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21 Feb 2026, 10:12
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Hey everyone!
I'm Suyash, and I recently scored a 715 on the GMAT Focus (Q88, V85, DI84).
Taking an MBA was something I'd wanted since college. I'd seen seniors from my batch get into private equity, venture capital, start their own companies – all after doing MBAs from places like Wharton and Harvard. That was the dream. After college I got a decent job, so I decided to work for a few years first and then go for it. Around the 3.5-year mark, I knew it was time to start prepping.
When I took my first diagnostic back in November 2025, I got a 625 – quant was fine at Q87-88, DI was okay at around 82, but verbal below the 75th percentile. I was literally leaving CR and RC questions blank because I just couldn't figure them out. Honestly, if someone had told me three months ago that verbal would be a 94th percentile section for me, I would've never agreed.
And it wasn't like I was getting close on the verbal questions. I'd read a CR passage and understand maybe 30-40% of what was actually going on. Then I'd look at the options and start thinking about what makes sense in the real world, bringing in my own opinions and general knowledge instead of sticking to what the passage said. Sometimes all five options looked right to me. Sometimes none of them did. There was no method to any of it.
RC was worse. I'm not really a reader, so I'd just skim through – read the first line of each paragraph, try to get the gist, and rush to the questions. The problem? By the time I got to the questions, I
I'd realize I hadn't actually understood anything.
What changed? I stopped trying to just practice my way through verbal and actually learned the right way to think about these questions. I know that sounds simple, but there's a huge difference between "doing more questions" and "doing questions the right way."
Six Weeks of Wasted Practice
After that diagnostic, I spent a good amount of time practicing CR and RC on GMAT Club. Tons of questions. And my score barely moved.
The issue was pretty clear in hindsight – I didn't have the right approach, so more practice was just more of the same mistakes. And the frustrating thing about the questions had answer keys but no proper explanations. I'd get something wrong, see the right answer, but have no clue why my thinking was off. I couldn't fix what I didn't understand.
That's when it hit me – I needed proper coaching. Just grinding more questions wasn't going to work.
Starting With e-GMAT: Rebuilding My Verbal From Scratch
When I joined e-GMAT, the first thing I realized was how wrong my whole approach to verbal had been. The video lessons broke things down step by step – not just what to look for, but how to actually process the information in a structured way.
CR: Pre-Thinking Changed Everything
This was the single biggest thing that helped me.
My old way of doing CR was basically: read the passage (understand about a third of it), jump to the options, and go with whatever "felt" right based on common sense. I'd bring in real-world knowledge, form opinions, and end up thinking two or three options all made sense. Sometimes I'd look at all five and think every single one works. Other times none of them seemed right. It was a mess.
What e-GMAT taught me was completely different. First – understand the passage fully. Not 30%, not even 80%. All of it. Know what's being argued, what the conclusion is, what evidence is given. Then, before you even look at the options, think about what a correct answer should look like. That's pre-thinking.
Once I started doing this, everything shifted. I wasn't randomly evaluating five options anymore. I had a clear idea of what I was looking for, so the wrong answers that used to trick me became pretty obvious. Instead of getting confused between choices, I was picking the right one because it matched what I'd already figured out.
It feels slower at first – spending those extra seconds to really process the passage before looking at options. But what actually happens is you stop wasting time going back and forth between two wrong answers. You end up being faster and more accurate.
RC: Just Read the Passage Properly
For RC, the fix was even more straightforward. e-GMAT told me to spend four to five minutes actually reading and understanding the passage before I touch any question.
Four to five minutes just reading? That sounded crazy at first. But here's what I found – once I actually understood the passage, the questions became really simple. Each one would take maybe 30-40 seconds, a minute tops. Compare that to my old approach of skimming for two minutes and then spending two to three minutes per question going back to the passage trying to find stuff I should've caught the first time around.
The math is clear – invest the time upfront and you save way more on the back end. And more importantly, I stopped having that terrible feeling of finishing a passage and realizing I'd absorbed absolutely nothing. Changing my approach helped me improve my accuracy from 55% to 70-75% on the Hard passages.
The Forum and Mentors Support: Clearing Every Doubt
One thing I used a lot was e-GMAT's answer forum. When you're learning a new approach, you run into doubts constantly. I'd do questions and get stuck – why are these two options wrong? Why doesn't this answer work? I posted questions day in and day out, and always got detailed responses back. That was huge for me because without that feedback, I'd just keep making the same mistakes without knowing it.
My mentors (Abha and Rashmi) through the Last Mile Push program helped just as much. Through emails and calls, they didn't just help me see the patterns in my mistakes but also kept me motivated throughout. They pushed me to keep an error log, writing down exactly why I got each question wrong. Was it a comprehension thing? Did I miss a keyword? Did I bring in outside knowledge? After a while, those entries started showing really clear patterns, and that's when things started clicking.
Quant: Keeping the Edge at Q88
Quant was always my strong area, so here it was more about staying sharp than building something new. At Q88-89, most questions aren't that hard – you might get an occasional tough one, but it's mostly about having clean fundamentals in ratios, percentages, number properties, that kind of stuff.
The real risk at this level is silly mistakes. The question asks for x + y but you calculate x - y. The problem says positive numbers only but you include negatives. These are the things that cost you points when you're already scoring high.
I kept a proper error log using the template e-GMAT gave me. Every 15-20 questions, I'd make maybe one or two mistakes, and I'd write down exactly what went wrong – which topic, and specifically why I got it wrong. Almost every time, it wasn't a calculation error. It was misreading the question or missing a constraint.
I used to make sure to practice on the Quant sectionals every now and then to test my ability and work on my test taking skills on the scholaranium.
DI: Breaking It into Time Buckets
DI ended up at D84, 97th percentile – my best section percentile-wise. But it was also where time management mattered the most.
I split the section into clear time blocks. Data Sufficiency – about seven or eight questions – got one minute each, so roughly 10 minutes total. I'd practiced enough DS that I could spot the patterns quickly. One trap I learned to watch for: when two equations look different but are actually the same thing, meaning one statement isn't really giving you new information.
MSR got its own 10-minute block for three or four questions. These need serious reading time upfront – I'd spend four to five minutes going through the sources before attempting anything. Rushing into MSR without understanding the data is a guaranteed way to waste time and get things wrong.
The rest went to graphs and Two-Part Analysis. Graphs always need some approximation since they're never perfectly clear on the GMAT – I'd give each one about two to two-and-a-half minutes. Two-Part Analysis was interesting because some questions are more quant-like and others are more verbal-like. After finishing e-GMAT's CR course, I noticed my accuracy on verbal-type TPA questions went up a lot. The logical reasoning skills carried over directly, which I hadn't expected at all.
The hardest part? Knowing when to let go of a question. My rule was: if I'm stuck early in the section, two minutes max – flag it, move on. But if I'm stuck on question 17 with plenty of time in the bank, I can spend a bit more. My mentors really drilled this into me – leaving questions unanswered carries a way bigger penalty than getting one wrong or coming back to it later.
Switching My Section Order: A Game Changer
This was something I wish I'd figured out earlier. At first, I started with verbal since it was my weakest section – tackle it while the mind is fresh, right? Makes sense in theory. In practice, it backfired badly. Starting with the section I was least confident in made me nervous right from question one, and that anxiety just carried forward into everything else.
So I flipped it around. Quant first, then verbal, then DI.
Starting with quant was like a confidence boost. I knew I'd do well, and that strong start meant my overall score was already in a good place. Even if I made five or six mistakes in verbal after that, it didn't tank my score because I'd built a solid cushion. For DI at the end – after about 90 minutes of testing – I'd take a full 10-minute break to reset before jumping in.
This change showed up immediately in my mocks. I wasn't suddenly smarter – I was just performing closer to my actual level instead of being dragged down by nerves.
The One Thing I'd Tell Every GMAT Aspirant
Practice without a solid base is wasted effort. Full stop.
My score barely moved initially. Why? Because I was practicing with the wrong approach, and more reps just made those bad habits stronger. It's like doing pushups with terrible form – doing more doesn't help, it just makes things worse.
The moment I took a step back, built the right foundation through e-GMAT's courses, and learned proper approaches like pre-thinking and active reading, everything fell into place. Practice after that was actually productive because I was building the right habits instead of reinforcing the wrong ones.
So if you're stuck in a score plateau, don't just do more questions. Ask yourself if your basic approach is right. If it's not, no amount of practice will fix it. Get the right coaching, build the base, and then go all out with practice. That sequence took my verbal from below 75th percentile to V85, and it can work for you too.
All the best!
I'm Suyash, and I recently scored a 715 on the GMAT Focus (Q88, V85, DI84).
Taking an MBA was something I'd wanted since college. I'd seen seniors from my batch get into private equity, venture capital, start their own companies – all after doing MBAs from places like Wharton and Harvard. That was the dream. After college I got a decent job, so I decided to work for a few years first and then go for it. Around the 3.5-year mark, I knew it was time to start prepping.
When I took my first diagnostic back in November 2025, I got a 625 – quant was fine at Q87-88, DI was okay at around 82, but verbal below the 75th percentile. I was literally leaving CR and RC questions blank because I just couldn't figure them out. Honestly, if someone had told me three months ago that verbal would be a 94th percentile section for me, I would've never agreed.
And it wasn't like I was getting close on the verbal questions. I'd read a CR passage and understand maybe 30-40% of what was actually going on. Then I'd look at the options and start thinking about what makes sense in the real world, bringing in my own opinions and general knowledge instead of sticking to what the passage said. Sometimes all five options looked right to me. Sometimes none of them did. There was no method to any of it.
RC was worse. I'm not really a reader, so I'd just skim through – read the first line of each paragraph, try to get the gist, and rush to the questions. The problem? By the time I got to the questions, I
I'd realize I hadn't actually understood anything.
What changed? I stopped trying to just practice my way through verbal and actually learned the right way to think about these questions. I know that sounds simple, but there's a huge difference between "doing more questions" and "doing questions the right way."
Six Weeks of Wasted Practice
After that diagnostic, I spent a good amount of time practicing CR and RC on GMAT Club. Tons of questions. And my score barely moved.
The issue was pretty clear in hindsight – I didn't have the right approach, so more practice was just more of the same mistakes. And the frustrating thing about the questions had answer keys but no proper explanations. I'd get something wrong, see the right answer, but have no clue why my thinking was off. I couldn't fix what I didn't understand.
That's when it hit me – I needed proper coaching. Just grinding more questions wasn't going to work.
Starting With e-GMAT: Rebuilding My Verbal From Scratch
When I joined e-GMAT, the first thing I realized was how wrong my whole approach to verbal had been. The video lessons broke things down step by step – not just what to look for, but how to actually process the information in a structured way.
CR: Pre-Thinking Changed Everything
This was the single biggest thing that helped me.
My old way of doing CR was basically: read the passage (understand about a third of it), jump to the options, and go with whatever "felt" right based on common sense. I'd bring in real-world knowledge, form opinions, and end up thinking two or three options all made sense. Sometimes I'd look at all five and think every single one works. Other times none of them seemed right. It was a mess.
What e-GMAT taught me was completely different. First – understand the passage fully. Not 30%, not even 80%. All of it. Know what's being argued, what the conclusion is, what evidence is given. Then, before you even look at the options, think about what a correct answer should look like. That's pre-thinking.
Once I started doing this, everything shifted. I wasn't randomly evaluating five options anymore. I had a clear idea of what I was looking for, so the wrong answers that used to trick me became pretty obvious. Instead of getting confused between choices, I was picking the right one because it matched what I'd already figured out.
It feels slower at first – spending those extra seconds to really process the passage before looking at options. But what actually happens is you stop wasting time going back and forth between two wrong answers. You end up being faster and more accurate.
RC: Just Read the Passage Properly
For RC, the fix was even more straightforward. e-GMAT told me to spend four to five minutes actually reading and understanding the passage before I touch any question.
Four to five minutes just reading? That sounded crazy at first. But here's what I found – once I actually understood the passage, the questions became really simple. Each one would take maybe 30-40 seconds, a minute tops. Compare that to my old approach of skimming for two minutes and then spending two to three minutes per question going back to the passage trying to find stuff I should've caught the first time around.
The math is clear – invest the time upfront and you save way more on the back end. And more importantly, I stopped having that terrible feeling of finishing a passage and realizing I'd absorbed absolutely nothing. Changing my approach helped me improve my accuracy from 55% to 70-75% on the Hard passages.
The Forum and Mentors Support: Clearing Every Doubt
One thing I used a lot was e-GMAT's answer forum. When you're learning a new approach, you run into doubts constantly. I'd do questions and get stuck – why are these two options wrong? Why doesn't this answer work? I posted questions day in and day out, and always got detailed responses back. That was huge for me because without that feedback, I'd just keep making the same mistakes without knowing it.
My mentors (Abha and Rashmi) through the Last Mile Push program helped just as much. Through emails and calls, they didn't just help me see the patterns in my mistakes but also kept me motivated throughout. They pushed me to keep an error log, writing down exactly why I got each question wrong. Was it a comprehension thing? Did I miss a keyword? Did I bring in outside knowledge? After a while, those entries started showing really clear patterns, and that's when things started clicking.
Quant: Keeping the Edge at Q88
Quant was always my strong area, so here it was more about staying sharp than building something new. At Q88-89, most questions aren't that hard – you might get an occasional tough one, but it's mostly about having clean fundamentals in ratios, percentages, number properties, that kind of stuff.
The real risk at this level is silly mistakes. The question asks for x + y but you calculate x - y. The problem says positive numbers only but you include negatives. These are the things that cost you points when you're already scoring high.
I kept a proper error log using the template e-GMAT gave me. Every 15-20 questions, I'd make maybe one or two mistakes, and I'd write down exactly what went wrong – which topic, and specifically why I got it wrong. Almost every time, it wasn't a calculation error. It was misreading the question or missing a constraint.
I used to make sure to practice on the Quant sectionals every now and then to test my ability and work on my test taking skills on the scholaranium.
DI: Breaking It into Time Buckets
DI ended up at D84, 97th percentile – my best section percentile-wise. But it was also where time management mattered the most.
I split the section into clear time blocks. Data Sufficiency – about seven or eight questions – got one minute each, so roughly 10 minutes total. I'd practiced enough DS that I could spot the patterns quickly. One trap I learned to watch for: when two equations look different but are actually the same thing, meaning one statement isn't really giving you new information.
MSR got its own 10-minute block for three or four questions. These need serious reading time upfront – I'd spend four to five minutes going through the sources before attempting anything. Rushing into MSR without understanding the data is a guaranteed way to waste time and get things wrong.
The rest went to graphs and Two-Part Analysis. Graphs always need some approximation since they're never perfectly clear on the GMAT – I'd give each one about two to two-and-a-half minutes. Two-Part Analysis was interesting because some questions are more quant-like and others are more verbal-like. After finishing e-GMAT's CR course, I noticed my accuracy on verbal-type TPA questions went up a lot. The logical reasoning skills carried over directly, which I hadn't expected at all.
The hardest part? Knowing when to let go of a question. My rule was: if I'm stuck early in the section, two minutes max – flag it, move on. But if I'm stuck on question 17 with plenty of time in the bank, I can spend a bit more. My mentors really drilled this into me – leaving questions unanswered carries a way bigger penalty than getting one wrong or coming back to it later.
Switching My Section Order: A Game Changer
This was something I wish I'd figured out earlier. At first, I started with verbal since it was my weakest section – tackle it while the mind is fresh, right? Makes sense in theory. In practice, it backfired badly. Starting with the section I was least confident in made me nervous right from question one, and that anxiety just carried forward into everything else.
So I flipped it around. Quant first, then verbal, then DI.
Starting with quant was like a confidence boost. I knew I'd do well, and that strong start meant my overall score was already in a good place. Even if I made five or six mistakes in verbal after that, it didn't tank my score because I'd built a solid cushion. For DI at the end – after about 90 minutes of testing – I'd take a full 10-minute break to reset before jumping in.
This change showed up immediately in my mocks. I wasn't suddenly smarter – I was just performing closer to my actual level instead of being dragged down by nerves.
The One Thing I'd Tell Every GMAT Aspirant
Practice without a solid base is wasted effort. Full stop.
My score barely moved initially. Why? Because I was practicing with the wrong approach, and more reps just made those bad habits stronger. It's like doing pushups with terrible form – doing more doesn't help, it just makes things worse.
The moment I took a step back, built the right foundation through e-GMAT's courses, and learned proper approaches like pre-thinking and active reading, everything fell into place. Practice after that was actually productive because I was building the right habits instead of reinforcing the wrong ones.
So if you're stuck in a score plateau, don't just do more questions. Ask yourself if your basic approach is right. If it's not, no amount of practice will fix it. Get the right coaching, build the base, and then go all out with practice. That sequence took my verbal from below 75th percentile to V85, and it can work for you too.
All the best!
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21 Feb 2026, 11:06
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Congrats for your score and thanks for your guidance.
