A CSE 2020 GRADUATE SCORES A 700!! IN LOCKDOWNHi this is Sameer.My journey to becoming a “GMAT assassin”, as they call them who break the 700-mark barrier, began immediately after my engineering. The road to getting the 90th percentile score in the world was not an easy one. I took the decision of appearing for GMAT during the final year of my B.Tech. But, I began the preparation only after my final year exams.
immediately after my final year exams, I dived into GMAT preparation. So, I began with online study material, and mocks. The 2 mocks that were present in the GMAT official guide were something that I was saving for later. Must say, GMAT club was an online portal that played a huge role in my preparation. I always turned to it for motivation, and finding longed-for answers to my unlimited queries.
But before starting my preparation I wanted to know how tough the GMAT actually is?So I started doing my research on the difficulty level and the type of questions that I encounter. I also had a bit of an experience with GRE where I did well.So I thought that GMAT is also similar and quiet easy to crack.But not until I started comparing both the exam and I found that there is a comparison tool in the Official ETS website where you can input your GRE score and get an equivalent GMAT score and I realized that a score of 700 on GMAT is equivalent to scoring a 325 on GRE.Thats when I realized the toughness of gmat and I started prepping for it accordingly.
I divided the 5 month’s-time, from June to Oct, in such a way that I keep the last month to brush up my skills, and get myself adapted to the habit of going through the exhaustive almost 3-hour long exam. In the initial 2 months, I divided each section of the exam into sub-parts, such as Verbal into RC (Reading Comprehension), SC (Sentence Correction), and CR (Critical Reasoning), and divided Quant topic-wise. Doing so, I focussed the majority of my time in improving the sub-parts that I was the weakest in. After absorbing the study material, I began practicing questions, solving them in a timed manner. I marked the questions that I found difficult during these small exams itself, and used to come back to them after the exam, also analysing the questions that I had got wrong. Performing such analysis helped me big time in getting a feel of the questions that were classic of the GMAT exam.I did this process for 120 days with 6-7 hrs each day.So it took me around 700 hrs to get into the line of gmat.I am a little bit weak in verbal so my only strength here is math and I have to score a Q50 which is a 96 percentile in math.So according to my mocks I was scoring that.This is the time when I realized that I should set my exam date and give my gmat.I was tensed because my job joining date is approaching and I don’t wanna do two things at a time.On the d-day I kept myself calm and wrote the exam and I felt I did really well “but” when I saw the result I was completely disheartened and depressed to see the score of 670.Gmat has a tricky thing that makes you not score a 700 because gmat maintains a difficulty meter where it first gives you a question which is a 550 level if you do it right you get a 560 question otherwise If you do it wrong you go to 540.so you should be careless and go down.So the end you must loose only 10 questions overall to score a 700 and my plan was a Q50 and V40.However,I was really tensed in the verbal section I donno why but I lost the track of time and I just had 2 mins at the end and 5 questions to do so I had no chance but guess them so I did one question and guessed the rest of them and unfortunately I think all of them went wrong.So I went 5 difficulty levels down and lost my verbal score.So I thought I could never make it to the 700 mark and I thought of let going the gmat but my dad had my back and told me to work on my speed and accuracy.So intitially it was really really hard for me to restart the process again.It was really tough because I lost all the grip because it had been 7 days since I got the result.However I made it till the end and gave my gmat again and scored a 700!!!.When it comes to the question of what next I am in a dilemma of choosing between studying abroad or studying in India and I left it to my future self to decide according to the future situations but when it comes to the colleges I wanna apply my abroad destination would be Canada where I can apply to the top 5(Rotman,Ivey,Mcgill,UBC and HEC montreal) and when it comes to Indian colleges I can apply to ISB(EEO),SP Jain,Xavier’s,IMI,IMT.Finally thanks to
Manhattan prep whose tutors supported me and made this happen
“Never be afraid of starting all over because this time you are starting with experience”