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Struggling with GMAT Verbal as a non-native speaker? Harsh improved his score from 595 to 695 in just 45 days—and scored a 99 %ile in Verbal (V88)! Learn how smart strategy, clarity, and guided prep helped him gain 100 points.
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05 Oct 2021, 02:59
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Hi all. Just wanted to share my GMAT experience. I will list things I found useful and things that I really wish I put more time and effort into while preparing for the GMAT. I've attempted some of the tests and questions during Dec 2020/Jan 2021 but my study was not very focused and I lacked any kind of plan and I really didn't know what I was doing. I had no one helping me with the GMAT and I had no idea where to look for proper help. I quickly got overwhelmed by other things in life and consequently stopped focusing on the GMAT for a while. My real preparation began in mid July and ended on 30th of September. I started with a score of 510 Q35 V26 to a score of 720 Q50 V37. While this is a great score, I really believe I can get a better score and might do a GMAT again in the future because I really understand what to work on and I will be using these tips if I do start preparing for the GMAT again. Hopefully some of these tips may help you.
Many thanks to GMATNinja , Bunuel , daagh and all the other legends on this site who have posted answers on this site for the questions.
Things I found useful
1. Make the most of your practice tests on the GMAT website and save one test for just before the exam
These practice tests really are like the real thing. There is no better indicator of your current ability than doing a fresh test under the same conditions as a real test. Spread your tests out and really make the most of the test. Really spend time trying to figure out why the questions are wrong and right and don't be afraid to redo a test a couple of weeks down the line. The score will not be representative, but what you will do is exhaust all the questions available and see how many of the same mistakes you made again even after correcting it, this would imply that you lack knowledge in that area. A difference of +/- 30 points is quite common from test to test. I've heard a few people say that the practice tests are much easier than the real test but I did not have the same experience here. GMAT Prep 6 for the first time the day before my real test and I got a 700. Less than 24 hours later on the real test, I got a 720 and I found the Quant section to be a lot easier on the real test than the Prep test. It just depends on what topics show up on the test and I feel like doing a practice test the day before and treating it like the real thing really showed any nerves or time mismanagement.
2. Official questions only
Official questions are the best questions because they test exactly what the GMAT might test and the answers are never up for debate. This means you will spend more time working on your weaknesses rather than debating whether the answer is correct in the first place. It is not uncommon for non official questions to test you on things that are not relevant, or have questions that are unclear in terms of its answers or straight up are incorrect. There are plenty of questions on GMAT Club and virtually all of them have been answered by our wonderful Experts or Community members. Just like with the practice tests, really value these official questions and don't just speed through them. Spend the extra time learning about why the right answers are correct and the wrong answers are wrong. Even if you know all this, some information you gain by just scrolling through other people's post may be very helpful, such as seeing a new method or finding an error in one of the answer choices that you did not know before. Bunuel always posts the most elegant solution to any Quant problems while on Sentence Correction you get many different perspectives on the right answer.
3. Excellent resources on Youtube
As someone who struggles with Verbal and primarily sentence correction, I found the Webinars by GMATNinja on the GMAT Club Youtube channel to be my saving grace. I went from not even knowing the very basics such as what pronouns are, or what a clause is and how it is constructed, and answering the answer that sounded best to understanding what to look out for on Sentence correction questions, the process of elimination, and the focus on meaning. There are many other great Youtube webinars by others as well and gives you an opportunity to feel like you are having a 1 on 1 lesson.
4. Working on your weaknesses
This is very important. It's very tempting to just keep doing what you are good at but having a focused mindset and a plan is essential if you want to keep seeing an improvement in your score. You have to be smart about how you study. In my case, I've always been very good at Quant. After only a few days of studying, my quant score was around 47-49. Now I really enjoyed quant and could try spending weeks trying to get that number slightly higher but the score difference that this would yield would only be around 20 points and may not even happen on the test day depending on if the test is kind to you by testing the topics you are good at or not. Instead I focused fully on verbal because an improvement from my verbal score of V27 to V40 and aiming even higher to V47 would be a much bigger jump of potentially well over 100 points. So I did a few days of CR questions and found that I grasped it quite easily because the format felt quite similar to me and I drew similarities from question to question. Each question had a lot in common like 1 trap answer that was not explicitly mentioned and 2-3 questions that are out of scope. So my focus turned fully to SC and my focus for a month and a half was SC only and attempting OG questions on GMAT Club that were 600-700+ difficulty. With the exceptions to Youtube webinars and going through practice tests. This was good in theory but really didn't work out exactly how I hoped it would as I will explain in my list of things I wish I did.
4. Managing your time on the test
This is something that is very difficult to become good at and is a very essential skill. I often get very stubborn with questions and would sometimes spend over 5 minutes on a single question just to try and get every question correct. This would be fine if you were near the end of your test and had time to spare but doing it at the beginning will just ruin your entire test. The question you spend 5 minutes on may be an extremely difficult question which won't hurt your score too much if you get incorrect and you are not even guaranteed to get it correct even after spending so much time on it. Not only that, you are now under constant time pressure and have to rush through other questions just to make sure you finish your test in time. Now you are open to careless errors on easy questions and also simply not having enough time to answer some questions leading you to get a lot more incorrect questions that you would normally get right, all for a question that you may not have got right in the first place. I try and set a limit on myself. I had to do this in my real test as well on the Quant section, I spent 1 minute 30 seconds on a question and got nowhere, so I just took an educated guess and moved on as I really did not understand the question. I wasn't so disciplined in my verbal section however and I think that really set me back from achieving my optimum verbal score so this is something I still need to work on.
Things I wish I did
1. Doing the LSAT to help your Verbal
When practising the Verbal section, I really underestimated just how difficult it is to break certain barriers. I expected the scoring to be similar to Quant, where I get about 1/3 rd of the questions incorrect and still get a great score. However this was not the case. I'm not sure if it's due to me getting easy questions wrong or the scoring being based on percentiles, but my Verbal score never was above V40, even on repeat tests. This was really disheartening because I would get only 8 out of the 36 questions incorrect and while getting a much more solid score in Quant of Q49 while getting 12 out of 31 questions incorrect. A way higher percentage in Quant can be incorrect than in Verbal and still yield a much higher score. Now I do not know whether this is the same for everyone or I'm just getting easy questions wrong but this meant I had to really just aim for perfection and I had no room for errors like I do in Quant. However having neglected RC and CR for such a long time really hurt my score because I wasn't as well versed on them. I started studying the LSAT RC passages way too late and by then they weren't as useful. What I failed to realise was just how much better I would become at RC on GMAT and indirectly better at SC and CR by reading such complex passages. Especially when I needed to strive for as many correct answers as possible, not understanding a passage was maybe my downfall in the real test as I would have got multiple questions incorrect because of it.
2. Working with a study buddy
I had no knowledge of the study buddy feature on GMAT club and usually just studied alone. This wasn't ideal to do for the entire 2 months because keeping up your morale and motivation was very difficult, especially if you reached a plateau of some sorts. Being able to interact with other people and seeing a different perspective on questions would have been very useful as well as someone explaining something you don't quite understand. There is also a sense of competitiveness that I really desire when studying and I lacked it while studying by myself day in and day out. This was really not my learning style and I feel I didn't get my max potential by studying this way.
3. Book your test as you begin studying and don't take big breaks
I started studying for the GMAT for the first time in late Dec 2020 and completely stopped early Jan 2021 because I had other commitments in life. I also did not book a test and felt absolutely no pressure in stopping. This was a huge mistake as I remembered virtually nothing from before and that time was essentially wasted and I was back to square one. This time I booked a test well in advance as soon as I began studying. This was not only good at giving me a push to keep studying, but also I could design a plan around the time leading up to my tests. I could plan when to do my practice tests to make the most out of them and I knew exactly how long I have left to shore up anything I am struggling with. I think that if I kept up with the GMAT even for 30 mins a day from Jan 2021 to when I started the prep at July 2021, I would have been working up to a much higher score and would have been much better prepared.
4. Use other people's experiences to learn
This is something that I definitely should have done more.There are people who have been in this game for decades and have a wealth of knowledge and have everything under the sun. I was too caught up doing question after question and overloading my mind with information, a lot of which I was unable to retain. Being able to go about the prep smarter instead of rushing head first into question after question was definitely something I was missing. I might have found out better study techniques like the LSAT or study buddies much sooner, or may have discovered other tricks and tips that I really may have found useful. I tried to be way too independent in my study but finding out how others tackled the GMAT from their much longer experience would definitely have gone a long way.
Thanks all for the GMAT experience. GMAT is one of the coolest tests I've done and there's definitely more that I can do. I have no plans to retake the GMAT as of yet but it's on my bucket list for sure. This is a wonderful community as well and I appreciate everyone here.
Many thanks to GMATNinja , Bunuel , daagh and all the other legends on this site who have posted answers on this site for the questions.
Things I found useful
1. Make the most of your practice tests on the GMAT website and save one test for just before the exam
These practice tests really are like the real thing. There is no better indicator of your current ability than doing a fresh test under the same conditions as a real test. Spread your tests out and really make the most of the test. Really spend time trying to figure out why the questions are wrong and right and don't be afraid to redo a test a couple of weeks down the line. The score will not be representative, but what you will do is exhaust all the questions available and see how many of the same mistakes you made again even after correcting it, this would imply that you lack knowledge in that area. A difference of +/- 30 points is quite common from test to test. I've heard a few people say that the practice tests are much easier than the real test but I did not have the same experience here. GMAT Prep 6 for the first time the day before my real test and I got a 700. Less than 24 hours later on the real test, I got a 720 and I found the Quant section to be a lot easier on the real test than the Prep test. It just depends on what topics show up on the test and I feel like doing a practice test the day before and treating it like the real thing really showed any nerves or time mismanagement.
2. Official questions only
Official questions are the best questions because they test exactly what the GMAT might test and the answers are never up for debate. This means you will spend more time working on your weaknesses rather than debating whether the answer is correct in the first place. It is not uncommon for non official questions to test you on things that are not relevant, or have questions that are unclear in terms of its answers or straight up are incorrect. There are plenty of questions on GMAT Club and virtually all of them have been answered by our wonderful Experts or Community members. Just like with the practice tests, really value these official questions and don't just speed through them. Spend the extra time learning about why the right answers are correct and the wrong answers are wrong. Even if you know all this, some information you gain by just scrolling through other people's post may be very helpful, such as seeing a new method or finding an error in one of the answer choices that you did not know before. Bunuel always posts the most elegant solution to any Quant problems while on Sentence Correction you get many different perspectives on the right answer.
3. Excellent resources on Youtube
As someone who struggles with Verbal and primarily sentence correction, I found the Webinars by GMATNinja on the GMAT Club Youtube channel to be my saving grace. I went from not even knowing the very basics such as what pronouns are, or what a clause is and how it is constructed, and answering the answer that sounded best to understanding what to look out for on Sentence correction questions, the process of elimination, and the focus on meaning. There are many other great Youtube webinars by others as well and gives you an opportunity to feel like you are having a 1 on 1 lesson.
4. Working on your weaknesses
This is very important. It's very tempting to just keep doing what you are good at but having a focused mindset and a plan is essential if you want to keep seeing an improvement in your score. You have to be smart about how you study. In my case, I've always been very good at Quant. After only a few days of studying, my quant score was around 47-49. Now I really enjoyed quant and could try spending weeks trying to get that number slightly higher but the score difference that this would yield would only be around 20 points and may not even happen on the test day depending on if the test is kind to you by testing the topics you are good at or not. Instead I focused fully on verbal because an improvement from my verbal score of V27 to V40 and aiming even higher to V47 would be a much bigger jump of potentially well over 100 points. So I did a few days of CR questions and found that I grasped it quite easily because the format felt quite similar to me and I drew similarities from question to question. Each question had a lot in common like 1 trap answer that was not explicitly mentioned and 2-3 questions that are out of scope. So my focus turned fully to SC and my focus for a month and a half was SC only and attempting OG questions on GMAT Club that were 600-700+ difficulty. With the exceptions to Youtube webinars and going through practice tests. This was good in theory but really didn't work out exactly how I hoped it would as I will explain in my list of things I wish I did.
4. Managing your time on the test
This is something that is very difficult to become good at and is a very essential skill. I often get very stubborn with questions and would sometimes spend over 5 minutes on a single question just to try and get every question correct. This would be fine if you were near the end of your test and had time to spare but doing it at the beginning will just ruin your entire test. The question you spend 5 minutes on may be an extremely difficult question which won't hurt your score too much if you get incorrect and you are not even guaranteed to get it correct even after spending so much time on it. Not only that, you are now under constant time pressure and have to rush through other questions just to make sure you finish your test in time. Now you are open to careless errors on easy questions and also simply not having enough time to answer some questions leading you to get a lot more incorrect questions that you would normally get right, all for a question that you may not have got right in the first place. I try and set a limit on myself. I had to do this in my real test as well on the Quant section, I spent 1 minute 30 seconds on a question and got nowhere, so I just took an educated guess and moved on as I really did not understand the question. I wasn't so disciplined in my verbal section however and I think that really set me back from achieving my optimum verbal score so this is something I still need to work on.
Things I wish I did
1. Doing the LSAT to help your Verbal
When practising the Verbal section, I really underestimated just how difficult it is to break certain barriers. I expected the scoring to be similar to Quant, where I get about 1/3 rd of the questions incorrect and still get a great score. However this was not the case. I'm not sure if it's due to me getting easy questions wrong or the scoring being based on percentiles, but my Verbal score never was above V40, even on repeat tests. This was really disheartening because I would get only 8 out of the 36 questions incorrect and while getting a much more solid score in Quant of Q49 while getting 12 out of 31 questions incorrect. A way higher percentage in Quant can be incorrect than in Verbal and still yield a much higher score. Now I do not know whether this is the same for everyone or I'm just getting easy questions wrong but this meant I had to really just aim for perfection and I had no room for errors like I do in Quant. However having neglected RC and CR for such a long time really hurt my score because I wasn't as well versed on them. I started studying the LSAT RC passages way too late and by then they weren't as useful. What I failed to realise was just how much better I would become at RC on GMAT and indirectly better at SC and CR by reading such complex passages. Especially when I needed to strive for as many correct answers as possible, not understanding a passage was maybe my downfall in the real test as I would have got multiple questions incorrect because of it.
2. Working with a study buddy
I had no knowledge of the study buddy feature on GMAT club and usually just studied alone. This wasn't ideal to do for the entire 2 months because keeping up your morale and motivation was very difficult, especially if you reached a plateau of some sorts. Being able to interact with other people and seeing a different perspective on questions would have been very useful as well as someone explaining something you don't quite understand. There is also a sense of competitiveness that I really desire when studying and I lacked it while studying by myself day in and day out. This was really not my learning style and I feel I didn't get my max potential by studying this way.
3. Book your test as you begin studying and don't take big breaks
I started studying for the GMAT for the first time in late Dec 2020 and completely stopped early Jan 2021 because I had other commitments in life. I also did not book a test and felt absolutely no pressure in stopping. This was a huge mistake as I remembered virtually nothing from before and that time was essentially wasted and I was back to square one. This time I booked a test well in advance as soon as I began studying. This was not only good at giving me a push to keep studying, but also I could design a plan around the time leading up to my tests. I could plan when to do my practice tests to make the most out of them and I knew exactly how long I have left to shore up anything I am struggling with. I think that if I kept up with the GMAT even for 30 mins a day from Jan 2021 to when I started the prep at July 2021, I would have been working up to a much higher score and would have been much better prepared.
4. Use other people's experiences to learn
This is something that I definitely should have done more.There are people who have been in this game for decades and have a wealth of knowledge and have everything under the sun. I was too caught up doing question after question and overloading my mind with information, a lot of which I was unable to retain. Being able to go about the prep smarter instead of rushing head first into question after question was definitely something I was missing. I might have found out better study techniques like the LSAT or study buddies much sooner, or may have discovered other tricks and tips that I really may have found useful. I tried to be way too independent in my study but finding out how others tackled the GMAT from their much longer experience would definitely have gone a long way.
Thanks all for the GMAT experience. GMAT is one of the coolest tests I've done and there's definitely more that I can do. I have no plans to retake the GMAT as of yet but it's on my bucket list for sure. This is a wonderful community as well and I appreciate everyone here.
06 Oct 2021, 11:39
Kudos
Bookmarks
Congratulations on the awesome score, and thank you for the shout-outs! Glad that we could help a bit.
This is a phenomenal debrief, and the title might obscure the real headline here: you improved by...
Is that correct? Seriously, that's an incredible, incredible achievement. Very few people pull off a jump of 200+ points, no matter how long they study, and no matter how much money they spend. That's amazing.
Good luck with your applications, and let us know where you land for grad school!
This is a phenomenal debrief, and the title might obscure the real headline here: you improved by...
210 points in less than three months?!?
Is that correct? Seriously, that's an incredible, incredible achievement. Very few people pull off a jump of 200+ points, no matter how long they study, and no matter how much money they spend. That's amazing.
Good luck with your applications, and let us know where you land for grad school!
07 Oct 2021, 15:19
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GMATNinja
Thank you so much GMATNinja . I really couldn't have done it without all the experts here. Having such high scorers such as yourself definitely motivated me to keep aiming higher and higher. Yes a 200+ points jump but those last 50 points were definitely the hardest and I'm glad I could pull it off in the test. The 720 I achieved was higher than any score I achieved in the practice tests (not repeat) and I heard stories about the real test being harder but I kept my focus and believed I could get a higher score and always kept that belief throughout the test, knowing that the GMAT Gods could be kind and be giving me questions I'm good at.
I'll definitely keep updating on the website with more journeys in the future, I want to help others like everyone here has helped me.
