My journey to GMAT 740

Question

There are a lot of questions when I decided to give the GMAT exam. But, several online resources have been quite effective in answering them. 
And GMAT club has been pivotal in the entire journey.

My journey -
 
  I started with the official guide. This was a pretty outdated one since it was from 2014. But since I hadn't decided on my actual sources of learning, I thought of starting with this one. I started the preparation with the topic I felt most uncomfortable with i.e verbal SC. I read through all the notes given in the OG and then went on the problem questions. I did the same for CR, RC and then quant. I spent nearly 2 months doing this. 
  Meanwhile I came across a 60 day study plan by BTG (Beat the GMAT) -  https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide/ . Once you sign up for this , you receive emails every day for what needs to be covered each day. This helped me with a ready to follow plan. This is actually one of the reasons I had set a target to complete my prep in 2 months. I was unable to follow this plan to the exact days mentioned, but it allowed me to set timelines for each section. Also it is a great source of practice tests that you can take for free. 
  Another feature of BTG is the daily questions  https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/your-daily-quant-verbal-question/ . This option sends you an email with 2 questions daily: one each from verbal and quant. One thing this helped me with is the ability to switch contexts between verbal and quant, and also between SC and CR. Additionally, this tremendously helped me with ensuring that I get into the habit of practicing every day.  
  One of my friends had nudged me to organize my email account to sort out the emails from BTG. Hence, I had created folders where each of the emails I had subscribed to ended up. And I would ensure that I read at least these emails daily. PS. this can be done on your phone too. 
  Once I was done with the OG, I decided to give my first GMAT practice test. Until this point in my prep, I still hadn't gotten into the habit of sitting long hours for the exam. Plus the fear of getting a low score made me delay this step. But I knew I had to start it sooner or later. So in order to make it simpler for me to take that first practice test, I thought of it as 3 individual sections of the test. In fact, since I hadnt prepped for the IR + AWA section, I was not going to attempt that section. So just verbal and quant for the first attempt (as suggested by the BTG 60 days plan). And eventually I gave my first practice test in 2 different sittings in the same day. I scored a 720 in this attempt. 
  After this, I gave the rest of my practice tests every weekend, since weekdays were clogged with office work. I would give the test on Saturday and do the analysis on Sunday. I gave a total of 6 practice tests. 
  Through the rest of the week, I would continue to practice the questions on GMAT club - more recent OG questions, daily practice questions. 
  While the score on the rest of my mock tests were not promising, I still decided to proceed with the GMAT. Since each of the mocks were from different companies with varying difficulty level, the score had to vary too. My scores were 720, 690, 660, 690, 630, 700.  
  I got a 730 on the first attempt and a 740 in my second attempt (16 days later).

A few resources / strategies that really helped me ...
 
  Error log - This might be one of the most neglected part of the preparation and probably the most important one too. This article gives a few samples of the error log -  https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-error-log . You might find a bunch more too. But, take a call on what features will help you and what you need. Learning from these sources, I had customized mine to have 3 sheets, one each for - questions, errors and practice tests. My columns were Date, Book, Section, Category, Problem, Content Tested, Error Category, What did I do wrong ?, TAKEAWAY, Length and Re-do date. This should help you better analyze the potential cause of the error and areas of weakness.  
  Timing - During the initial days of my prep, I did not time the questions I worked on. But once I realized that this could be an issue for me, I started timing them. I prefer timing a set of 4-6 questions over timing each question individually.  
  Timing during the exam - I found it more productive to chalk out a table in advance that has the question number marked against the time remaining. With this in place one need not worry about this time calculation during the exam. eg: for verbal - 6 questions in 11 minutes, for quant - 4 questions in 8 minutes. This was sufficient to average out the time taken for each set of questions. 
My grid for verbal looked like this -
6 - 55
12 - 44
18 - 33 ...
The one for quant looked like this -
4 - 54
8 - 46
12 - 38 ...
 
  General Practice - I relied completely on GMAT club for this part. Refer to the search tags  https://gmatclub.com/forum/search.php?view=search_tags . Here you get a pretty lengthy list of questions for the specific type and difficulty level of question you want. I would typically have 5 tabs open one for each type of question. The tags i used most often were "difficulty 700-Level", "Source : Official Guide", "Source: Advanced GMAT", and "Source: Official Guide (Verbal Review)" .
Also, they also have a set daily practice questions that you can access by navigating to - the error log and then "Daily Practice Questions" on the left panel. 
  Practice Test - A few sources for free practice tests are - GMATPrep Practice exams (2), Manhattan Prep, Princeton Review and Kaplan. They allow one free practice test on signing up.

TheUltimateWinner · Answer

Congrats for the nice score. All the best.

jn0r · Answer

Good job! Good luck with your application for masters programs!!!

ProKiller · Answer

Detailed debrief! Congratulations on the great score.

and all the best for the applications.

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