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22 Apr 2026, 08:25
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From the 455 to 675
I'm a tech engineer in banking, and I'll be upfront — I did not expect this to take six months.
When I first sat down to write about this journey, I wasn't sure where to start. Not because there wasn't enough to say, but because so much happened between that first mock and test day that it's hard to compress it into something readable. I'll try.
My name is Kashish, and I recently scored a 675 (Q88, V82, DI80) on the GMAT Focus. I started in the 400s. That's more than 200 points of improvement, and I still feel a little disoriented looking at the number.
Why I Even Started
The MBA decision had been sitting at the back of my mind for a while. I work in tech within the banking industry, and while the work is good, I kept hitting the same ceiling — conversations where I could see the problem clearly but didn't have the business language or the cross-functional credibility to fully participate. That gap started to bother me.
So I finally committed to the GMAT, signed up with e-GMAT roughly six or seven months before my exam, and took my first official mock.
The score was in the 400s. And yes, I was shocked.
But when I actually sat down with that result, something clicked. My first instinct had been to blame time pressure — I hadn't finished sections, I'd rushed, I'd panicked. But the deeper analysis told a different story. It wasn't that I didn't understand the concepts. It was that my method of solving was completely wrong for this test. I was getting to answers through a haphazard process that happened to work on simpler problems but fell apart under GMAT conditions. That realization was actually the most important thing that came out of that first mock — not the number itself.
Quant: Building from Scratch (Q88)
I came in assuming quant would be my foundation. Engineering background, heavy math exposure — how hard could it be?
Harder than I thought, in ways I didn't expect.
The issue wasn't that I couldn't do the math. The issue was that I was missing entire categories of cases. Arithmetic especially. In my first practice attempts, I was solving questions without accounting for all the possibilities — positive vs. negative integers, odd primes, zero as a special case, edge conditions in inequalities. I'd read the question, build a solution path, and arrive at a confident wrong answer because I'd excluded a case I didn't even think to check.
The e-GMAT solutions changed that. I had to genuinely shift how I approached each problem — expanding my thinking to consider every case before committing to an answer path. I went back to the forums on the platform constantly, reading through question discussions, watching how other students and experts reasoned through problems where I thought I already understood the method.
Eventually, I stopped chasing question volume. I went slower, reviewed harder, and the 360-degree thinking started to feel more natural. By the end, I had a Q88.
Verbal: V82
Reading comprehension, I could manage from day one. The tougher RC questions — main idea, inference — those required practice because GMAT isn't just testing whether you understood the passage, it's testing whether you understood it well enough to extend the reasoning. That's a subtle but critical difference.
Critical Reasoning was a different story entirely. I had genuinely never encountered this type of question before. Assumption questions, boldface — I had no framework for any of it when I started.
What I was doing initially, without realizing it, was the worst possible approach: reading the question, going straight to the answer choices, and then trying to backwards-match the passage. Under timed pressure, this is a disaster. The answer choices in GMAT CR are designed to look similar. When you're in the fifth hour of a preparation session and two choices feel roughly equivalent, you're done.
The pre-thinking approach that e-GMAT teaches flipped this for me. The method made me articulate what I expected the answer to look like before I read the choices. For assumption questions specifically, I had to first understand the argument structure, then come up with possible falsification conditions, and only then evaluate whether an answer choice qualified. It sounds slow when I describe it, but it's actually faster under pressure because it gives you a filter. You're no longer comparing all five choices to each other — you're comparing them against something you've already constructed.
The change didn't happen overnight. I kept going back to the CR video lessons on the platform when I solved questions incorrectly. My pattern was: solve the question, get it wrong, go back to the relevant video, understand the gap in my reasoning, try again. Slow and iterative — but it worked.
Data Insights: DI80
If quant surprised me and verbal challenged me, DI was in its own category.
I moved from a DI 69 to a DI 80. That improvement required the most sustained effort of any section.
Data Sufficiency was actually the first topic I started on the e-GMAT platform, and I'm glad I did it early. The mental decision tree — when do you pick A, when do you move to the other branch — is not intuitive. Multi-Source Reasoning was the second major challenge. I had experience with graphs and tables from work, but the way GMAT frames MSR questions is nothing like reading a business dashboard. Two-Part Analysis was probably my worst area for the longest time. You can get completely lost in the information they give you, especially when the answer choices are close, and you're running short on time.
My approach to DI was different from how I handled the other sections. From the beginning, I practiced DI under timed conditions — not because I had strong foundations yet, but because I'd realized early that DI is one of those areas where the speed component is inseparable from the accuracy component. If you don't train your brain to extract information efficiently from the start, you develop habits that are very hard to unlearn later. So, I forced myself to work within time limits even when it felt uncomfortable.
Over several weeks, those short quizzes built an endurance baseline that made the longer sectionals feel manageable rather than brutal.
The Last Mile Push Program
I joined the LMP program in the final two months of my preparation, and it changed the texture of those last weeks significantly.
Until then, I had structure through the PSP — the platform gave me a clear learning pathway, and I knew what to do each day. But the LMP added something the platform alone couldn't: a person on the other side of a screen who had seen hundreds of students make the same mistakes I was making and could tell me exactly where I was being inefficient.
I had hit a wall with verbal at one point — stuck between V80-V81 for what felt like too long. My mentor, Abha, told me to put it down for now and focus on Quant, since all three sections were weighted equally and I was leaving more points on the table there. That kind of call is hard to make on your own when you're emotionally invested in one section. Having someone with experience make it for me, backed by data, was genuinely valuable.
The emails I was sending were very long. I had questions about timing strategy, test-day logistics, how to pace myself through a 45-minute sectional, and how to mentally let go of a question you're not sure about. The mentor team was available for all of it.
Test Day
I booked a 12:15 PM slot intentionally. I've never been a reliable morning person under stress, and I didn't want exam-day nerves compounding a too-early start time. I had a heavy breakfast, I knew exactly where the test center was, and I walked in as calm as I've felt at any point in six months.
Quant went well. I knew it before I'd finished.
Verbal was harder than I'd hoped. There were a couple of stretches where I wasn't sure if I was managing time correctly, and I left the section feeling uncertain. During the break, I made a conscious decision: whatever just happened is done. DI is still in front of me, and I can still do well there.
Even with DI, where I lost track of time once or twice, I kept pulling myself back. You've done 45-minute sectionals. You know this material. Don't panic — just answer the question in front of you.
When I saw the final score, 675, I genuinely didn't know what to say for a few seconds.
Wherever you are in your preparation — trust the process. Do the review. Show up consistently. That's actually all it takes.
Good luck.
I'm a tech engineer in banking, and I'll be upfront — I did not expect this to take six months.
When I first sat down to write about this journey, I wasn't sure where to start. Not because there wasn't enough to say, but because so much happened between that first mock and test day that it's hard to compress it into something readable. I'll try.
My name is Kashish, and I recently scored a 675 (Q88, V82, DI80) on the GMAT Focus. I started in the 400s. That's more than 200 points of improvement, and I still feel a little disoriented looking at the number.
Why I Even Started
The MBA decision had been sitting at the back of my mind for a while. I work in tech within the banking industry, and while the work is good, I kept hitting the same ceiling — conversations where I could see the problem clearly but didn't have the business language or the cross-functional credibility to fully participate. That gap started to bother me.
So I finally committed to the GMAT, signed up with e-GMAT roughly six or seven months before my exam, and took my first official mock.
The score was in the 400s. And yes, I was shocked.
But when I actually sat down with that result, something clicked. My first instinct had been to blame time pressure — I hadn't finished sections, I'd rushed, I'd panicked. But the deeper analysis told a different story. It wasn't that I didn't understand the concepts. It was that my method of solving was completely wrong for this test. I was getting to answers through a haphazard process that happened to work on simpler problems but fell apart under GMAT conditions. That realization was actually the most important thing that came out of that first mock — not the number itself.
Quant: Building from Scratch (Q88)
I came in assuming quant would be my foundation. Engineering background, heavy math exposure — how hard could it be?
Harder than I thought, in ways I didn't expect.
The issue wasn't that I couldn't do the math. The issue was that I was missing entire categories of cases. Arithmetic especially. In my first practice attempts, I was solving questions without accounting for all the possibilities — positive vs. negative integers, odd primes, zero as a special case, edge conditions in inequalities. I'd read the question, build a solution path, and arrive at a confident wrong answer because I'd excluded a case I didn't even think to check.
The e-GMAT solutions changed that. I had to genuinely shift how I approached each problem — expanding my thinking to consider every case before committing to an answer path. I went back to the forums on the platform constantly, reading through question discussions, watching how other students and experts reasoned through problems where I thought I already understood the method.
Eventually, I stopped chasing question volume. I went slower, reviewed harder, and the 360-degree thinking started to feel more natural. By the end, I had a Q88.
Verbal: V82
Reading comprehension, I could manage from day one. The tougher RC questions — main idea, inference — those required practice because GMAT isn't just testing whether you understood the passage, it's testing whether you understood it well enough to extend the reasoning. That's a subtle but critical difference.
Critical Reasoning was a different story entirely. I had genuinely never encountered this type of question before. Assumption questions, boldface — I had no framework for any of it when I started.
What I was doing initially, without realizing it, was the worst possible approach: reading the question, going straight to the answer choices, and then trying to backwards-match the passage. Under timed pressure, this is a disaster. The answer choices in GMAT CR are designed to look similar. When you're in the fifth hour of a preparation session and two choices feel roughly equivalent, you're done.
The pre-thinking approach that e-GMAT teaches flipped this for me. The method made me articulate what I expected the answer to look like before I read the choices. For assumption questions specifically, I had to first understand the argument structure, then come up with possible falsification conditions, and only then evaluate whether an answer choice qualified. It sounds slow when I describe it, but it's actually faster under pressure because it gives you a filter. You're no longer comparing all five choices to each other — you're comparing them against something you've already constructed.
The change didn't happen overnight. I kept going back to the CR video lessons on the platform when I solved questions incorrectly. My pattern was: solve the question, get it wrong, go back to the relevant video, understand the gap in my reasoning, try again. Slow and iterative — but it worked.
Data Insights: DI80
If quant surprised me and verbal challenged me, DI was in its own category.
I moved from a DI 69 to a DI 80. That improvement required the most sustained effort of any section.
Data Sufficiency was actually the first topic I started on the e-GMAT platform, and I'm glad I did it early. The mental decision tree — when do you pick A, when do you move to the other branch — is not intuitive. Multi-Source Reasoning was the second major challenge. I had experience with graphs and tables from work, but the way GMAT frames MSR questions is nothing like reading a business dashboard. Two-Part Analysis was probably my worst area for the longest time. You can get completely lost in the information they give you, especially when the answer choices are close, and you're running short on time.
My approach to DI was different from how I handled the other sections. From the beginning, I practiced DI under timed conditions — not because I had strong foundations yet, but because I'd realized early that DI is one of those areas where the speed component is inseparable from the accuracy component. If you don't train your brain to extract information efficiently from the start, you develop habits that are very hard to unlearn later. So, I forced myself to work within time limits even when it felt uncomfortable.
Over several weeks, those short quizzes built an endurance baseline that made the longer sectionals feel manageable rather than brutal.
The Last Mile Push Program
I joined the LMP program in the final two months of my preparation, and it changed the texture of those last weeks significantly.
Until then, I had structure through the PSP — the platform gave me a clear learning pathway, and I knew what to do each day. But the LMP added something the platform alone couldn't: a person on the other side of a screen who had seen hundreds of students make the same mistakes I was making and could tell me exactly where I was being inefficient.
I had hit a wall with verbal at one point — stuck between V80-V81 for what felt like too long. My mentor, Abha, told me to put it down for now and focus on Quant, since all three sections were weighted equally and I was leaving more points on the table there. That kind of call is hard to make on your own when you're emotionally invested in one section. Having someone with experience make it for me, backed by data, was genuinely valuable.
The emails I was sending were very long. I had questions about timing strategy, test-day logistics, how to pace myself through a 45-minute sectional, and how to mentally let go of a question you're not sure about. The mentor team was available for all of it.
Test Day
I booked a 12:15 PM slot intentionally. I've never been a reliable morning person under stress, and I didn't want exam-day nerves compounding a too-early start time. I had a heavy breakfast, I knew exactly where the test center was, and I walked in as calm as I've felt at any point in six months.
Quant went well. I knew it before I'd finished.
Verbal was harder than I'd hoped. There were a couple of stretches where I wasn't sure if I was managing time correctly, and I left the section feeling uncertain. During the break, I made a conscious decision: whatever just happened is done. DI is still in front of me, and I can still do well there.
Even with DI, where I lost track of time once or twice, I kept pulling myself back. You've done 45-minute sectionals. You know this material. Don't panic — just answer the question in front of you.
When I saw the final score, 675, I genuinely didn't know what to say for a few seconds.
Wherever you are in your preparation — trust the process. Do the review. Show up consistently. That's actually all it takes.
Good luck.
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22 Apr 2026, 10:57
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Great. Good luck!
Kjain2000
