Persistence and Determination to reach 740

It gives me an immense pleasure and delight to write this debrief today as I myself has read many debriefs throughout my GMAT journey. Reading all those debriefs not only kept me motivated through all these months but also gave me solutions to many problems that I faced throughout the journey. So I feel obliged to return the favour to the GMAT club community. Though many of the strategies might seem repetitive, I will try to keep it succinct.

Background
I am engineering graduate working for Indian government from the past 4 years. My job is not only mentally exhausting but also physically draining, so it was really difficultly for me to devote even 2-3 quality hours everyday, and unlike most corporate sectors I don’t have weekends off during which I could make up for the hours lost. But with every passing day I could feel the guilt for not taking the 1st step towards my dream, which I saw 10 years back, of doing an MBA from an ivy league college.
Finally, regardless of all the challenges (or shall I say excuses) I decided to start my preparation for GMAT this february.

1st Attempt: GMAT 620 (Q49, V26)—June 10th
I started off my preparation this February and as I said earlier it was really difficultly for me to devote quality time everyday for GMAT preparation. For this reason I began my preparation with quantitative section. Being from an engineering background, I felt that I didn’t need much preparation for this section. Moreover, I really enjoyed solving quantitative problems and this fact would help me to not only build the stamina for studying continuously 2-2.5 hrs but also maintain my regime.

Preparation Phase:
I began practicing quantitative problems directly from official guides. I know, to some it might seem the biggest mistake that I did, but in my personal defence I do not think so because for me it was necessary to know the pattern of the test, the kind of questions that are asked and how the test takers frame questions. Apart from all these reasons I knew that there are numerous official resources which I could use later to practice more questions. I finished the quantitative section from OG in 15 days and was really comfortable with question patterns and the accuracy which I was getting. There was though one area of concern and that was data sufficiency questions from number properties and algebra; It would take me more 3 minutes to solve 700 level questions from these sub sections and I would hardly get them correct more than fifty percent of the times. But I was confident that with practice I would definitely improve.

The next was the daunting task to begin verbal section. I began practicing sentence correction questions from official guide (one of the biggest mistakes that I did). After practicing few questions from official guide I realised that though I was answering 70% of the questions correctly, I wasn’t able to discern why others options were wrong and would often get confused among them. That is when I decided to change my strategy because I felt continuing this way would be a sheer waste of good questions. So I started looking online for various resources such as books, presentations and videos etc. There were few resources which I found were a bit advanced for me and few resources which were boring. After a lot of search I came across e-Gmat verbal course. In the beginning I attended the free webinars offered by e-Gmat and I was really impressed by both the content and the user friendly platform. Just to be sure I attended few more free webinars and after considering a lot of factors such as content, reviews, pricing, quality and scholaranium question bank, I decided to enrol for the e-Gmat verbal Course. I found the course really helpful as the content was presented in the most comprehensive way possible and every module was followed by application files which would compel you to use those concepts on the GMAT like questions. After completing all the modules and application files of the SC course, I decided to practice questions from the scholaranium (2nd biggest mistake which I realised after my 2nd attempt).
After completing SC part of the scholaranium, I moved on to CR modules. The pre thinking approach to tackle CR questions is undoubtedly the best. It not only improves your comprehending skills but also helps to eliminate trap options. In addition to pre thinking technique , I also used a technique which I call “role play” technique. In this technique I would assume myself to be in a position of the object or the subject of the argument (for eg: In an argument saying something about government proposal, I would assume myself to be either in a position of government official or in a position of stakeholders).This technique of visualising the argument not only improved my accuracy in CR questions but also decreased the time it would take me solve CR questions to around 90-100 secs. After completing CR modules and practicing questions from scholaranium, I straight away decided to practice RC’s from scholaranium (3rd biggest mistake) because I thought RC’s can only be improved with practice and there is no strategy or proven way to gain substantially in RC section.

Exam phase
As I completed the whole course I started giving CAT’s available at GMAT-CLUB (one of the perks of enrolling e-gmat course is that they provide you with the subscription of gmat club tests and 5 full length 800score tests without any additional cost). After giving couple of tests I decided to go for MGMAT free full length test and scored 710 (the test was given in untimed condition). So, I booked a slot for a date 3 weeks later thinking that I would have enough time to work on my time management skills. Unfortunately, fate has something else planned for me. Just the next day I got a tragic news that a close relative of mine has passed away. I left for my native place, 2000 miles far, to attend the last rituals. I was there for about 15 days and didn’t get a second to practice a single question. In fact it wasn’t until 8th June (2 days before my test date) when I realised that I have a test in 2 days. By then it was already too late to reschedule, so I decided to appear for the test. I took no pressure or stress before the test as I knew I am not prepared and will only gain the experience of real test. As the test proceeded I got distracted and fumbled on almost every question and finally 620 flashed on my screen (to be honest I don’t even remember my exact score as I pressed the ‘cancel score’ option after vaguely seeing 56 percentile on verbal section).

2nd Attempt: GMAT 650 (V29, Q49)- 15th July
After giving my 1st attempt I knew I had to practice a lot (remember: practice makes a man perfect :D). So thats what I did and went on with full guns and blazes. I solved every question I found without reviewing the wrong options. I downloaded every free resource available on web (veritas, Manhattan, kaplan, Princeton etc) and did every question from those resources. Till now I had not given a single Gmat Prep, so it was time to have the feel of real test. I scored 720 on the first test and 730 on the second. The official prep test scores gave me moral boost but this time I don’t wanted to keep any stone left unturned, so I ordered the official test pack 2 & 3. Following are score that I got.
Gmat Prep 3: 710
Gmat Prep 4: 700
Gmat Prep 5: 650
Gmat Prep 6: 760
As you can see my results were quit erratic but still I was optimistic of my ability and decided to book a test slot for 15th July at a centre which was 500 miles away.

Test Day
As I reached the test centre, I was a little nervous but was confident of crossing the 700 barrier. I began my test with quant section. Though I had to rush through the last 2 question, everything else went pretty smooth (thats what I thought). As I started the verbal section, the fear of not performing well started to kick in. I spent almost 8 minutes on the first 2 questions but somehow managed to finish the test on time. FYI I was feeling really good and thought that test is going really well (but it wasn’t :D). After finishing both the sections I was confident that I had done really well and would definitely score above 700. With this enthusiasm I finished the IR and AWA section.
Now it was time to click the button that makes every Gmat test taker skip a heartbeat and as I pressed the end exam button, 650 flashed on my screen. I was clueless of what went wrong and even had a thought that may be this is my ability level and accepted the score.
But this wasn’t the worst feeling I had on that day (remember I have to travel 500 miles to reach home and that too without any earphone or any source of entertainment); I couldn’t sleep for those 10hrs having a thought that what went wrong. It was the longest night of my life and every 2nd minute I would check the mba.com website to see whether the option of ESR has come.

3rd Attempt: GMAT 740 (Q50, V40)-October 13th
Next day when the option to order ESR became available, I requested for it without wasting a second. After seeing my ESR I could not understand whether it was my bad luck or my lack of preparedness that has led to this unsatisfactory result; I answered only 50% of the questions correctly in the first sub section of verbal reasoning ,and even after such a bad start I still managed to get an overall accuracy of 75-80% in verbal reasoning. I was perplexed with the statistics given in ESR and adaptive algorithm of GMAC, so I decided to mail my ESR to Rajat (founder of e-Gmat) to review and give opinion. And I am really happy that I sent my ESR to e-Gmat (first right decision I took :D) because the detailed analysis and the feedback given by Rajat became the foundation for my successful attempt. Here’s my detailed plan for my 3rd and last attempt.

Quantitative
Getting Q49 on both the attempts became a concern for me as I had consistently got Q50/Q51 on Gmat prep and other mock tests. So this time I decided to see my error logs and review my previous tests in detail. I was surprised to see that the sub section, Geometry and Word problem, of which I was confident about was my weakest and the sub section, Number system and Algebra, of which I was least confident about was my strongest. From that day I decided to practice 700 level geometry and word problem questions under timed condition.
Also to improve my speed I registered for MGMAT test series as the quant section on MGMAT tests are really difficult and tests how good you can hold your nerves.

Verbal
By this time I clearly knew in which areas I have to improve: First, improve my accuracy in low and medium difficulty level questions and second, improve my speed. But before even starting to execute my plan, I was stuck with a major challenge: Lack of quality practice resource as I have already exhausted almost all my resources. Since this time I had already decided to practice only from the official question bank, I purchased the official practice question (pack of 404 questions). Instead of practicing randomly I decided to form a custom test of around 38 questions and tried to complete within 65 minutes. Additionally, I was giving MGMAT tests and analysing my mistakes.

Test Day
This time I was very calm and composed at the test centre because I knew that I was prepared as I was getting an accuracy of almost 85%. Test began with quantitative section and went quite smooth. After giving MGMAT tests, quant on Gmat felt like a cake walk and was able to finish it with 7 minutes to spare. Same was the case with verbal section. Though I had to pace up a bit in verbal section but was finally satisfied with the performance and continued with the same vigour on IR and AWA section.
Again that moment came when I have to click that ‘end exam’ button, but this time a 740 flashed on the screen. It was an extremely emotional moment for me and would cherish the result for eternity.


Take aways
Even if you really good at quant don’t ignore to check your errors logs.
If anyone wants to improve on quant, I would highly recommend MGMAT test series.
Don’t waste your valuable resources, specially scholaranium (if you have subscribed to e-Gmat course. Try to give custom full tests on scholaranium to improve your speed.
Practice from only official question bank, at least 3 weeks from taking test.
For CR pre thinking and role play techniques are the real deal. Also, I found AWA to be quite effective for CR
For RC’s try to read articles from New York times, nautili.us or new yorker.


PS: I know the post is really long but my intent is not to share the resources I used or the mocks I gave rather to address the candidates who felt demotivated after giving numerous attempts. For cracking the Gmat you need to know your strengths and weaknesses and to continue discern the gaps in your preparation and fill them.