Scoring 760 in first attempt with 2 months prep

My journey for GMAT started an year before in 2016. In july i bought the GMAT official guide and started practicing verbal and quant. It was then that I took the first GMAT prep exam to gauge where I stand. I scored 650. It did give me some confidence, however I did not continue preparing for GMAT and thought of giving CAT (by IIMs) a try. I prepared for CAT thereafter, which has quant and verbal section. Although the pattern of CAT and GMAT is different, but it kept me in touch with practicing both. However, after taking my CAT exam in Nov 2016 I did not practice or prepare for GMAT. It was only after I could not get through any B school through CAT that i decided to start preparing for GMAT again.

This time I was clear in my mind about GMAT. So the preparation started in July last week. I undertook a short trip on my birthday week to rid myself of the saturation from work. Reading various blogs about weekly schedules made me nervous, since I could not put 3-4 hours daily along with my work. So I decided to go with my own schedule and give 70% time to verbal and 30% to quant. I bought Maghoosh comprehensive package, which came at a discount for a short period. I started with verbal video lessons and made sure I took notes of important learnings. The Maghoosh video lessons are very short and to the point. The practice questions after each video or within the video are really valuable. Take them seriously. After completing a good number of sections, I started taking practice questions for those sections. Took notes of observations that I came through while practicing as well. It is really important to have these observations handy and well written to improve your overall performance. As the preparation progressed, I made sure I practised questions and took Mock GMATs at frequent intervals. I took complete GMAT mocks at every 2-3 weeks, on Sundays. Here I would suggest taking the Mocks at the time of the day when you would actually take the real GMAT. Your mind works at different concentration levels through the day. So it is good to tune it to the real GMAT timing.

Before taking the GMAT I took the second GMAT Prep test and scored 750 in that. I could not believe, since i was scoring 590-650 on the Maghoosh GMAT tests. On the exam day it is important to be calm and confident. Do practice the different sequence of sections to identify your best and go with that one. Do not, I repeat do not experiment on the exam day. So, with a preparation of almost two months, I was able to score 760 and feel content with it.

Cheers.