Events & Promotions
|
|
GMAT Club Daily Prep
Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.
Customized
for You
Track
Your Progress
Practice
Pays
Not interested in getting valuable practice questions and articles delivered to your email? No problem, unsubscribe here.
Apr 2912:30 AM EDT
-01:30 AM EDT
Learn how Kamakshi achieved a GMAT 675 with an impressive 96th %ile in Data Insights. Discover the unique methods and exam strategies that helped her excel in DI along with other sections for a balanced and high score.
Apr 3001:30 AM EDT
-02:30 AM EDT
At one point, she believed GMAT wasn’t for her. After scoring 595, self-doubt crept in and she questioned her potential. But instead of quitting, she made the right strategic changes. The result? A remarkable comeback to 695. Check out how Saakshi did it.
May 0111:00 AM PDT
-12:00 PM PDT
Free- full-length test + 15 concept videos + 150+ short videos + study plan!
May 0306:30 AM PDT
-08:30 AM PDT
Verbal trouble on GMAT? Fix it NOW! Join Sunita Singhvi for a focused webinar on actionable strategies to boost your Verbal score and take your performance to the next level.
I recently took the GMAT for the 1st time. I kind of started my prep last year at the start of the pandemic, but the nature of my work never allowed me to devote enough time consistently towards it. Finally I decided to take the plunge and move into a less demanding role at another company to focus on what was really important to me.
I would like to document my entire rollercoaster of a journey, including the preparation stage (used e-gmat’s content) and the actual test (gave the GMAT online).
I have a few friends who have already given the GMAT and I spoke to most of them before beginning my prep. Having studied with many of them in the past, I knew who had an approach to test prep similar to mine. I like taking my time with concepts because I take some time to wrap my head around them. I tend to go back to the concept files multiple times because I feel that the nuances of a concept tend to jump out after you have some time with it. So based the reviews from friends e-gmat’s course material seemed perfect for me. I watched a couple of e-gmat’s free sentence correction and critical reasoning webinars on YouTube and made my decision then.
I stuck with e-gmat and the official guide throughout my prep and didn’t use any other material. I was told early that all test prep companies have their own unique approach and strategy to the GMAT content, so I didn’t want to get confused with multiple sources.
To begin, lets talk about how I felt the actual preparation stage went by
A] Content
Sentence correction: Like most people starting their verbal prep, I began with sentence correction. I always believed my grammar was passable, maybe not always accurate, but still, I didn’t think it was bad. After all, for over 3 years I wrote financial and investment reports and conveying a point across in the most concise and grammatically accurate manner was paramount.
My diagnostic mock made me question my English grammar, did I even speak the language? I scored somewhere in the mid-30th percentiles. This is when GMAT put the fear of God in me and I emailed the E-GMAT support team.
My score made one thing very clear. I had a lot of gaps in my SC knowledge, so I started from scratch, The master comprehension course. In theory, if someone were to tell you that the 1st step in your GMAT journey would be someone teaching you how to read slowly and deriving the most bang (extracting meaning) for your buck (every second you spend reading), you would laugh them out of the room. I had the same initial thought, but I had mentally decided that I will trust the process. The GMAT is a marathon, and the 1st step is teaching you how to put one foot in front of the other.
After the master comprehension stage, I was ready for actual GMAT SC. The foundation of the e-gmat’s SC and I believe even the actual GMAT’s SC is simple, conveying a thought without any ambiguity and in as concise a manner as possible. The “Meaning analysis” method taught be E-GMAT appears almost too simple for it to work. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely takes some time to get use to. It’s a muscle that needs to be developed so that it becomes second nature. But the process of meaning analysis, error analysis and then answer choice analysis is a perfectly well-rounded method of approaching sentence correction.
The approach to the content that E-GMAT follows, video lectures followed by application files followed by practice quizzes, helps in building your ability in a step-by-step fashion. Each subsequent application file and practice quiz builds upon the content file that came right before it and also incorporates elements from previous application files. By the time you are done with the content files, you have already solved a substantial number of questions.
Critical Reasoning: Critical reasoning was always a strength for me (relative to the other verbal sections), and so I didn’t think I would need a lot of help with it. But what I didn’t realize was that I was going through critical reasoning based on instinct. Working on instinct is not necessarily a bad thing but I definitely needed some structure around it. Going through E-GMAT’s modules provided me the required structure. The Pre thinking approach worked beautifully, eventually reducing my time for CR questions to about 1.5 minutes per question on average.
Reading comprehension: In many ways RC uses all the skills you have learnt while preparing for SC and CR. And that’s true, but there is one particular skill that I underestimated, the cross between reading speed and understanding the passage. Sacrifice reading speed to understand the passage better or read faster to ensure I finish the verbal section, that was the dilemma I always found myself in. In my first three mock tests I never finished the verbal section because I was spending too much time on RC passages. This is where E-GMAT’s reading strategies and the inputs from my E-GMAT mentor, Archit, came in (more on this later).
I watched a few YouTube videos of people who had recently taken the GMAT and one line kind of popped out, the subject matter of the RC passage doesn’t really matter, the skills apply universally. Armed with the reading strategies I bought subscriptions to the Economist, the New Yorker and National Geographic and began reading a minimum of 5 articles a day.
This had a profound impact on my reading speed for RC, after about 20 straight days of this exercise, I was finishing RC passages in a respectable time. One thing I would like to note is that entire process had an unexpected impact on my other 2 sections too, I was reaching SC and CR passages much faster.
Quant: my initial quant score in my diagnostic mock was not all that bad, a Q45. But I knew, the score for which I was aiming required a much higher score. However, I do not have much of a quant background. Luckily e-gmat was rolling out their updated quant course just as I was finishing up my verbal prep.
The e-gmat quant course is tailored to help people who need a little more assistance (like me). Ideally you would be able to skip some sub modules based on the diagnostic test that is in front of each and every content module, but I didn’t do that. I went through each and every content file, in many cases multiple times.
What the course most certainly focuses on is subject matter concepts, but it also focuses on the process skills required to consistently ace GMAT type quant questions. What I realized over the course of about 40 days was that my problem was consistently applying these skills and the actual concepts. Don’t get me wrong, it took me a while, I solved most questions more than 3 times to wrap my head around it. And I am sure people who are a little better at quant than I am would get through this part of the course a lot faster.
B] Scholaranium – This is the part of the e-gmat course where I had the most fun. I am a bit of a data nerd and scholaranium is built for people like me. E-gmat advocates the cementing process, in which you take a few medium and a few hard level quizzes, performing a review after each quiz. I definitely followed this approach albeit a little differently. I needed a little more time for each learning to settle in, so I interspersed these quizzes with OG questions to see how I was progressing.
The scholaranium platform provides a lot of data. You can view your performance trends over the duration of your preparation by topic, sub topic and question difficulty level. This kind of data is what honestly assisted me in targeting weak areas.
It proved a lot more useful for quant where the gap between weak and strong areas was a lot more evident than it was for verbal. I always went back to my notes and the concept application files to sure up whatever gaps I noticed.
One thing I would definitely like to point out is that e-gmat’s quant course is built to test you. It may get you a little worried with how tough it can seem. I feel that the questions are about half a difficult level above the GMAT, not in the content they test (this felt fairly accurate) but in the time that it takes to read the question and solve it. I didn’t mind it really, kept me from getting complacent.
C] Test readiness and Mock tests – This is where the fun ended for me
. I gave a lot of practice quizzes (what e-gmat calls test readiness) to build stamina and time management skills. I always messed up on these and consequently my prep time got extended a little. There were certain process skill gaps that I believe I ignored in the initial stages. Take it from me, DO NOT DO THAT, you will pay for it later (with interest).
For mocks I used only 2 types of mocks – the official GMAT prep mocks (gave 4 of them) and e-gmat’s sigma X mocks. My last 3 official mock scores were 750, 770 and 750. My last 3 sigma X mock scores were 700, 690 and 710. My unofficial score on the actual test was 730 (at the time of writing this I haven’t received my official score report as yet).
The GMAT prep mocks in my opinion are a little easier than the actual test, I can’t really put my finger on what makes this so, but they do feel a little easier (maybe test pressure has something to do with it). The main issue that I have with the GMAT prep mocks is that they can only be used to gauge an overall score. There are no analytics that can help you improve from one test to the next. Which is why I primarily used them to test time management and build confidence.
e-gmat’s Sigma X mocks on the other hand are fairly accurate in their difficulty level. the verbal section feels like a very good representation of the GMAT. The quant section again feels a little tougher than the actual test. The best way I can describe e-gmat’s quant section is that its probably built to keep honest a demographic with quant skills better than mine. But the beauty of these tests is not the actual test but what came after it. e-gmat provides analytics that resembles an ESR, giving block wise and section wise accuracy, time management and difficulty level statistics. This is where the refining part of the prep came in.
D] Mentorship: While the mocks and Scholaranium did provide adequate data that could provide some actionable insights, translating this information required some experience. This is where the e-gmat’s mentorship program came in. Archit, who I worked with extensively through this entire process gave me a lot of insights to a) improve my accuracy and b) improve my timing related issues. The suggestion of limiting note taking and the timing matrix to ensure that the clock does not run away were the two biggest factors that ensured I completed the verbal section.
Another really important aspect is the targeted approach to the inputs you receive. As someone tracking my progress from the outside looking in, Archit identified issues with my approach that I would never have figured out. This led to a customized plan for SC and Quant which targeted some key issues I had with the process. Most important, having a mentor really kept me honest.
Other aspects: I couldn’t figure out where to put this part but I do believe everything up to this point was about 50% of the prep, the balance is only one part. The error logs. Again, I was told very early in the process (either through other GMAT debriefs or through friends) that the error log is THE MOST IMPORTANT part of my the GMAT prep, so I took that to heart. My SC error log is about 100 questions and CR error log is about 80 questions. To make the process of revising more efficient, I categorized my errors into Low, Medium and High categories. The high category errors were revised once every 3 – 4 days while the medium errors were revised once every 10 days. Low errors were mostly repeats of similar errors in the medium and high section.
F] Test experience: Test day was extremely stressful, also because I tend to stress a lot in general. I took some extreme steps to ensure my home stays silent and no one connects to the internet. Power issues are rare where I stay and the internet has historically never let me down, so I figured if something were to happen on test day then it would be fate.
The check in experience was very smooth and the proctor was very polite and put me at ease. After a quick scan of the room and the regular check in formalities the test began.
The testing process also for the most part was fairly smooth baring a couple of issues. First, the online test for me lagged every few questions. I would select an answer or press the next button and the test would not register the input for a few seconds. This happened once every 4-5 questions. This wasn’t much of an issue during the quant, verbal and IR sections (apart from the impact to my focus) but on the AWA section I definitely felt it. Complete sentences didn’t get typed at times or while deleting letters I would land up deleting more than I intended. This seriously impacted my timing in AWA and I barely finished and was not able to do a proper proof read of my essay.
Another unintended problem related to this same lag issue was the break between the quant section and IR. The test did not register me selecting the option to opt for the second break. So I pressed the button again, resulting in the test thinking I pressed it twice and starting the IR section immediately after my quant section, without a break.
I’m not sure if this was an internet related problem and If other people have faced this similar issue, but be mindful of this when going in for the online GMAT.
On the whole, this whole GMAT experience was quite a journey, I definitely would like to take it again, at a test centre this time. Maybe a better handle on my nerves and no lag issues will help me up this score. Fingers crossed.
I would like to document my entire rollercoaster of a journey, including the preparation stage (used e-gmat’s content) and the actual test (gave the GMAT online).
I have a few friends who have already given the GMAT and I spoke to most of them before beginning my prep. Having studied with many of them in the past, I knew who had an approach to test prep similar to mine. I like taking my time with concepts because I take some time to wrap my head around them. I tend to go back to the concept files multiple times because I feel that the nuances of a concept tend to jump out after you have some time with it. So based the reviews from friends e-gmat’s course material seemed perfect for me. I watched a couple of e-gmat’s free sentence correction and critical reasoning webinars on YouTube and made my decision then.
I stuck with e-gmat and the official guide throughout my prep and didn’t use any other material. I was told early that all test prep companies have their own unique approach and strategy to the GMAT content, so I didn’t want to get confused with multiple sources.
To begin, lets talk about how I felt the actual preparation stage went by
A] Content
Sentence correction: Like most people starting their verbal prep, I began with sentence correction. I always believed my grammar was passable, maybe not always accurate, but still, I didn’t think it was bad. After all, for over 3 years I wrote financial and investment reports and conveying a point across in the most concise and grammatically accurate manner was paramount.
My diagnostic mock made me question my English grammar, did I even speak the language? I scored somewhere in the mid-30th percentiles. This is when GMAT put the fear of God in me and I emailed the E-GMAT support team.
My score made one thing very clear. I had a lot of gaps in my SC knowledge, so I started from scratch, The master comprehension course. In theory, if someone were to tell you that the 1st step in your GMAT journey would be someone teaching you how to read slowly and deriving the most bang (extracting meaning) for your buck (every second you spend reading), you would laugh them out of the room. I had the same initial thought, but I had mentally decided that I will trust the process. The GMAT is a marathon, and the 1st step is teaching you how to put one foot in front of the other.
After the master comprehension stage, I was ready for actual GMAT SC. The foundation of the e-gmat’s SC and I believe even the actual GMAT’s SC is simple, conveying a thought without any ambiguity and in as concise a manner as possible. The “Meaning analysis” method taught be E-GMAT appears almost too simple for it to work. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely takes some time to get use to. It’s a muscle that needs to be developed so that it becomes second nature. But the process of meaning analysis, error analysis and then answer choice analysis is a perfectly well-rounded method of approaching sentence correction.
The approach to the content that E-GMAT follows, video lectures followed by application files followed by practice quizzes, helps in building your ability in a step-by-step fashion. Each subsequent application file and practice quiz builds upon the content file that came right before it and also incorporates elements from previous application files. By the time you are done with the content files, you have already solved a substantial number of questions.
Critical Reasoning: Critical reasoning was always a strength for me (relative to the other verbal sections), and so I didn’t think I would need a lot of help with it. But what I didn’t realize was that I was going through critical reasoning based on instinct. Working on instinct is not necessarily a bad thing but I definitely needed some structure around it. Going through E-GMAT’s modules provided me the required structure. The Pre thinking approach worked beautifully, eventually reducing my time for CR questions to about 1.5 minutes per question on average.
Reading comprehension: In many ways RC uses all the skills you have learnt while preparing for SC and CR. And that’s true, but there is one particular skill that I underestimated, the cross between reading speed and understanding the passage. Sacrifice reading speed to understand the passage better or read faster to ensure I finish the verbal section, that was the dilemma I always found myself in. In my first three mock tests I never finished the verbal section because I was spending too much time on RC passages. This is where E-GMAT’s reading strategies and the inputs from my E-GMAT mentor, Archit, came in (more on this later).
I watched a few YouTube videos of people who had recently taken the GMAT and one line kind of popped out, the subject matter of the RC passage doesn’t really matter, the skills apply universally. Armed with the reading strategies I bought subscriptions to the Economist, the New Yorker and National Geographic and began reading a minimum of 5 articles a day.
This had a profound impact on my reading speed for RC, after about 20 straight days of this exercise, I was finishing RC passages in a respectable time. One thing I would like to note is that entire process had an unexpected impact on my other 2 sections too, I was reaching SC and CR passages much faster.
Quant: my initial quant score in my diagnostic mock was not all that bad, a Q45. But I knew, the score for which I was aiming required a much higher score. However, I do not have much of a quant background. Luckily e-gmat was rolling out their updated quant course just as I was finishing up my verbal prep.
The e-gmat quant course is tailored to help people who need a little more assistance (like me). Ideally you would be able to skip some sub modules based on the diagnostic test that is in front of each and every content module, but I didn’t do that. I went through each and every content file, in many cases multiple times.
What the course most certainly focuses on is subject matter concepts, but it also focuses on the process skills required to consistently ace GMAT type quant questions. What I realized over the course of about 40 days was that my problem was consistently applying these skills and the actual concepts. Don’t get me wrong, it took me a while, I solved most questions more than 3 times to wrap my head around it. And I am sure people who are a little better at quant than I am would get through this part of the course a lot faster.
B] Scholaranium – This is the part of the e-gmat course where I had the most fun. I am a bit of a data nerd and scholaranium is built for people like me. E-gmat advocates the cementing process, in which you take a few medium and a few hard level quizzes, performing a review after each quiz. I definitely followed this approach albeit a little differently. I needed a little more time for each learning to settle in, so I interspersed these quizzes with OG questions to see how I was progressing.
The scholaranium platform provides a lot of data. You can view your performance trends over the duration of your preparation by topic, sub topic and question difficulty level. This kind of data is what honestly assisted me in targeting weak areas.
It proved a lot more useful for quant where the gap between weak and strong areas was a lot more evident than it was for verbal. I always went back to my notes and the concept application files to sure up whatever gaps I noticed.
One thing I would definitely like to point out is that e-gmat’s quant course is built to test you. It may get you a little worried with how tough it can seem. I feel that the questions are about half a difficult level above the GMAT, not in the content they test (this felt fairly accurate) but in the time that it takes to read the question and solve it. I didn’t mind it really, kept me from getting complacent.
C] Test readiness and Mock tests – This is where the fun ended for me
. I gave a lot of practice quizzes (what e-gmat calls test readiness) to build stamina and time management skills. I always messed up on these and consequently my prep time got extended a little. There were certain process skill gaps that I believe I ignored in the initial stages. Take it from me, DO NOT DO THAT, you will pay for it later (with interest). For mocks I used only 2 types of mocks – the official GMAT prep mocks (gave 4 of them) and e-gmat’s sigma X mocks. My last 3 official mock scores were 750, 770 and 750. My last 3 sigma X mock scores were 700, 690 and 710. My unofficial score on the actual test was 730 (at the time of writing this I haven’t received my official score report as yet).
The GMAT prep mocks in my opinion are a little easier than the actual test, I can’t really put my finger on what makes this so, but they do feel a little easier (maybe test pressure has something to do with it). The main issue that I have with the GMAT prep mocks is that they can only be used to gauge an overall score. There are no analytics that can help you improve from one test to the next. Which is why I primarily used them to test time management and build confidence.
e-gmat’s Sigma X mocks on the other hand are fairly accurate in their difficulty level. the verbal section feels like a very good representation of the GMAT. The quant section again feels a little tougher than the actual test. The best way I can describe e-gmat’s quant section is that its probably built to keep honest a demographic with quant skills better than mine. But the beauty of these tests is not the actual test but what came after it. e-gmat provides analytics that resembles an ESR, giving block wise and section wise accuracy, time management and difficulty level statistics. This is where the refining part of the prep came in.
D] Mentorship: While the mocks and Scholaranium did provide adequate data that could provide some actionable insights, translating this information required some experience. This is where the e-gmat’s mentorship program came in. Archit, who I worked with extensively through this entire process gave me a lot of insights to a) improve my accuracy and b) improve my timing related issues. The suggestion of limiting note taking and the timing matrix to ensure that the clock does not run away were the two biggest factors that ensured I completed the verbal section.
Another really important aspect is the targeted approach to the inputs you receive. As someone tracking my progress from the outside looking in, Archit identified issues with my approach that I would never have figured out. This led to a customized plan for SC and Quant which targeted some key issues I had with the process. Most important, having a mentor really kept me honest.
Other aspects: I couldn’t figure out where to put this part but I do believe everything up to this point was about 50% of the prep, the balance is only one part. The error logs. Again, I was told very early in the process (either through other GMAT debriefs or through friends) that the error log is THE MOST IMPORTANT part of my the GMAT prep, so I took that to heart. My SC error log is about 100 questions and CR error log is about 80 questions. To make the process of revising more efficient, I categorized my errors into Low, Medium and High categories. The high category errors were revised once every 3 – 4 days while the medium errors were revised once every 10 days. Low errors were mostly repeats of similar errors in the medium and high section.
F] Test experience: Test day was extremely stressful, also because I tend to stress a lot in general. I took some extreme steps to ensure my home stays silent and no one connects to the internet. Power issues are rare where I stay and the internet has historically never let me down, so I figured if something were to happen on test day then it would be fate.
The check in experience was very smooth and the proctor was very polite and put me at ease. After a quick scan of the room and the regular check in formalities the test began.
The testing process also for the most part was fairly smooth baring a couple of issues. First, the online test for me lagged every few questions. I would select an answer or press the next button and the test would not register the input for a few seconds. This happened once every 4-5 questions. This wasn’t much of an issue during the quant, verbal and IR sections (apart from the impact to my focus) but on the AWA section I definitely felt it. Complete sentences didn’t get typed at times or while deleting letters I would land up deleting more than I intended. This seriously impacted my timing in AWA and I barely finished and was not able to do a proper proof read of my essay.
Another unintended problem related to this same lag issue was the break between the quant section and IR. The test did not register me selecting the option to opt for the second break. So I pressed the button again, resulting in the test thinking I pressed it twice and starting the IR section immediately after my quant section, without a break.
I’m not sure if this was an internet related problem and If other people have faced this similar issue, but be mindful of this when going in for the online GMAT.
On the whole, this whole GMAT experience was quite a journey, I definitely would like to take it again, at a test centre this time. Maybe a better handle on my nerves and no lag issues will help me up this score. Fingers crossed.
09 Nov 2021, 06:04
Kudos
Bookmarks
rohitsk91, Congratulations on your score.
Your hard work paid off.
Could you please add your score to the profile along with the other details so that it can be verified.
Thank you ! Best of luck for the journey ahead.
Your hard work paid off.
Could you please add your score to the profile along with the other details so that it can be verified.
Thank you ! Best of luck for the journey ahead.
09 Nov 2021, 10:50
Kudos
Bookmarks
Wow.. Official mock scores of 750, 770 and 750 !! you sure are a prodigy or something 
.. Congratulations! 
.. Congratulations! 
