Scored 710 after 2 attempts, prepping for one more!

Question

Hello everyone,

I appeared for GMAT in Jan 2019 and scored 710 (Q47, V40) after scoring 650 in my previous two attempts. The resources I used for my prep were: GMAT Club and e-GMAT. These two were the ones that finally helped me score 710 after a lot of hit and trials with other scores. I followed Bunnel and GMAT Ninja closely in my prep days and I feel a lot of concepts got cleared with reiterations and practice. However, probably one key thing I have learnt in this entire journey is the role confidence can play in your GMAT journey. I have absolute conviction in this fact because I can honestly tell you that in the month between my second and third attempt, I did not study for GMAT at all. I did not take a single mock and only revised my notes two days prior to my third attempt. However, a few things I should note to substantiate my reasoning are:

1) I had saturated all GMAT resources by second attempt. I honestly didn't have any new information I could have taken post second attempt. However, what I felt during my first two attempts was a blanket of anxiety and stress. This was missing from my third attempt. I think in my heart, I was done with this exam making me feel little about myself and wanted to just get done with it. I honestly feel that the moment I realised that this exam is not the judge of my intelligence is the moment I won.

2) In the month between the two attempts, I was working on my applications which made me revisit all my past achievements. I strongly feel that that activity led to a surge in my confidence. This was another reason why I stopped measuring my worth/intelligence by my GMAT score.

I am not suggesting any applicant to take the approach of not studying for a month before the exam that I took. However, I will strongly advice to do the things that fuel you with supreme confidence so that you feel like a lion on the day of the exam.

I am planning to take GMAT again after all these months because I want to apply for a new set of schools. I am planning to take the exam by July end and will welcome any sage advice on how I can bump my score from 710 to 760+. I have started with GMAT Ninja's advice on the matter already (he has published some fantastic posts on last mile improvement).

Thanks in advance! Let me know if you guys have any questions!

dcummins · Answer

Congratulations mate. I'm in a similar situation - I scored 650 on my most recent attempt Q47, V33. I'm at the stage now where i'm working on fairly difficult problems and ironing out weaknesses e.g. assumption questions and SC. Even though I focus on these questions I still some wrong, and it really kicks me in the teeth.

What were the levers you pulled to go from a 650 to 710?

What were the levers you pulled to go from a 650 to 710?

bebs · Answer

Congratulations. You might want to look at Target Test Prep to boost your quant score. You should be able to use their accelerated study plan since you are already at Q47. You can refer to this debrief (https://gmatclub.com/forum/from-700-to- ... l#p2294885). He was in a similar situation as yours and was able to improve his quant score using TTP's accelerated plan.

Best wishes.

GMATin · Answer

Thank you! I think you are at a decent place when it comes to Quant, though you might want to keep working on it since your goal is Q49. 
For Verbal, here are my thoughts:

I think with a score of V33, you might be making more mistakes in the basics or taking more time than you should in solving the questions. This is what I had noticed in one of the ESRs of earlier attempts. I had very high percentile (over 90) in SC and CR but a ridiculous sub 20 percentile in RC. This made no sense especially when RC was, in fact, my strength in mocks/general practice. However, after a lot of deliberation, I realised that the reason I scored so high in SC and CR was not because of my general ability in those two sections but because I was taking more time to solve them. This was essentially leaving me with less time to solve RC and since reading the RC properly in 1 go is crucial for success in the section, I didn't have the time or patience to do so. Hence, my first suggestion would be that instead of solving higher level questions at this stage, solve medium level but do them so many times that the process/approach with which you solve a question in each section becomes second nature. If I have to wake you up in the middle of the night and make you solve a question, you should be able to do it without thinking. This you can achieve only when you solve easy to medium questions (tough questions can be intimidating when you are trying to perfect the approach) with the discipline of repeating the approach you have decided again and again. No shortcuts no matter how easy the question.

Have a go using the above two points and see if your accuracy improves.

Once, you have seen visible improvement, only then move to tough questions.

dcummins · Answer

That’s an astute observation.

I’m 100% gunning for that Q49, so I’ll keep pushing.

I think I just haven’t mastered the grammar rules in SC, and I took way too long in RC I’m my last attempt that I had to rush and guess a lot in the last section, which is typically where some easy and medium questions are kept safe.

I’ll take what you said into account and practice a lot with medium questions, bud a big problem I had was that when I got to the hard questions, I found it difficult to get them right at all. I made a post containing this and attaching my ESR and the observation was that when faced with hard questions I wouldn’t get many right.

So I’m practicing weaker areas, and also exposing myself to those difficult questions that I didn’t expose myself to as much before, such as flaw in reasoning/ method of reasoning/ bold face

Definitely going to spend the majority of my time solving medium verbal questions and mix in hard ones here and there for that exposure.

How did you master the grammar rules?

How did you also make step improvements in weak areas?

Also, how often did you practice test after your first take? A huge flaw of mine is getting my exam strategy down and developing an internal clock of when to dump questions on verbal. I’m reasonable at this on quant.

I’m a gmatprep test 1 week before my last official I actually scored a v40. Most of the improvement was from SC, and it was because for any repeated mistakes and actually made physical flash cards. I haven’t been doing that since though and I didn’t review them in the week leading up to my last take as I was focused on quants maybe I need to!

Posted from my mobile device

bb · Answer

Your verbal looks great! V40 is a solid score. If you protect and maintain your Verbal score while increasing the Quant (as  bebs  mentioned, TTP course would do well for Quant). The trick is to retain your verbal score while improving quant. People so often end up ignoring their strong suit only to focus all energy on the weakness and usually end up losing some points in the area they ignored.

To avoid having to retake the GMAT twice, make sure you still keep working on verbal. Maybe you can even bump it up to 41, though that is much harder than getting your quant up to 49. My guess is that you were planning to revisit verbal since it's been a while since you took the last GMAT.

I think it is good to have confidence and GMAT often is a test of spirit, perseverance and mental state. However, I would not say that 710 is a bad score. Anything above 700 is great (though with some demographics it may not be competitive).

Good luck on your next shot.
BB.

GMATin · Answer

Thanks a lot,  bb . You are quite right. In my last attempt, I saw a dip in my Quant score largely because I had shifted concentration from Quant to Verbal. I am not going to repeat that mistake this time. I am aiming for a 750+ score which means a Q50 and V44 at the least. 
Considering that I am an Indian who is aiming for Top 10 schools and want a shot at scholarships, I feel a 750+ score will truly give me an edge over other applicants.
Hence, my plan is to spend a few more days revising my notes (from GMAT Club and e-GMAT) and then move to other courses such as TTP. I want to revise my previous and current error log daily so that I am in touch with mistakes and patterns of the past and can reverse them now. I also plan to start working on applications right away which will keep my general self-esteem up and will not stress me out if GMAT takes a little more time than anticipated. Fortunately, my work on applications last year should be a great starting point.

Do let me know if you have any more advice I should keep in mind.

Thanks!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi GMATin,

First off, a 710/Q47 is an outstanding score, so you can comfortably apply to any Schools that interest you. There's certainly no harm in retesting though - and you have the potential to pick up some noteworthy points in the Quant section. With a Q47, you likely know most (if not all) of the Quant 'content' just fine, so assuming that you retained all of this knowledge, your emphasis during this next phase of your studies should be on Tactics, pattern-matching and training to take advantage of how the GMAT is written.

If it's really been almost 6 months since you took any type of Exam (Official or practice CAT), then it would make sense to take a new, FULL-LENGTH CAT - and make sure to take it in a realistic fashion (take the FULL CAT - with the Essay and IR sections, take it away from your home, at the same time of day as when you'll take the Official GMAT, etc.). This will help to define your current skills and specific concepts that you may need to focus on. Once you have that score, you should report back here and we can discuss how best to proceed.

1) From what you describe, it sounds as if you're focused this year's Round 1 applications. Is that true (and are you planning to apply for that Round for all of the Schools that you're interested in?)? 
2) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

This is a tough challenge. Hitting 760+ should not be anyone's goal, except for those who have very strong background in both English and math. Since you're already at the high end of GMAT scores, any score increase is going to be difficult to achieve. At this level, general advice is usually not effective. I would strongly recommend that you work with a good tutor who can help you pinpoint specific weaknesses and practice in a consistent manner to make incremental improvements. A good tutor can observe how you solve problems and help you fine tune your approach to improve both accuracy and efficiency. It's not about how many practice questions you take - it is all about how you take practice questions, so the fact that you have attempted all OG questions should not matter too much. Another important job of a tutor is to make sure that you are on track, and this is something that free advice can never give you.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi GMATin,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. To improve from 710 to 760, you need to go through GMAT quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to find weaker areas, learn all about how to answer questions of types that you aren't that comfortable with now, and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving your score up point by point.
 
For example, if you were to find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, you would carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type.

As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant
topics.
 
Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see and that there are types questions that take you a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that currently take you five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, make some more areas stronger.
 
You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, Find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc.
 
As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why you didn't get it right.
Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you would have had to know in order to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.
 
When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of the questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to at least around 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.
 
So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and, when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently.
 
The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new verbal and quant materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses .

You also may find my it helpful to read my article about  how to score a 700+ on the GMAT .

Feel free to reach out with any further questions.

Good luck!

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Scored 710 after 2 attempts, prepping for one more!

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