started recording and I was matched to a proctor in less than 10 seconds. The proctor only asked to show the whiteboard and the exam started. The whole process took around 10 mins. I had practiced not to cover my mouth or look anywhere else than my screen or whiteboard to minimize any interruptions from the proctor and as a result there were no interruptions from the proctor. During the 5 min break, I thought it would be good to inform the proctor in chat that I am leaving my desk, however, the proctor did not show up and there was no chat option to leave a message, so I just left for a break after realizing the proctor might take longer.
Quant was standard and no surprises. Completed the Quant a few minutes early and utilized that time to stretch my arms, drink water, and relax before verbal. I believe the first half of verbal was very CR heavy and second half SC heavy with RC equally split across. I found the CR questions very time consuming as they were lengthy to comprehend and prethink. SC was straightforward and RC passages were standard, not too tough (except for the last tough social science passage, hate that
). I spent too much time in CR questions and was left with 7 questions (including a passage) in the last 10 mins. Barely finished in time and skipped a CR question. IR section was also standard, no surprises. Apart from multi-source reasoning format(3 questions), the rest was straight forward to solve.
The testing experience was super smooth and I got my score on Wednesday early morning (in 4 calendar days /3 working days). Finally scored 710 (Q50,V36, IR 7).
Thanks to GMATClub and to amazing people
bb,
Bunuel,
GMATNinjaHigh-level strategies I applied- RC: read the passage carefully, differentiate the author's view from scholar's / historian's view, understand why is the passage written (main point), connect the passages to each other. After reading the complete passage, I jump to question and quickly re-read the relevant section and do POE.
- SC: read the sentence carefully, identify error in original sentence, use splits and meaning to remove definite errors. If I was still left with more than 1 option, I used to plug and check in sentence.
- CR: find the conclusion, pre-think the answer, do POE.
- Quant: read the question carefully and don't miss any given condition.