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I sat my first and only diagnostic at 540. Six weeks later, I walked out of my (online) GMAT with a 740 — Q51, V39, IR8, on the very first official attempt. A few months after that, I was admitted to HEC Paris (MiM, Major in International Finance).
I've wanted to write this for a while. GMAT Club carried me through the hardest part of that stretch, and the debriefs I read here at 2 a.m. when I was stuck did more for my morale than any single study tip. So this is me giving some of that back, as honestly and concretely as I can.
Who I am
I'm spelling this out because the GMAT doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your background decides which section is your weapon and which is your wall. For me, Quant was the weapon, and Verbal was the wall. For you it might be the opposite, so plan around your own profile instead of copying someone else's split.
Sort out your English first
Before I touched the GMAT, I took the IELTS and went from B1 toC1. If you're a non-native speaker, I'd really recommend doing it in this order.
The reason: the IELTS pushed my general English (vocabulary, reading speed, comfort with dense text) to a point where GMAT Verbal stopped being a language problem and became a reasoning problem. Those need completely different kinds of study, and you want to deal with them one at a time.
My honest IELTS prep was mostly Friends (yes, the sitcom) for everyday fluency, plus official mock tests for the format. Not glamorous, but it worked.
The numbers
How I studied
I did this as a concentrated full-time sprint: roughly 6 weeks at ~8 hours a day, not working in parallel. That setup isn't realistic for everyone, and most people need more calendar time around a job. But if you can clear your schedule, the momentum helps. Concepts stay warm, and you don't lose the first 20 minutes of every session warming back up.
Materials: I used official material only, and I'd recommend it. The official questions have a logic that third-party ones imitate but rarely match, and on a six-week timeline I couldn't afford to train on anything that wasn't representative.
What made the difference: the mock tests, by far. A set of practice questions trains one thing at a time — your accuracy on a given topic. A full-length mock trains the whole package at once: timing, stamina, pressure, accuracy, and strategy, all colliding the way they will on the real day. That combination is the thing you simply can't drill in pieces. And the score was never the point. The value was in picking the mock apart afterward — a mock you don't review is a wasted afternoon.
What I set aside: I tried the Manhattan guides and dropped them. For me, they were too long and too basic. I wanted to go straight to real questions. That's a fit call, not a verdict: if you're rebuilding fundamentals from scratch and have more time, they might be exactly right for you. I just wasn't that profile.
My daily routine:
Verbal was where I struggled
My hardest fight was Verbal: reading speed in RC, and spotting the assumption in Critical Reasoning.
What broke the plateau was a change in mindset. I stopped attacking Verbal like a math problem and started treating it strategically. As an engineer, my instinct was to prove the right answer with airtight logic, but the GMAT doesn't reward the most rigorous reader. It rewards the most effective one under time pressure.
In practice:
Math gives you the points it can. Past a certain level, Verbal points come from efficiency and judgment, not from being thorough.
A few words on Quant
The biggest realization I had: GMAT Quant is not really a math test, it's a reasoning test wearing a math costume. The underlying content is high-school level. What's hard is spotting what the question is actually asking and not walking into the trap it set for you. So I spent very little time learning new formulas and a lot of time learning how the questions are designed.
A few things that helped, for whatever they're worth:
The emotional side
This usually gets skipped, so I'll be honest about it.
The hardest pressure wasn't the material; it was the clock and the stakes. I wanted to finish in time for Round 4 because I felt behind, and underneath that was a real fear: I didn't know what I'd be doing for my master's a few months later. I had a plan B (staying at PoliMi), but I didn't want it, and studying for a high-stakes exam while quietly dreading your own backup is its own kind of exhausting.
What got me through:
If you're feeling the weight too: it's normal, it doesn't mean you're not cut out for this, and it deserves a real plan rather than just "push through."
Test day
I took the exam online. A few honest tips:
By the end, I was genuinely exhausted and walked out with no clean sense of how it had gone. Then the score loaded. 740. It paid back every one of those six weeks.
Getting into HEC
I applied to HEC's MiM, Major in International Finance, in Round 4, and started in 2024. I also applied across a strong list: LBS, ESSEC, LSE, Bocconi.
Here's what I genuinely think got me in, and it matters: top admissions are holistic, and the GMAT is a multiplier, not the engine.
My GPA wasn't a perfect 4.0. The 740 made up for that. It showed I could handle quant and took the GPA worry off the table. That's how I'd think about a high score: it covers your weakest spot. It's rarely the whole story.
What carried the rest:
The thread tying it together is being well-rounded. Admissions committees are building a class, not ranking GMAT scores. Use the test to cover your weak spot, then put your real energy into the story only you can tell.
One caveat on all of this: I'm speaking about MiM admissions specifically, where candidates are young and pre-experience, so the GMAT does a lot of the "can this person handle the academics" work. From what I've seen on the MBA side, the GMAT matters even less. With several years of work behind you, your career trajectory, leadership, recommendations, and essays carry most of the weight, and a strong score mostly serves to reassure the committee rather than to win the seat. So if you're an MBA applicant reading this: by all means get a good number, but don't let the GMAT crowd out the parts of the application that actually decide it.
What I wish I'd known
If you're starting now
Resources
Thanks, and reach out
A huge thank-you to GMAT Club and to everyone who answers questions and writes these debriefs. You helped me more than you know, and this is my way of giving some back.
If any of this resonates, leave a comment or message me here on GMAT Club. I'm always happy to talk through prep strategy, timelines, or the admissions side, and I'll do my best to reply to everyone.
A 740 was not the result of studying more things. It was the result of studying the right things, reviewing properly, and learning how the test thinks. That is the lesson I would give anyone starting now.
Whatever stage you're at, the work you're putting in now will pay off. Be kind to yourself along the way, trust the process, and good luck — you can do this.
Eugenia
I've wanted to write this for a while. GMAT Club carried me through the hardest part of that stretch, and the debriefs I read here at 2 a.m. when I was stuck did more for my morale than any single study tip. So this is me giving some of that back, as honestly and concretely as I can.
Who I am
- Studies: scientific high school, then a BSc in Management Engineering in Italy. The engineering training was a real advantage on Quant. Not because of advanced math, but because of how it teaches you to take a problem apart.
- Work: I worked in finance, then left to start my own company.
- Where I'm from: Italy. English is not my first language.
- Starting points: strong in math, weaker in English. I began around a B1.
- Age at application: 23.
I'm spelling this out because the GMAT doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your background decides which section is your weapon and which is your wall. For me, Quant was the weapon, and Verbal was the wall. For you it might be the opposite, so plan around your own profile instead of copying someone else's split.
Sort out your English first
Before I touched the GMAT, I took the IELTS and went from B1 toC1. If you're a non-native speaker, I'd really recommend doing it in this order.
The reason: the IELTS pushed my general English (vocabulary, reading speed, comfort with dense text) to a point where GMAT Verbal stopped being a language problem and became a reasoning problem. Those need completely different kinds of study, and you want to deal with them one at a time.
My honest IELTS prep was mostly Friends (yes, the sitcom) for everyday fluency, plus official mock tests for the format. Not glamorous, but it worked.
The numbers
- Diagnostic: 540, taken at the very start just to see where I stood.
- Mocks: about one every two weeks.
- The curve: I climbed into the mid-650s fast, then got stuck. Getting off 650 was much harder than getting to it.
- Official exam (1st attempt): 740 — Q51, V39, IR8.
How I studied
I did this as a concentrated full-time sprint: roughly 6 weeks at ~8 hours a day, not working in parallel. That setup isn't realistic for everyone, and most people need more calendar time around a job. But if you can clear your schedule, the momentum helps. Concepts stay warm, and you don't lose the first 20 minutes of every session warming back up.
Materials: I used official material only, and I'd recommend it. The official questions have a logic that third-party ones imitate but rarely match, and on a six-week timeline I couldn't afford to train on anything that wasn't representative.
What made the difference: the mock tests, by far. A set of practice questions trains one thing at a time — your accuracy on a given topic. A full-length mock trains the whole package at once: timing, stamina, pressure, accuracy, and strategy, all colliding the way they will on the real day. That combination is the thing you simply can't drill in pieces. And the score was never the point. The value was in picking the mock apart afterward — a mock you don't review is a wasted afternoon.
What I set aside: I tried the Manhattan guides and dropped them. For me, they were too long and too basic. I wanted to go straight to real questions. That's a fit call, not a verdict: if you're rebuilding fundamentals from scratch and have more time, they might be exactly right for you. I just wasn't that profile.
My daily routine:
- Morning: review whatever I'd gotten wrong the day before, refreshing the rule before drilling it again.
- Midday: timed sets of official questions, by topic and difficulty, always on the clock. Timing is a skill you build, not something you switch on at the test.
- Afternoon: the part that actually moved my score. Reviewing every question, right and wrong, and writing down why I missed the ones I missed.
- Error log: I tagged every mistake by type (careless, concept gap, timing, fell for the trap). After two weeks, the patterns are impossible to ignore. Mine were almost all in Verbal and almost all the same two kinds.
- Mocks: one full-length every two weeks under realistic conditions, then a proper multi-day review before moving on.
- Quant: I leaned into it hard. It was my strength, and I wanted to go into finance, so a high Quant score both anchored my total and signaled quantitative ability to schools.
- Verbal: this is where the real work went (more below).
- One note on IR and AWA: I took the Classic edition, which still had Integrated Reasoning and the essay. Worth knowing if you're prepping now: the current Focus edition dropped the essay completely and folded IR into the Data Insights section. So I think of my IR practice as roughly what now lives in Data Insights — same muscles, reading data and reasoning under time pressure.
Verbal was where I struggled
My hardest fight was Verbal: reading speed in RC, and spotting the assumption in Critical Reasoning.
What broke the plateau was a change in mindset. I stopped attacking Verbal like a math problem and started treating it strategically. As an engineer, my instinct was to prove the right answer with airtight logic, but the GMAT doesn't reward the most rigorous reader. It rewards the most effective one under time pressure.
In practice:
- For CR, I'd pre-phrase the gap in the argument myself before reading the options, then match. The assumption is almost always the unstated bridge between the evidence and the conclusion, and once I started hunting for that bridge specifically, the noise dropped away. But the thing that really rewired me was doing a lot of CR questions, always followed by review, in concentrated stretches. To be clear, this wasn't mindless grinding — every set was paired with going back over why each answer was right or wrong. After enough of them, my brain started reading every argument the way you'd listen to two politicians debating: automatically looking for the weak link, the thing one side is quietly taking for granted. At some point it stopped being a technique I had to apply and just became how I read.
- For RC, I let go of trying to fully absorb every paragraph. I read for structure (what each paragraph is doing) and only went back into the text for details when a question forced me to. Reading less, on purpose, made me both faster and more accurate.
Math gives you the points it can. Past a certain level, Verbal points come from efficiency and judgment, not from being thorough.
A few words on Quant
The biggest realization I had: GMAT Quant is not really a math test, it's a reasoning test wearing a math costume. The underlying content is high-school level. What's hard is spotting what the question is actually asking and not walking into the trap it set for you. So I spent very little time learning new formulas and a lot of time learning how the questions are designed.
A few things that helped, for whatever they're worth:
- Don't compute when you don't have to. Many questions are faster solved by estimating, plugging in smart numbers, or working backward from the answer choices than by grinding through the "proper" algebra. The answer choices are information — use them.
- At a high level, your enemy is careless errors, not concept gaps. When I tagged my Quant mistakes, almost none were "I didn't know how." They were misreads, sign slips, or answering a slightly different question than the one asked. So I trained precision under time: re-reading the actual question before picking, and writing my steps down cleanly instead of doing too much in my head.
- Master the high-frequency topics deeply (number properties, algebra, word problems, ratios, statistics) rather than chasing rare, exotic ones. The exam rewards fluency in the common stuff far more than coverage of edge cases.
- A note on Data Sufficiency. I took the Classic edition, where DS was part of Quant; in the current Focus edition it lives inside Data Insights, but the skill is the same and worth calling out. DS asks whether you have enough information, not what the answer is — so the moment you can tell it's sufficient (or not), stop. I lost early practice points by reflexively solving all the way through when I didn't need to.
- Being good at the section is a trap of its own. Confidence makes you rush. I treated my strong section with the same discipline as my weak one, because at Q50+ a single careless miss costs you more than it does lower down.
The emotional side
This usually gets skipped, so I'll be honest about it.
The hardest pressure wasn't the material; it was the clock and the stakes. I wanted to finish in time for Round 4 because I felt behind, and underneath that was a real fear: I didn't know what I'd be doing for my master's a few months later. I had a plan B (staying at PoliMi), but I didn't want it, and studying for a high-stakes exam while quietly dreading your own backup is its own kind of exhausting.
What got me through:
- A support system of people going through the same thing. Not cheerleaders. Peers who understood why a 10-point mock drop could wreck a Tuesday.
- Planning in layers. Several contingency plans for the timeline meant no single bad outcome was the end of the world. Oddly, having a plan B I didn't love made it easier to chase plan A without panicking.
- Concrete anxiety tools: time-management strategies so I never felt lost on the clock, and breathing exercises for the spikes. These sound soft. On the day they mattered as much as anything I knew about geometry.
If you're feeling the weight too: it's normal, it doesn't mean you're not cut out for this, and it deserves a real plan rather than just "push through."
Test day
I took the exam online. A few honest tips:
- Do a full tech and room check the day before. Webcam, ID ready, desk completely clear. The onboarding is long, and getting it right ahead of time means you start calmer instead of frazzled.
- The onboarding eats time. The room scan and ID checks drag, and that's plenty of empty space for nerves to build. Expect it so it doesn't rattle you.
- Don't mouth the words while you read. I got flagged with interruptions for moving my lips, which apparently proctors don't allow, and it broke my rhythm. If you're a silent lip-reader like me, catch yourself in practice before test day.
- Take the optional break and actually use it. Water, stretch, reset. Don't try to power through the whole thing in one block.
- Have your pacing plan memorized so you're never doing mental math mid-section about whether you're behind. Knowing your checkpoints (where you should be at question X) keeps panic off the table.
By the end, I was genuinely exhausted and walked out with no clean sense of how it had gone. Then the score loaded. 740. It paid back every one of those six weeks.
Getting into HEC
I applied to HEC's MiM, Major in International Finance, in Round 4, and started in 2024. I also applied across a strong list: LBS, ESSEC, LSE, Bocconi.
Here's what I genuinely think got me in, and it matters: top admissions are holistic, and the GMAT is a multiplier, not the engine.
My GPA wasn't a perfect 4.0. The 740 made up for that. It showed I could handle quant and took the GPA worry off the table. That's how I'd think about a high score: it covers your weakest spot. It's rarely the whole story.
What carried the rest:
- A non-traditional background (engineering, then finance, then founding a startup) that I think helped me stand out instead of blending in.
- Student associations, which are badly underrated and, in my view, a real differentiator.
- An engineering internship and volunteering.
The thread tying it together is being well-rounded. Admissions committees are building a class, not ranking GMAT scores. Use the test to cover your weak spot, then put your real energy into the story only you can tell.
One caveat on all of this: I'm speaking about MiM admissions specifically, where candidates are young and pre-experience, so the GMAT does a lot of the "can this person handle the academics" work. From what I've seen on the MBA side, the GMAT matters even less. With several years of work behind you, your career trajectory, leadership, recommendations, and essays carry most of the weight, and a strong score mostly serves to reassure the committee rather than to win the seat. So if you're an MBA applicant reading this: by all means get a good number, but don't let the GMAT crowd out the parts of the application that actually decide it.
What I wish I'd known
- How hard the exam actually is. I underestimated it. Respect it early.
- The right approach from day one. The strategic, effectiveness-over-rigor mindset I "found" at the plateau is where I should have started. It would have saved me a week.
- How to set it all up efficiently: timing as a trained skill, an error log from day one, official material only.
- The GMAT is one piece of a bigger puzzle. A great score won't save a one-dimensional application, and a non-perfect profile isn't doomed by a non-perfect GPA.
If you're starting now
- Take a diagnostic immediately. You can't plan a route without a starting point, and a "bad" diagnostic is data, not a verdict.
- Build accuracy first, then layer in timing. Get the fundamentals solid before you obsess over the clock, but don't leave timing for the last week either. Once your basics hold up, train pace deliberately. It's a skill you build, not something you switch on at the test.
- Review more than you solve. Your error log is where the score actually grows. Solving feels productive; reviewing is productive.
- Expect the plateau and don't panic. The early gains are easy points. Breaking through usually takes a change in method, not more hours.
- Lean into your strength to anchor your score, but spend your study hours on your weakness. That's where the extra points are.
- Treat the emotional side as part of the prep. Build a peer support system and have real anxiety tools ready for the day.
- Non-native speakers: do your English test first. Separate the language problem from the reasoning problem.
Resources
- Official material, all of it. The only thing fully representative of the real exam.
- Official mock tests. My single highest-leverage resource, because of the review, not the score.
- GMAT Club's question bank. You can filter by topic and difficulty, which let me drill my exact weak spots (mostly CR and RC) instead of wasting reps on things I'd already nailed. This is how I made every question count on a tight timeline.
- An error log. Free, and arguably more important than any book.
- Third-party prep (long foundational guides): a fit decision. Great if you're rebuilding fundamentals with a longer runway, less so at six weeks with a strong math base.
Thanks, and reach out
A huge thank-you to GMAT Club and to everyone who answers questions and writes these debriefs. You helped me more than you know, and this is my way of giving some back.
If any of this resonates, leave a comment or message me here on GMAT Club. I'm always happy to talk through prep strategy, timelines, or the admissions side, and I'll do my best to reply to everyone.
A 740 was not the result of studying more things. It was the result of studying the right things, reviewing properly, and learning how the test thinks. That is the lesson I would give anyone starting now.
Whatever stage you're at, the work you're putting in now will pay off. Be kind to yourself along the way, trust the process, and good luck — you can do this.
Eugenia
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