Success Formula for Achieving an 800 GMAT Score

Question

This is both a debrief of my GMAT preparation experience and an outline of how to score 800 on the GMAT. It’s a bit long, but it’s a fairly complete formula for maximizing your GMAT score regardless of what your score goal is.

Pre-Preparation – Developing the Mindset to Succeed

From the outset of my GMAT preparation, my goal was to score 800. On some level, I was sure that I could score 800 on the GMAT, but I was not at all sure about how to score 800 on the GMAT.

I had taken a practice test years before and scored 740 (Q44, V46). Now, you might think that, having scored 740 on a practice test, I didn’t think getting to 800 would be that difficult. However, the truth is that I didn’t have much experience preparing for a test like the GMAT, and when I took the practice test I felt pushed for time and beaten up a bit by the quant section. So, even the idea of getting from 740 to 760 seemed intimidating.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t hung out on a GMAT forum or read about how to prepare. I was basically clueless about how to increase my GMAT score.

Anyway, I starting thinking about how I could increase my score, and I realized what pretty much everyone who prepares for the GMAT figures out, that if I became more familiar with how to answer the questions, I should get more correct more quickly and score higher. That may not sound like much of a revelation, but it was key for me. That one idea gave me at least some confidence that I could drive my score higher.

Another key aspect of my mindset was having a growth mindset. I don’t really believe in talent. I think we all develop who we are and what we can do, and having a growth mindset meant that I felt that I could develop myself to the point of being able to score 800 on the GMAT.

So, with the ideas that I could increase my score by developing familiarity with concepts and developing skills and that I could develop myself, I was mentally set up to achieve my goal.

(More on  Developing the Proper Mindset For GMAT Success )

Initial Preparation – Haphazard Question Answering

As many people do, I started preparing for the GMAT by answering random practice questions.

Working in that way is not all that effective. You see one type of question, and answer it, and then you see another type, and answer that one, and building skill takes forever, because you’re jumping from one concept or question type to the next without ever going deeply into any other them.

Anyway, I read up on concepts and approaches, answered hundreds of GMAT quant and verbal questions, and took official and non-official practice tests from various sources.

All of this was rather inefficient, but I did so much of it that, after months of preparation, I was scoring pretty high on practice tests. At that point, I thought I might score 800 on the actual GMAT. So, I decided to give the real GMAT a shot and scored 780.

780 was a high score, but my GMAT score goal was 800. So, I was pretty happy but, at the same time, a little disappointed. I was a little worked up after I took the test and told the proctor at the test center that I’d be back to score a perfect 800. He was like, “OK, that’s nice ….”

Effective Preparation – Topic-by-Topic Practice

If you know much about preparing for the GMAT, you know that working on one topic at a time is the most effective method for preparing. Well, after months of preparing, I somehow figured that out myself, possibly because I had seen two or three triple overlapping sets questions when I had taken the GMAT and had spent so much time on them that I didn’t complete the quant section.

So – brainstorm – I realized that I should master triple overlapping sets questions by focusing on them, and from that realization came the further realization that the way to master GMAT quant was to focus on my other weak areas of quant in the same way. Once I had that realization, I started to make inexorable progress toward my quant score goal by mastering one quant topic at a time.

To master each quant topic, I would first learn all about the topic, making sure that I fully understood it. If there were formulas or methods associated with the topic, I would seek to understand the derivations of the formulas and the bases of the methods. I wanted to know from the ground up how everything worked, so that I could handle any question I saw and come up with efficient, out-of-the box approaches for answering questions when there were opportunities to do so. Then, I would answer dozens of questions involving that topic until I practically could not miss them. I would play the topic like a video game, seeing how high I could drive my hit rate and how many questions I could get correct in a row.

(More on  How To Increase Your GMAT Quant Score )

For verbal, I was a little worried about Sentence Correction. GMAT verbal came pretty naturally to me, and so, I was scoring pretty high, but not V51, which is the verbal score I needed to score 800 and which takes getting every verbal question correct. So, I had to figure something out.

I realized that I was seeking to get every verbal question correct, but I didn’t even know what a preposition was. So, I read up on SC concepts, and I studied some idioms, which I didn’t end up using when I took the GMAT because few to none of the Sentence Correction questions I saw involved idioms.

(More on  GMAT Sentence Correction: 8 Essential Tips )

That said, the most important thing I learned for verbal was to be super careful. Whether I was answering a Sentence Correction question, a Critical Reasoning question, or a Reading Comprehension question, getting it correct came down to being super careful and determined to get it correct.

I learned to carefully analyze answer choices and see what was going on in them, and, even though I knew only a few key things, such as that an inference had to be something that must be true given the facts provided, I was getting questions correct.

(More on  How to Score High in GMAT Verbal )

Key Realization About Accuracy

At some point, I felt pretty good about my preparation, but then I looked at my practice quiz scores and realized that they weren’t that consistent. In fact, often, my accuracy was at 60 percent. 60 percent accuracy wasn’t going to get me to my 800 GMAT score goal, and I realized that I was getting excited about knowing how to answer questions, but, at the same time, I wasn’t necessarily getting them correct.

The thing is that the GMAT isn’t like many other tests, which test whether you know about something or whether you know how to do something. The GMAT tests whether you can put it all together and arrive at correct answers. So, I changed my focus in a key way, from learning how to answer questions to learning how to arrive at correct answers consistently.

In doing so, I came up with a simple system for rating my performance in answering questions.

Level 1 – I knew how to answer the question.

Level 2 – I knew how to answer the question and got it correct.

Level 3- I knew how to answer the question and got it correct in under two minutes.

I did most of my practice untimed, taking as long as I needed to get to the correct answer to a question. By doing practice questions untimed, I gave myself time to learn to see what's going on in questions and to learn to execute.

If, in answering a question, I hit Level 2, I was pretty psyched. If I pulled off Level 3, even better.

(More on  Improving Your Accuracy on the GMAT )

Hacker Mentality

Through doing all of this, I learned a lot about answering GMAT questions, but, at the same time, another key aspect of consistently arriving at correct answers was having a hacker mentality. I was always ready to look for an out-of-the-box way to answer a question.

If I wasn’t sure what was really going on in a Sentence Correction question, I would figure out some hack that I could use to eliminate choices.

If I saw a quant question that I didn’t know how to answer, I wouldn’t look at the explanation until I had come up with a hack that would get me to the answer, or at least close to it.

By developing a hacker mentality, I was ensuring that I could answer any question that I saw on test day.

Staying Motivated

To stay motivated, I treated the GMAT like a game.

One way I made the GMAT a game was to take a practice test, see how I did, and see what I could do to increase my score. I didn't feel as if I was learning a syllabus of material. I felt as if I was getting better at a game.

Another thing that kept me motivated was working on topics that I was curious about or on topics such that I was bugged by the fact that I didn't get them. For example, if it was bugging me that people on GMAT Club knew how to answer probability questions and I didn't, I worked on probability questions.

Also, the more I prepared, the more I got to a point such that it was almost easier to prepare for the GMAT than not to.

The Inner Game of the GMAT

All of the learning and practicing I was doing worked well. At the same time, I’m not sure whether I would have hit my score goal if I hadn’t been aware of how to do inner work.

Here’s the thing. We all have unconscious ideas that don’t really make sense and unconscious inner conflicts that keep us from manifesting our full potential, and my unconscious ideas and inner conflicts were hampering my GMAT performance.

I know they were, because I went into my unconscious and found and changed my ideas and resolved inner conflicts.

For instance, I was making many so called careless errors, but, by exploring my less conscious aspects, I discovered that they weren’t so careless after all. In fact, my inner child was super entertained when I made a “careless error.” If I added 26 and 26 and got 56 and blew a question, my inner child thought that my doing so was pretty funny and encouraged me to do that again. So, I had an inner conversation and decided not to entertain my inner child that way any more, and my rate of “careless errors” decreased pretty much immediately.

I found other things I had going on, such as that the idea of doing something right the first time felt really uncomfortable to me, and as I addressed one such issue after another, my performance improved.

Working on the inner game of the GMAT works super well.

Visualization

Another psychological approach I used was visualization.

I visualized taking the test, and, by doing so, learned to deal with the test experience before I took the test.

I looked at pictures of test centers and got accustomed to the idea of being in a test center taking the test.

I also visualized my goal score appearing on the screen at the end of the test, 51 51 800, to get comfortable with the experience of scoring a perfect 800 on the GMAT.

Some Other Aspects of My Preparation

My preparation included the following as well.

Math in my head – I did basic day to day math tasks in my head. I found that there was an emotional aspect to doing math in my head that I had to learn to handle. I’m sure learning how to handle that emotional aspect of doing math resulted in an improvement in my quant performance.

Practicing tired – I would do practice questions or take practice tests late at night to learn to keep my mind clear even when I was fatigued.

Practice Tests – I took 15 to 20 practice tests to get used to handling the test experience.

The Week Before the Test

Around a week before test day, I took a GMAT Prep practice test and scored 780 and barely finished the quant section on time. I had scored 800 on some practice tests before that one, but I still didn’t quite feel as if I had the test down.

I kept preparing and working on weaker quant areas, but maybe the most significant thing I did was more inner work. I had to go somewhere for a few days, and I didn’t bring GMAT materials with me. Instead of studying or doing practice questions while I was away, I spent hours doing inner work to improve my energy flow and performance, and doing all that inner work seems to have paid off.

Test Day

I had scheduled my test for mid-day, so that I wouldn’t have to rush at all to make it to the test center on time.

Since I had noticed that, if I took a practice test after studying for hours, I would be on point when I took the practice test, and that the practice test would feel like just more practice questions, I set myself up for test day success by warming up by answering practice questions before I went to the test center.

I biked to the test center and spent the ride doing inner work, and when I got to the test center building, I chilled out for a while before I went into the center.

The Test

I took the test in the days before you could select section order. So, it went AWA, IR, quant, verbal. I didn’t go all out on the AWA or IR because I wanted to save energy to ace quant and verbal.

The coolest thing about taking the test was that, maybe because of all the inner work I had done during the week before the test, the quant section seemed shockingly easy. Whereas, a week before, I had had difficulty finishing quant on time when I took a practice test, this time, I got way ahead of the clock. In fact, quant seemed so easy that I actually checked to make sure that I was taking the GMAT and not some other test.

Working on the inner game of the GMAT works super well.

The key thing I did for verbal was sticking with questions until I was sure I had the correct answer. When I took my first GMAT, I would leave a verbal question when I felt I had “spent enough time on it,” and I finished the verbal section early. Of course, working that way didn’t really work out, because I didn’t get all the verbal questions correct. This time, I didn’t click the button on a verbal question until I was sure I had the correct answer. I barely finished on time, and I got them all correct.

The Aftermath

I was so intense about taking the test and so wired by the time I was done that I clicked past the screen that showed my scores. So, I didn’t know what my score was until I checked out and the proctor handed me the sheet with my unofficial GMAT score, which showed that I had scored 51 51 800. I said, “I told you I would get a perfect score next time,” and the proctor was like, “OK, that’s nice ….”

I was so psyched that I barely cared that a blizzard had started while I was taking the test and that the bike ride home took around four hours of dodging skidding cars and hiking through snow drifts.

Effective preparation had done the job.

Some Other Points of Interest

Here are some other things that people might find interesting.

One thing I didn’t know when I took the test, amazingly enough, is that, to score 800 on the GMAT, you have to get every quant and verbal question correct. I was still wondering whether I had done so recently, and so, I got my ESR, and sure enough I had, as you can see.

https://i.postimg.cc/XvD4gy7H/image.png

https://i.postimg.cc/9M8b0Cbq/image.png

Another thing you can see from my ESR is that the question difficulty did not keep increasing. Many people think that, if you keep getting GMAT questions correct, the questions get more and more difficult until you are practically designing moon rockets in two minutes each. The truth is that, even if you get every question correct, you see maybe seven truly hard questions per section mixed with medium questions, some of which can seem pretty easy.

Finally, the fact that I spent significantly more time per Sentence Correction question than per Critical Reasoning question may be interesting to some people. It shows that everyone has his style, and that what works for another person may not be what’s best for you.

https://i.postimg.cc/g0JPZZ51/ESR-Verbal-Timing-Page.png

Final Thoughts

As I said before, I don’t really believe in talent, and I don't believe in "peak" GMAT scores. I think that achieving anything is just a matter of developing yourself.

I like to take that attitude that, if another person has achieved something, well, I’m a person too. So, I should be able to do it too.

So, the keys to scoring 800 on the GMAT, or attaining any other GMAT score goal, are an effective mindset and effective preparation, and, as long as you keep finding new ways to drive your score higher, your GMAT score will keep increasing until you hit your goal.

sagarnamo1 · Answer

Hi Marty sir , Amazing debrief. May I know what inner work you did or how can I do that same inner work ?

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bb · Answer

Congratulations Marty! Thanks so much for sharing the debrief and your score report and appreciate verifying your score!!!

unraveled · Answer

Hey Marty,

Thanks for your wonderful insights as always. A great read it is.
Pretty awesome GMAT journey and learnings are as applicable to anyone at any level as it could be.

Best part was 3 levels of accuracy. I thought that one more level about incorrect answer would be there as i read but realised then that it would not be about accuracy but inaccuracy.

Finally, a round of applause for 'designing moon rockets in two minutes'

. And thanks for writing it razor-sharp.

Can you share quant's 'performance over time'. Hope I'm not nagging.

. And thanks for writing it razor-sharp. Can you share quant's 'performance over time'. Hope I'm not nagging.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

I'm may change Level 1, because, currently Level 1 is in a way basically logically equivalent to Level 2.

Here's my quant time management chart. Notice that, even though I was ahead of the clock by the end of the first quartile, I didn't finish early. Instead, I slowed way down and double checked my work to make sure that I was answering correctly. Also, when I had found the answer to the last quant question, I waited until the last minute or so to click and used the minutes I had left by sitting there to extend the break between quant and verbal, so that I would be fresh for verbal. Hence the 2:49 per question for the last quartile. To win the game, play every angle! https://i.postimg.cc/RVxzsMBz/ESR-Quant-Performance-Over-Time.png

ChiranjeevSingh · Answer

Such an honest and matter-of-fact debrief! You've really highlighted the importance of "inner work" - if I'm correct, you're referring to managing one's emotions and thoughts while preparing for and taking the test. I'd like to know more about it. If you have already written an article about it and can share the same, I'd be grateful.

Also, I wanted to highlight this statement of yours  "I did most of my practice untimed" . People who are preparing for the test, please see that this guy who was at 780 and was working to improve his score did 'most' of his practice untimed, and you begin your practice by solving questions in a timed way. Baaadddd strategy!

Thank you, Marty, for the brilliant debrief!

Regards,
CJ

NandishSS · Answer

HI ChiranjeevSingh Is solving questions in a timed way,Baaadddd strategy? Can you please brief or if you an article written can you provide the link

Love to read your article and strategy

Yogananda · Answer

Hi Marty,

Congratulations.
And thanks for sharing such a detailed and motivating debrief.

Posted from my mobile device

TargetMBA007 · Answer

Thanks  MartyTargetTestPrep  . This is a classic.

You talk about doing a lot of your practice untimed. 
1. Did you find that as you focused on accuracy, the timing naturally kept improving over time? Does this apply to both Quant and Verbal?
2. At what point (or level of accuracy) do you say to yourself that I have nailed the accuracy or my accuracy is good enough and now I am going to work on my timing?

Cheers

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

Yes, for sure.

Also, what I've found is that, as one becomes sufficiently skilled, the GMAT time constraints become something of a non-issue. In verbal, the time allotted per question is now significantly more than I need, and I have basically never done verbal timed practice. In fact, since I took that test, my verbal speed has increased without my doing any practice at all. What I have been doing is analyzing question after question to see how they work, and the result of that analysis is that I readily see everything going on in verbal questions and can answer them super fast.

I didn't really separate the two that much. I mean, if you are skilled, you are going to answer questions accurately and quickly. Right? So, mostly I focused on developing skill in general.

That said, I did realize that timing is a factor. So, I looked for ways to answer questions efficiently.

So, kind of like what you said, in some cases, after learning how to answer a type of question accurately, I would have to learn to answer questions of that type more quickly. However, I didn't do so by practicing timed. I did so by looking for efficiencies until I got my time under the limit.

I think that's the thing. There is clearly some utility to doing timed practice, but what I think is better is shooting for the time until you get there. So, if you are at 4 minutes per question for a type, shoot for three minutes. Then figure out how to get the time you need for that type down to two minutes.

Using that method, you aren't cutting yourself off at two minutes. You don't learn to succeed by cutting yourself off before you have succeeded. You learn to succeed in the allotted amount of time by giving yourself time to succeed over and over until you can succeed in the allotted amount of time.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi CJ. I'm glad to hear that you like the debrief.

Regarding the inner work, it was more a re engineering of my being that involved using mediation type techniques to become aware of my unconscious aspects and changing what I found.

For instance, we all have unconscious (and conscious) beliefs and strategies that are suboptimal and, therefore, prevent us from manifesting our full potential. So, I would go into my unconscious to find such beliefs and strategies and change them to optimize myself for GMAT success.

For instance, as I was preparing for SC, I realized that maybe I had an issue with the concept of grammar. So, I meditated on grammar and realized that the very word makes my blood pressure go up. So, while, on a conscious level, I was learning grammar and seeking to apply it, unconsciously I had this really strong antipathy toward the concept of grammar. Now, if you despise something that you are learning about and working with, you are not going to perform as well as you would were you at peace with it. So, once I found that I had an issue with grammar, I meditated on and thought about grammar until my attitude toward grammar had softened.

Another thing I found in my unconscious was that I was missing questions on purpose if I didn't think they were written well, official questions even. I wanted to punish the question writers by getting their bad question wrong. LOL. That may sound pretty ridiculous, but it's a great example of the type of thing we do unconsciously. Ever wonder why you didn't get a question correct the first time when the answer was obvious to you the moment you looked at the question again? There's a good chance that you missed the question on purpose for some unconscious reason. So, anyway, after I discovered that self-sabotaging unconscious strategy, I though about what I was doing and meditated on it to convince the conscious and unconscious aspects of myself that punishing the question writers by getting their questions wrong was not a strategy to follow. Of course this change to myself resulted in an immediate improvement in accuracy.

Another type of strategy I used was going into my unconscious to find conflicts I had with succeeding. For instance, I searched for conflicts with such aspect of success as scoring high on the GMAT, getting quant questions correct, and getting questions correct the first time. In each case I found that, while consciously I was working to achieve those things, unconsciously, I was conflicted about doing so. For example, I had had a difficult time in my fourth grade math class. Somehow the experience rubbed me the wrong way. So, what I found in my unconscious was that, decades later, I was still angry at my fourth grade math teacher and sort of angry at math in general, and all that antipathy was hampering my quant performance. So, having found that issue, I addressed it, and my quant performance improved.

For someone who wants to apply these ideas in a simple way, You can ask yourself things like "Why would I not want to hit my score goal?" "What do I have against Critical Reasoning?" "What would I have against getting questions correct every time?"

Once, when I was working with a student in a session, he was making the silliest errors. We would literally laugh about how crazy his errors were. So, I decided to explore what he might have going on unconsciously. It turned out that, basically, he was unconsciously making the errors on purpose to entertain us.

In another case, a student whose score goal was 760 kept scoring 720. He scored 720 three times in a row despite preparing a lot between tests. So, I told him that probably he had some unconscious conflict with scoring 760. He went exploring and found that he really liked his current situation and was conflicted about going to business school. He addressed that unconscious issue, and, sure enough, he scored 760 the next time he took the test.

So, these types of approaches can be successfully used at a sophisticated, expert level and also at a basic level.

TargetMBA007 · Answer

Thanks Marty, that is really useful to know and perhaps just what I wanted to hear at this stage of my preparation.

dcummins · Answer

Congratulations Marty! Best believe i used a lot of the techniques you  bestowed  upon me to fulfill my GMAT dream!

couillardandrew · Answer

I appreciate the level of detail in this post! This is a great resource for those that want to score in the elite top 1%.

smartvn2020 · Answer

Congratulations.
And thanks for sharing such a detailed and motivating debrief.

samwaters · Answer

Hello
Сongratulations on this result!
Thank you for such a detailed description!

mcelroytutoring · Answer

I would expect nothing less than an A+ debrief from the only user on GMAT Club with a verified perfect 800 GMAT score!

Nice work, Marty, and thanks for sharing your wisdom.

-Brian

singd · Answer

I am bamboozled that your first practice test score was a 740 , which is before you had exp with prep for exams like GMAT !!!

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

I didn't have much experience in preparing for a test like the GMAT, but I did have some experience with SAT math and with taking standardized tests in general. So, I wasn't a complete newbie at dealing with a tricky standardized test.

Also, my parents were education focused, would to talk about standardized tests over dinner, and basically started preparing me for the SAT the day I was born. So, while I wasn't really sure how to prepare for the GMAT, it wasn't as if I had no preparation.

So, you can see that, even that 740 "cold" test score was in a way an example of the results of effective preparation.

Shikhar22 · Answer

Hello Marty, I just wanna say, I’m so so so glad you wrote this. This is exactly the issue I’m facing. The unconscious conflict of what i want and what i really think i deserve. This is by far the most important bit of advice i think. That part where you mention about being uncomfortable about getting answers right or dwelling into grammar rules speaks so truly to me, that I’m here smiling and thinking ‘at last I’m not the only one who feels this way”. I’m so happy and thankful that you wrote this and i have got my hands on this in such a crucial time. It is like a liberation knowing that I’m not alone who feel this way and there is someone like you who has overcome and come out on the other way, with flying colours, biking away in a blizzard! I’m so inspired. I’m gonna work on my inner conflicts. thank you so much.

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