My GMAT Adventure – Lessons Learned in achieving 750 (Q47, V46)!

Question

Hi all, I wanted to share my GMAT journey with the forum members here in the hope that my experiences can aid and inspire those of you who are facing similar challenges that I struggled through. Also, it feels somewhat cathartic to reflect on the previous four months of my life, in which I ate, slept, and breathed GMAT. This forum has been incredibly valuable to me during this process, so I hope my story serves as some guidance for others.

Background & Initial Attempt 
My first mistake in this whole process was underestimating the enormity of the challenge I was about to undertake. As an accomplished mechanical engineer, who graduated with first class honors and has spoken English his entire life (well, Australian English, but close enough), I assumed my math and English skills were at a high enough level that the GMAT would be a fairly simple undertaking. How hard can it be, right?.... A bit of high school Maths and English...... Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
 
I made the decision to commence GMAT preparations on the 4th of July 2021. I work in the construction industry as a Field Engineering manager, a role that demands long working hours - 60 to 70 hour weeks - and very early starts – 5 am – so I made a plan to complete most of my study on Sundays with light review in the evenings after work. Having graduated from university 10 years ago, my math was a little rusty, so I purchased some used copies of the Manhattan GMAT Quant and Manhattan GMAT Verbal Guides and went through each, cover to cover, taking notes as I went. Surprisingly, I found the content fairly interesting, and it was nice to rehash a lot of the concepts I had long forgotten from my academic days. After finishing up both books in mid-August, I believed I was ready to tackle a practice test so I signed up to the GMAT Club Forum and planned to start working through practice questions. Fortunately, the following Sunday it was India’s Independence Day (Aug 15th), therefore GMAT Club was offering free CAT tests. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to gauge my progress and see if I was ready to book-in a test date.
 
I attempted both Quant and Verbal sections, and scored a miserable 33 and 31 respectively, equivalent to an aggregate score of 580. I barely made it through 20 questions on each and ended up guessing long strings of questions at the end just to finish in-time.

It was obvious that, despite my study, I still was nowhere near ready – my timing was off, I made numerous careless errors, and I felt like I was missing knowledge and understand of a large chunk of the content that GMAT tests (especially in the Quant Sections).

Initial Quant Improvement - TTP 
After reading the recommendations on this forum, I decided to give Target Test Prep a go, and signed up for their $1 seven-day trial. Glancing over the course content, it became immediately apparent to me that the Manhattan books I initially studied, while providing a good basic overview, lacked a substantial amount of intermediate and advanced GMAT specific material that I knew I was missing. I signed up for a month of TTP and worked through the courses, loosely following the study guide (as I already covered some of the content with the Manhattan Books), taking notes as I went. The course was very comprehensive, and I immediately noticed significant improvements in my accuracy and speed in solving quant problems. I was able to recognize and understand problem types/variations quicker and employ the correct strategies to arrive at a solution. The question bank was especially helpful, and I made a commitment to do a 30 question quant test everyday in the evening, consisting of Medium and Hard problems under timed conditions. After another month of study, I attempted my first full Official GMAT practice test.

Lessons / Takeaways 
 1. I regret starting my study off with the Manhattan GMAT books. In hindsight, I would have been a lot more efficient and better prepared going with Target Test Prep from the beginning. All things considered, the service is very affordable, and it raised my competency to a level in which I was able to consistently score in the mid to high 40’s.
2. One note on the TTP course, be aware that that the website will hide chapters based on the mastery level you select when signing up. I had selected the 2nd highest mastery level (up to Q47) and was unaware that as a result, there were a handful of advanced chapters which were not shown to me. Annoyingly, I discovered this fact after my first test attempt and one of the hidden chapters was pertinent to a question that I was dealt in the exam and consequently missed. 
 
 Practice CAT 1 – 650 (Q47, V33) 
I didn’t score too badly on my first attempt, however realized that my verbal score still completely sucked. Fortunately, I realized Target Test Prep also had a verbal section, so I poured over the Sentence Correction and Critical Reasoning Sections of the courses, taking notes as I went. Two weeks later I was approximately halfway through the verbal TTP content and decided to take my next Official Practice test to gauge my progress.

Practice CAT 2 – 680 (Q46, V37) 
I definitely felt I performed better on the verbal section this time, and felt reassured that the TTP verbal course was helping me improve. I was still a little bit slow and didn’t finish the section in time (had to guess the last 4 questions), however I wasn’t using my “ear” to solve sentence correction problems anymore, and was, more often than not, able to methodically eliminate incorrect answer choices. I continued through the remainder of the TTP verbal courses and finished all chapters. To attempt to improve my speed, I committed to doing a 30-question test after work each evening, using the TTP custom test feature. I took a few days off work five days prior to my real GMAT test appointment (October 4th) to hone my final preparations and on the first of these five days, I undertook Official Practice 3.

Practice CAT 3 – 710 (Q45, V41) 
This attempt felt really good. I only just finished the verbal section in-time but felt very competent selecting answer choices. My Quant section suffered a little, as I got 3 of the first 10 questions wrong (due to really silly mistakes on my part), causing the CAT algorithm to feed me lower-level questions for the majority of the latter part of the test. However, I took this as a lesson to remind myself to slow down a bit, and be a bit more methodical at the start of the quant section in the real test.

First GMAT Attempt – VUE Test Center - 630 (Q47, V31, IR8) 
To be honest I was absolutely gutted after seeing my score flash on the screen. I immediately cancelled my score and berated myself for the entire drive home.

I chose a section order of Quant – Verbal – IW & AWA.

Quant went pretty well, I finished the entire section on time and only had to guess 4 questions, (2 completely stumped me so I quickly moved-on, and the other 2 I exhausted my allotted time to solve them).

To this day, I still don’t know how I went so wrong on the verbal side of the test. I felt like I didn’t do too bad as I was taking it, however I panicked on a couple of the early sentence correction problems that were very pronoun heavy, and I ultimately ran out of time at the end of the section. Also, I stupidly misjudged the number of question and somehow thought Q35/36 was the last question. I spent my last few seconds answering this question, only to be surprised when Q36 flashed on the screen with less than 2 seconds to go. Unfortunately, I don’t have mad gamer-level mouse skills and I was not fast enough to select an answer and press submit. I considered purchasing an enhanced score report, however since my score was so unrepresentative of my recent practice attempts, I decided not to bother – all areas of Verbal needed work.

Some Lessons / Takeaways 
 1. I cannot emphasize this enough – TEST THE PENS that the test center issues you! I read this countless times before my first attempt, and upon receiving my pad drew a feeble 1 cm line on the cover with each pen and assumed that both were fine. As I started to write out the equations for question one, the first pen was completely useless and felt like I was rubbing a dry, sticky eraser over a sheet of plastic. The second pen was not much better but at least I could faintly mark out my workings with it. Really test the pens out when they are issued to you. This really threw me off at the start of the test and added an unnecessary issue for me to have to manage.
2. Be wise with your mid-test snacks and try not to deviate from your regular routine too much. I am a big coffee drinker, consuming 2 – 3 pints of coffee per day. I tried to limit my caffeine the week of my test, and on the test day itself, and found myself a bit less alert, and slightly more mentally fatigued than usual. Granted, it may have just been a result of all the added stress imposed by the test environment, however I definitely felt a bit less focused after tackling the quant section. Three hours is a long time to maintain deep focused concentration, so I certainly recommend putting some thought into refueling during the small breaks. 
 
 Strategies to Improve. 
After taking a week off to process my results and get over the disappointment of my initial attempt, I decided not to give-up and formulated the following 3-week plan to strengthen my Quant and Verbal abilities and attempt the test again.

Quant 
 1. I was pretty happy with my quant performance on test day, so I decided to stay sharp by continuing to do TTP custom tests most night after work. I understand a considerable amount of time and effort is needed to progress from Q47 to 49-50, time which I decided was better spent elsewhere.

2. Additionally, I purchased a copy of the  GMAT Official Advanced Questions Book  – this is an IMMENSELY Useful resource, a true Game Changer that I wish I knew existed sooner. I set up an excel spreadsheet and listed out the questions and answers, then used this to jumble the order and create five mock tests consisting of 30 problems each. This exposure to the harder GMAT questions not only helped me strengthen my understanding of more complex quant concepts, but also provided me with a better feel for that special nuanced style of questioning that GMAC employs.

3. MathRevolution provides a series of advanced quant videos on YouTube.
I found these to be very helpful, especially when facing convoluted data sufficiency problems. The videos cover a number of advanced concepts and added a couple of extra tools and tricks to my repertoire.

Reading Comprehension 
 1. As a native English speaker, I was confident in my ability to read and understand long and complex passages. Many of the uncommon ‘big’ words GMAT likes to throw into these questions to confuse test takers I was already familiar with; Some of the more frequent words I encountered and recommend learning include, analogous, ambivalent, presupposes, dichotomy, derivative, derogatory, paradoxical, purports, hubris, immutable....

2. I deduced that my main issue with RC seemed to be maintaining interest in the passage to properly take in the content. Also, I was not always picking-up on exactly “what the author was trying to say” after each paragraph.

3.By far, the most useful resource in improving my Reading Comprehension was this technique by Mr Phillip aka  The Tested Tutor  on Youtube.
This method absolutely works and is completely gimmick free - I cannot thank Mr Phillip enough for his videos and his detailed approach (he has a excess of useful and carefully explained GMAT content on his channel, including a full run-through of a practice CAT in which he score 780 whilst casually explaining his reasoning as he goes – very impressive).
Using this method, I attempted all 50 of the Reading Comprehension problems in the  GMAT Official Advanced Questions Book , under timed test-like conditions, and only got 4 wrong. I cannot recommend this approach enough – read slow – answer fast – no note taking.

Sentence Correction 
 1. TTP gave me a good foundation on Sentence correction theory, however, my confidence was still relatively low when attempting questions and I wasn’t noticing any improvement. I found that running through lots of questions in TTP wasn’t helping me improve.

2. I decided to try something different and stumbled upon the  Thursdays With Ron  Workshop Videos - Available on Youtube.
These were a huge help and I cannot recommend these videos enough to anyone struggling with sentence correction. The videos cover numerous good examples of questions on all key topics, and do so in a very pragmatic and methodical approach. This really helped me solidify my understanding of the key grammar rules which I could reliably use to eliminate incorrect answer choices. Furthermore, while I am partial to the idea that sentence correction questions have an “intended meaning”, they must certainly have a logical meaning, which is something that I often overlooked in my answer selections (especially once I’d narrowed down the answer choices to 2 remaining options). This is something I encourage TTP to place some additional emphasis on in their otherwise stellar SC course.

3. I watched 2-3  Thursdays with Ron  webinars per day (at 1.75x speed – Ron speaks very slowly) then attempted a mock test every other day consisting of questions from the  GMAT Official Advanced Questions Book .
Two weeks out from my test date, I refrained from attempting any unofficial SC practice problems and only focused on Official GMAT SC problems.

Critical Reasoning 
 1. The TTP course did a very good job in preparing me for CR question content and variations, so I felt my knowledge in this area was already well rounded.

2. To sharpen my proficiencies, I worked through the questions in the  GMAT Official Advanced Questions Book . As I did for Quant, I made up practice tests consisting of 30 questions at a time from this book, and ran through them under timed conditions. This was immensely helpful as some of the questions in this book are insanely challenging and require a very high level of thinking (a very critical level of reasoning!). Once I could reason my way to answering these problems, the lower level test problems were a joke, and the correct answers seemed almost blatantly obvious.

3. To further finesse my Critical Reasoning skillset, I also utilized the  Thursdays With Ron  Workshop Videos - Available on Youtube.
Again, these are an excellent resource and I highly recommend them to anyone struggling to fortify the key CR concepts in their mind.

The week before my retest I completed my last official GMAT practice test.

Practice Cat 4 – 750 (Q50, V40) 
Practice test went really smoothly. I only just finished the verbal section in-time (had to really rush the last 4 questions) but came away with only 5 errors and scored 40. I felt a lot more deliberate and decisive in eliminating answer choices, and after working my way through so many challenging SC and CR problems in the GMAT Official Advanced Questions Book, many of the early questions seemed really easy.

Furthermore, as a consequence of all the advanced official guide quant questions I completed, my Quant score improved drastically. I finished the section with 5 minutes to spare and absolutely nailed the test content – only 3 questions wrong, all of which were just silly mistakes.

Second GMAT Attempt – Online - 750 (Q47, V46, IR8) 
Because of limited availability at the test centers in my local area, I decided to take my retest online. I was a bit apprehensive about this as I had read some horror stories on the forums, however I tried to focus on the positive aspects – familiar setting, familiar whiteboard, reliable pens, no traveling required, etc.

I switched up the section order and decided to do verbal first, with the thought being that I will be at my most mentally sharp state (least fatigued) at the beginning of the test. I don’t regret this choice!

The online test experience was far from perfect. I was interrupted twice during my verbal section by the proctor, once for reading a bit too loudly and once more because I was leaning-in too close to the screen and the proctor was unable to see my full face. Furthermore, about 5 questions in, the secured browser began to lag, and I had to click on my answer choice multiple times before it would register my selection. The same issue sporadically occurred when I went to click “Next” to move onto the next question. All-up I probably lost 1 – 2 minutes of test time due to these distractions and issues. Nevertheless, I felt very confident with my answer selections in the verbal section, and for the first time, I finished the section on-time (I had just 3 minutes to complete the last 2 questions, but I was able to power-read through the question stems and deduced my answers in time, making confident and deliberate selections).

In the quant section I experienced similar issues to those encountered in the verbal section. Button selections were laggy and I was stopped twice by the proctor as he couldn’t see my full face when I was writing on my whiteboard; I had to tilt my laptop screen down to accommodate, putting the viewing angle at a slightly uncomfortable position. I screwed up a couple of the earlier questions by rushing through reading of the question stem (i.e. missing a number when computing an average - dammit), and as a result I started to fall behind in time. Compounded with the delays due to the laggy browser and proctor interruptions, I ended up having to make swift educated guesses on the last 2 questions of the section. I felt that I didn’t do too bad, however the test certainly didn’t go as smoothly as my practice Cat 4 and my attempt was a little off my best.

The AWA section was by far the worst section to complete online. The input box was very laggy and slow. After every couple of words the display would freeze, and I would have to wait for it to respond again before the words that I typed showed up on the screen. Nevertheless, I managed to hammer out a decent essay attempt (well I hope - yet to be scored).

When I saw my overall score on the screen, I was ecstatic and felt a huge wave of relief – All those long hour and sacrifices were worth it! Unfortunately, I received one final kick in the teeth from the online exam the following day - an email stating that my test has been flagged for administrative review. I will be devastated if my exam is voided for some trivial technical issue, however I did everything right by the test rules and followed all instructions given to me by the proctor, so I am remaining optimistic in the hope that nothing unfavorable will come of this.

Reflecting on the entire process I think the main contributor to my success was that I consistently strived for continual improvement. My practice test scores reflected this trend, starting at 580 and progressing through 650 to 680 to 710 to 750. The resources on this forum were invaluable to me during my journey, and I hope the tools and resources that helped me – that I listed above – are also helpful to others facing similar challenges.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi Montecarlo89.

Congrats!

It's great to see how you kept finding levers to pull until you aced the GMAT, providing a great example of how anyone can proceed to achieve GMAT success.

Yogananda · Answer

Congratulations on the great score.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Very helpful.

Posted from my mobile device

Rohit5678 · Answer

Congratulations on the efforts. I too am working on improving my score (660 Q49, V31 IR 4 AWA 4.5).

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