I took GMAT on October 5 and improved from 565 to 615. My score breakdown:
Q81
V81
DI80
Order of attempt Q-DI- Break- Verbal; 2:30 pm, Offline exam
I took the previous attempt in May 2024 with 45 days of preparation. Honestly, I didn’t assess the difficulty level of the exam in my first attempt much which I realised on the final day. Even the Official Mocks 1 and 2 provided to me at that time were of previous edition of GMAT and hence, no eye openers there.
FAQs:
1. Why Verbal in the end?
I noticed that I was making lesser errors on Verbal with a warmed up brain. Hence, I kept it for end and took a break before beginning the section.
Quant and DI overlap and the initial Quant questions can be solved correctly even if you are anxious or not very active. Hence, I chose this order.
P.S.: I couldn’t solve some questions out of first 10. I realised that there were some topics I was still weak at or they were just time consuming. All of them were dancing one after the other on my screen. I had targeted to achieve Q90 because my score in previous attempt was 81 (when I got 3 questions wrong). I was doubtful about 5-6 questions this time. Literally sat numb for 2 minutes and told myself how badly I was messing up. Honestly, I expected my score to be lower than before.
2. Preparation:
1. Quant:
First attempt- Used Wizako quant course. Great for concept building. Practiced a little bit from OG and GMAT Club. Had no guidance about resources.
Second attempt- Referred the entire TTP course,
Magoosh Questions
Learnings: More practice was required. I should have practiced more from GMAT Club as during first attempt. Was finding it hard to balance all three sections.
2. Verbal
First attempt- Happily overconfident. Solved some OG questions, ignored the mistakes. I have an IELTS band 8. I thought GMAT would be similar :’)
Second attempt- Scared to my nerves. Studied and solved everything I could. But TTP theory for Verbal was a game changer. It made me comfortable. The questions in the Hard sections blew me off and decreased my confidence. So my final recipe was TTP theory clubbed with OG questions.
There’s a tip that almost everyone gave- be interested in the passage/ argument. I did that. I was done with other two sections and during the break, I just had some chocolate, water and told myself that I am going to learn some new concepts/ stories today or make them better! It worked.
3. DI
First attempt: Solved DI OG questions. They are hard and the explanations aren’t that satisfactory. So, I used YT and GMAT Club for their explanations. Learnt many methods from eGMAT, GMAT Ninja Yt videos. TTP again helped a lot with the concepts and I got comfortable with the types of questions. I recommend solving one(only) set of TTP from each difficulty level and then, moving back to OG. Focus on concept building, approximations, identifying difficulty level and learning about the turns in questions.
I knew I won’t be able to master DI. I didn’t even challenge it. On the final exam, DS was good to go, TPA Verbal was hard, MSR I skipped and came back to later, used calculator for bigger calculations on Graph based questions, Tables are always simple.
3. What went wrong?
The problem with my entire exam was ‘not focusing on the Quant practice much which got me a lot of wrong answers in Quant, DI (Data Sufficiency) and decreased my confidence in the first 20 mins itself. I was taking the whole exam like I was fighting a battle where I knew I would lose for sure. But then, I also told myself that I must give my best here no matter how low the score would be. All kinds of Plans B kept visiting me throughout the exam but meditation practices of previous 20 days helped me improve my score (at least by 50). And it’s better than before. So I am telling myself that probably another attempt is required, more work is required but be happy for what has been achieved. I am using
Forum Quiz for everyday practice. Feel free to suggest any resources or practices that could help me improve my score.
4. Miscellaneous Learnings:
1. Number of questions doesn’t matter. The difficulty level of questions does. The calculation that GMAC uses for your percentile is complex and cannot be equated with number of questions that are correct. I got 3 incorrect in Quant on my last attempt but the percentile was much lower as compared to this time when I got 5 incorrect .
2. Solve each and every question.
3. Save time on DI by understanding your weak areas. You won’t be able to attempt all questions and hence, guess mark the ones that are tough, mark them for review and come back to them later if time permits. Strengthen DS part along with Quant because there can be up to 9 questions out of 20 from DS itself.
4. I took a break before Verbal which I saved for the end. No time to doubt yourself or re- read the entire thing again so keep the mind very very active and take it one question at a time. The initial questions may need extra time if your brain is not warmed up well. Let it be and stay positive. It’s hard, the moment you get tired and are running out of time, you see a long passage on the screen and then there’s a CR question reserved for number 23 :’). But RC takes lesser time on average if you read the passage well, jot down ur notes well and know how to find answer (TTP taught me). So just breathe, read and solve. Also, questions in the end would take lesser time to solve because your brain is running super fast.
Right resources, right effort and right mindset - all of them are required. This is an amazing community to share one’s journey. I took a lot of guidance from Reddit threads as well.
All the best to all of you reading this. 😇