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va95
Joined: 24 Dec 2016
Last visit: 19 Jun 2025
Posts: 60
Given Kudos: 153
Location: Armenia
Concentration: Statistics
Schools: Duke Fuqua HBS '26 Wharton '26
GMAT 1: 720 Q49 V40
GMAT 2: 770 Q50 V47
GPA: 3.4
WE:Consulting (Consulting)
Products:
I hope this text is not too long and boring. Before I share my GMAT experience, I'd like to say that my experience will probably not be very helpful for people who just start studying for GMAT, as I used to study and took GMAT back in 2016, so I already knew the basics when I started studying two months ago. Also, I'd like to thank Manhattan GMAT and GMAT club; you are the best 
.
Background:
I have a BSc in Business (2018) and MSc in Business Analytics (2019). Once I graduated, I worked as a Data Scientist in retail and banking. For the past two years, I have been working in consulting. I studied for GMAT for few months in 2016 as I was preparing to apply for a Master's Degree. I took two attempts; I got 640 (canceled immediately) and 720 (Q49 V40). Two months ago, when I started studying, I had a decent understanding of how GMAT works and what are the available resources out there, though I didn't remember most of the SC and math concepts. In addition, the type of work that I do prepared me a lot for CR since I do a lot of work related to finding and interpreting causal links.
Resources:
1. Manhattan GMAT. I had old books, and I also bought All the Quant, All the Verbal, and Advance Quant; for Quant Section, I found separate books more helpful, as they contained some advanced topics that I didn't find in "All the Quant" book.
2. GMAT club. I used the forum to read explanations for problems for which the official explanations were unconvincing or not optimal to me. Kudos to all the experts. I also bought GMAT club tests but stopped using them, given the time constraints that I had, and after receiving 38 in Quant
.
3. GMAT official guides, including Verbal Review, Quantitative Review, and Advance Questions.
4. GMAT official tests.
Study plan:
Step 1. I started my study by reading Manhattan GMAT Quant books and SC. While learning the concepts, I also did a few daily questions using the GMAT club forum.
Step 2. I took the first official CAT to get the baseline score and identify potential problems in my performance. I got 740 (Q48 V44). I realized my Verbal was great, while the quant score was not very good. I made many careless mistakes in my quant section, and the test never got very hard. I also noticed some mistakes were in the first 10 questions, which was a huge problem. I then realized that I don't need to be able to solve all the hard questions; instead, I need to be able to solve all the easy and medium-difficulty questions with very high accuracy to get a good score.
Step 3. I bought official test banks and started solving the questions from there every day. I used to read all the explanations unless the solution was too obvious. Whenever I didn't like the official explanation, I read the one by experts in this forum.
Step 5. (last week before the exam) Polished some concepts, continued solving official test banks, focusing mostly on error log in quant and started doing IR official questions. In addition, I read how to get "How to get 6.0 on GMAT" by chineseburned. The guide helped me a lot, though I never used his template. I wrote two essays each day, two days before the exam. On the last day, I didn't study hard; I only went through my notes and wrote an essay. The rest of the day, I played mobile games and chess.
Practice CAT Scores:
GMAT club test (3 December) 680 (Q38 V45)
Official CAT (17 December): 740 (Q48 V44)
Official CAT (30 December): 760 (Q50 V42)
Official CAT (6 January): 760 (Q50 V44)
Official CAT (15 January): 770 (Q50 V45)
Tips & Things that work in my case:
Hope this helps and good luck with your GMAT exam!
P.S. if you have any questions, feel free to contact me
.Background:
I have a BSc in Business (2018) and MSc in Business Analytics (2019). Once I graduated, I worked as a Data Scientist in retail and banking. For the past two years, I have been working in consulting. I studied for GMAT for few months in 2016 as I was preparing to apply for a Master's Degree. I took two attempts; I got 640 (canceled immediately) and 720 (Q49 V40). Two months ago, when I started studying, I had a decent understanding of how GMAT works and what are the available resources out there, though I didn't remember most of the SC and math concepts. In addition, the type of work that I do prepared me a lot for CR since I do a lot of work related to finding and interpreting causal links.
Resources:
1. Manhattan GMAT. I had old books, and I also bought All the Quant, All the Verbal, and Advance Quant; for Quant Section, I found separate books more helpful, as they contained some advanced topics that I didn't find in "All the Quant" book.
2. GMAT club. I used the forum to read explanations for problems for which the official explanations were unconvincing or not optimal to me. Kudos to all the experts. I also bought GMAT club tests but stopped using them, given the time constraints that I had, and after receiving 38 in Quant
.3. GMAT official guides, including Verbal Review, Quantitative Review, and Advance Questions.
4. GMAT official tests.
Study plan:
Step 1. I started my study by reading Manhattan GMAT Quant books and SC. While learning the concepts, I also did a few daily questions using the GMAT club forum.
Step 2. I took the first official CAT to get the baseline score and identify potential problems in my performance. I got 740 (Q48 V44). I realized my Verbal was great, while the quant score was not very good. I made many careless mistakes in my quant section, and the test never got very hard. I also noticed some mistakes were in the first 10 questions, which was a huge problem. I then realized that I don't need to be able to solve all the hard questions; instead, I need to be able to solve all the easy and medium-difficulty questions with very high accuracy to get a good score.
Step 3. I bought official test banks and started solving the questions from there every day. I used to read all the explanations unless the solution was too obvious. Whenever I didn't like the official explanation, I read the one by experts in this forum.
- Quant: whenever I got a question wrong or solved in more than 2.5 minutes or solved not in an optimal way, I used to flag the question and return to it once in a while. I never unflagged any question unless I could solve it correctly in an optimal way in 2.5 minutes. Note that some questions are impossible to solve quickly, which is okay. I also re-read selected topics in Manhattan GMAT quant books whenever I forgot the concept.
- Verbal: Simply solved 10-25 questions a day, reading all the explanations just as in Quant. I used to flag SC questions whenever I got them wrong and returned to them once in a while. I never flagged incorrect CR and RC questions as I would remember solutions, and those two sub-sections are more about logic and reasoning than concepts.
Step 5. (last week before the exam) Polished some concepts, continued solving official test banks, focusing mostly on error log in quant and started doing IR official questions. In addition, I read how to get "How to get 6.0 on GMAT" by chineseburned. The guide helped me a lot, though I never used his template. I wrote two essays each day, two days before the exam. On the last day, I didn't study hard; I only went through my notes and wrote an essay. The rest of the day, I played mobile games and chess.
Practice CAT Scores:
GMAT club test (3 December) 680 (Q38 V45)
Official CAT (17 December): 740 (Q48 V44)
Official CAT (30 December): 760 (Q50 V42)
Official CAT (6 January): 760 (Q50 V44)
Official CAT (15 January): 770 (Q50 V45)
Tips & Things that work in my case:
- If you decide to study using the forum of GMAT club, make sure to check the source. Never solve the questions with the source "GMATprep" as those are the questions from official CAT and you will likely artificially inflate your score.
- Don't focus too much on very hard questions, as most of your score depends on easy and medium difficulty questions.
- Solve all the official question available, they are the most similar to questions of real exam.
- Time yourself during practice questions.
- Always read explanations by experts for difficult quant questions, there is a high chance that their approach is much easier than that by official guide. At the same time, take their explanations for SC and CR with a grain of salt, as after all their explanations are unofficial.
- Don't take official CATs too early in your preparation.
- Learn the time benchmarks for each section (i.e. when you finish q10 of verbal you must have 47 minutes left, if more you are quick, if fewer you are behind. 29 minutes for q20, and 11 for q30)
- Whenever you see new RC during the exam, mark it somewhere. This way you will easily tell how many RCs are left, even if you forget. Time yourself accordingly.
- Take official CAT as if its a real exam. Take them during the time of the day when you'll most likely take your real exam, avoid the noise, take only 8 minutes breaks, don't pause or cheat in other ways (you only deceiving yourself), if possible buy the board and markers to practice (i found it difficult to write with the marker and it took me a while during the real exam, before I got used to), go see how the screen in your local test center looks and if possible take the exam on similar screen (I used to practice on 12 inch screen, while the screens in test center were huge, it created some difficulties during the verbal section).
- Never assume your performance during the exam. I thought I bombed the quant section, and it kind of affected IR and AWA, I was even thinking about skipping those two sections altogether and cancelling the exam, but I didn't and got a really high score.
Hope this helps and good luck with your GMAT exam!
P.S. if you have any questions, feel free to contact me
21 Jan 2023, 15:38
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Gratz on the 770. Stellar score to include with your apps.
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