790 on First GMAT Online Attempt - How I Did It and What to Expect

Hi All,

First off, I just wanted to say thanks for all of the helpful information as I’ve been preparing for the GMAT. GMAT Club has been an absolutely essential resource in my prep work for the the exam and helped me understand why I missed a number of questions on the practice tests and official prep materials (especially when the explanations in the OG books have been vague and unhelpful). I wanted to pay it forward by sharing some details of my Enhanced GMAT Online Experience this past weekend and to give some information on how I was able to achieve this score.

A little background first: I am a professional ACT and SAT (and ISEE and SSAT and English/History/Calculus) tutor and I had already taken the At-Home GRE last year and had gotten a perfect 340 on it, so I was very much familiar with almost all of the Math and Grammar content on the exam and had a rock-solid understanding of basic test-taking strategies even before I started prepping. However, the GMAT definitely presented a greater challenge for me than other standardized tests. Working entirely without a calculator was difficult, the data sufficiency questions were a new type of problem for me, and the inability to return to previous questions forced me to rethink my question by question approach. Generally I have always taken advantage of "quick skipping" and returning to more difficult questions after the full set of questions is finished, and since I am able to work very quickly and usually finish sections early, I like to use that extra time to double and even triple check previous answers. On the GMAT, however, you have to keep moving and the timer keeps ticking, so when you are presented with a near-impenetrable 700-level Quant question that may or may not be experimental you have to make a real decision about whether to guess or to keep working and burning the clock. This made the Quant a real challenge for me at the outset - I scored a 750 on my first practice test, but that was almost entirely carried by my near-perfect Verbal score. I missed 10 out of 31 questions on that first Quant section and was barely able to finish! That really had me kicking myself since I consider myself to be pretty damn good at Math!

My prep work occurred first somewhat passively and then very intensely over the last month. I took each of practice tests #2, #3, and #4 about a month apart and scored a 770 and two 780's with much stronger results on Quant, using explanations here on GMAT Club to review my wrong answers. Then last month, I finally decided to actually take the GMAT after an admissions advisor told me that a 780+ would significantly increase my chance of getting a full ride for a top MBA program. I shifted into overdrive, regularly working on questions from the Official Guide, the Official Verbal Guide, and the Official Quantitative Guide, and I also bought the Official Advanced Questions Guide. Two weeks before the test, I took Practice Test #5 and scored a 780, and a week before the test I took Practice Test #6 and also scored a 780. Then, in a move that I would probably not recommend to anyone else, I completed all of the remaining 200+ questions from the Advanced Question book in a single day before the exam and reviewed all of my wrong answers in the book and on all six of my practice tests here on GMAT Club. It was a 10-12 hour marathon, but it worked for me and definitely made the real exam feel a lot easier as that Advanced Questions book is littered with poorly worded problems and trap answers (hallmarks of the most difficult questions).

I took the Enhanced GMAT Online on my MacBook Pro and mostly had a very smooth test experience (as I did when I took the At-Home GRE last year), but there were a few notable hiccups. First, my proctor had a bit of trouble actually starting the exam, so even though I checked in 15 minutes early, I didn’t actually start my exam until 10 minutes after my appointment time (by which time I already had to use the bathroom as I chugged half a cup of coffee just before I checked in!). I was also under the mistaken assumption that I needed my cell phone in the room in order to do the check-in, but I think that was only part of the old GMAT Online experience through Pearson Vue. During the initial check-in, I told the proctor that I had my phone in the room when she asked about it and she asked me to move it into the other room, which I did.

Since I’m more of a verbal person, I did V/Q/IR/AWA. I think the Verbal was somewhat tricky but very much comparable to the six official practice tests online. I finished the section with more than ten minutes to spare, and I felt 100% certain on every RC and CR question, which felt closer in difficulty level to the Official Guide than to the Advanced Questions book. However, there were a few very tough sentence corrections that I waffled on (including one I’m fairly certain I got wrong). For Quant, I went in expecting it to be much more difficult than the practice tests based on what I’ve heard about recent exams and particularly recent GMAT Online tests, but in my experience it was basically the exact same level of difficulty as the questions on the official practice tests. I was making incredible time on the first half of the section and was feeling rather impressed with myself at first, but I just barely finished with seconds to spare as I think I spent too much time writing out problems on the whiteboard rather than just jumping in to solve them. I also got completely stumped on my last question without much time for any workarounds, so I had to take an educated guess.

For IR, I struggled with the first couple of questions as I was super burned out after barely finishing Quant and then was making up for time throughout the whole rest of the section. Not being able to go backwards really hurt me here, and I ended up doing worse than on all of my practice tests (which I scored a 7 or an 8 on). I don’t think the questions were necessarily harder than on any practice tests but I just got jumbled up on two or three of the early ones and ended up forcing myself to move too quickly. I also definitely think I didn’t prepare enough for this section as I was exclusively focused on Verbal and Quant during my studies and didn’t do any work on IR at all outside of the practice tests.

The AWA was the only really glitchy section. My essay turned out great, but I kept getting a glitch that deleted the sentence that I was currently writing and sometimes multiple sentences! At one point I had to write the same sentence, no joke, five different times and I had to restart my whole third paragraph after I had already written two sentences. Also, as I typed, occasionally it would randomly highlight the entire paragraph so that if I typed another word the whole paragraph would be deleted, so I ended up having to type much more slowly in order to prevent disaster from striking. In addition, the return key stopped working at various points, so I had to figure out a workaround in order to start new paragraphs (I had to go to the last word of the previous paragraph, press enter in order to make a space, and then go back and fill in the word I cut off). Luckily, I’m a very quick writer but this almost made me want to scream! If I hadn't gotten a 6 on the section, I definitely would have complained to GMAC, but I figure there's no use raising a stink about it now. I know the Enhanced GMAT Online Test with the AWA is fairly new so maybe they'll work out the kinks in the future, but this issue was annoying enough that I probably would have preferred a test center in retrospect.

Overall, I was very happy with the way my score turned out: I got a 790 overall with 51Q, 49V, 6 IR, and 6 AWA. This was higher than all six of my official practice tests, but I’m still kicking myself about the IR section and since I was probably just one question away from an 800! So close! I’m somewhat tempted to try again for an 800 and an 8 as I know I can achieve both but at the same time I’m pretty exhausted from this one and I think I accomplished my purposes.