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14 Sep 2020, 18:51
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I promised myself that I would do this once I get a good enough score since there are so many things I learnt at GMATClub and wanted to give back a little and help out someone who might be struggling to go from a low 700 score to a 750+.
To begin with, I have written the GMAT thrice now, beginning at 720 (Q49, V40, IR5, AWA 5.5), then 710 (Q49, V39) and finally 770 (Q50, V44, IR7, AWA6). It has been an enriching journey, althougha bit a lot frustrating at times. Yeah, I scored even lower on my 2nd attempt. xD
Attempt 1 & 2: 720 (Q49, V40)/ 710 (Q49, V39)
Anyone who belongs to a competitive demographic knows that this score just isn’t going to cut it. I’ll share some of things I think I did wrong in the first two attempts so that you all know what not to do.
Quant:
Here’s where I made my first mistake. Since I was from an engineering background, I thought Quant would not be a problem at all. But here’s the thing; when you’re years out of college, you tend to lose touch with a lot of things. I was making silly mistakes right, left and center: whether it was cross multiplying ratios in my head or plain adding/ multiplying numbers. As a result, my ESR showed a skewed 47th percentile in PS and 84th in DS. You have your guard up with DS because most questions are logic based, but can make errors on PS. And it doesn’t help that the clever folks at GMAT have options available for every permutation of errors you can make. Shout out to ScottTargetTestPrep for helping me figure this out.
My advice, take 10 seconds at the end of each question to know for sure that you are selecting the option for the EXACT thing that the question is asking for and not the result you got from some intermediate calculation. GMAT uses this trick so often that it isn’t even funny anymore. After writing the exam thrice, I see the same pattern again and again in each exam.
I know a lot of people maintain error logs for the verbal section, but do not underestimate the importance of one for Quant. If you are going for multiple attempts, invest in an ESR, it would give you insights for $26 that would be useful if you are going to spend $250 on another attempt.
Also, please use the GMATClub’s search function to get all official questions for Quant and solve all the ones that are of 700+ difficulty. While there are a ton of non-official questions for Quant and they don’t suffer from the same quality issues that verbal questions do, you should move to them only once you’ve exhausted the official ones. If you’re like me, trying to chase the toughest questions on the forum, I have some news for you. GMAT questions are rarely incredibly tough; they use a lot of tricks to mislead you and what you should really be focusing on is understanding the questions and your mistakes correctly.
Verbal:
Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start on this one.
Sentence Correction:
I think the biggest lie I told myself when I was preparing for the verbal section was that I was terrible at Sentence Correction and that Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning would be a breeze. I was so committed to this vision that I didn’t even see why I would get 1-2 RC and CR questions incorrect in every mock. Why? Because I was so distracted by those 4-5+ mistakes in SC I made in the first few mocks.
When you’re aiming for a 750+ score, you cannot afford to ignore any error you make. I had maintained an error log only for SC till this point and realized how big a mistake that was.
Sure, SC is a huge problem for non-native speakers. But it is also a problem you can solve. I would definitely recommend the Manhattan SC guide; it’s a heavy read, but worth the effort. You might want to skip the Idioms section, it’s not worth the effort and in all the exams that I wrote, I found no questions with a split based only on idioms. There are better, definite errors always, and GMAT, I believe no longer tests obscure grammar rules either. After you get the first 3-4 grammar based questions right, I’m pretty sure the GMAT begins throwing meaning based SC questions at you. No grammar rules are going to help you here. Once I was down to two or three options, neither of them were grammatically incorrect.
Critical Reasoning:
Moving on to CR, I would constantly make errors on assumption and weaken questions. Never realized it. Why? Overconfidence. Because I had no error log, I never realized this. I would never approach the questions methodically and relied solely on intuition. And the GMAT knows how to punish individuals who do that. They will slip that one word: ‘may’, ‘could’, ‘may not’, in one of the options or worse in the question prompt that you skim over and end up selecting the wrong option. Do you ever feel that you are down to two options can can’t decide what’s wrong with either? It is subtle word placement of the kind I mentioned earlier that you probably missed.
My advice, look at CR in a formal, methodical manner. I used the Manhattan CR guide here as well. They have some good insights; I would recommend it even if you score well in CR, so that you know how to approach questions methodically. I never used techniques such as Assumption Negation and that was a mistake.
Reading Comprehension:
Ah finally, RC, my mortal enemy. I paid the least attention to it and was punished severely for that. Punished how much you ask? On my 2nd attempt, my ESR showed a 96th percentile in SC and 60th in RC. The folks at GMAT have the most classic, subtle tricks up their sleeves here. Do you ever feel that you’ve read through the passage and while attempting a specific detail question you just can’t find where the damn reference to an option is? And then you don’t select that one option and go for your best guess because well, what are you supposed to do? Guess what. The option you never thought could be true was the right one.
While you need to pay attention to specific words in the passage (eg. However, but, although, on the contrary (transition words basically) etc.), GMAT often camouflages correct answers with a single word somewhere in the passage that you glossed over. You cannot afford to just run through a passage and hope that you will re-read the passage every time you find a specific detail question. Worse, if you just read a passage and cannot rephrase it in a sentence or two, you’re doing it wrong and need to slow down. (Important for mail point questions).
Note on LSAT RCs:
Here’s where I made another mistake between my first and second attempts. I tried to work with LSAT RC passages. Now, LSAT RC passages are great but I feel that you need to be really careful when you do use them. I would take 40-45 minutes for the 4 passages in one LSAT question paper, but I feel that it was too little time. I developed a bad habit doing these passages: I began to gloss over passages because they were so long and dense. So if you plan to use LSAT RC passages, bear that in mind. GMAT RC passages are not that long, plus you get 2 short and 2 long passages, so you don’t need to worry about timing so much and need to instead focus on grasping the passage. Don’t fret about reading a sentence you do not understand multiple times. Heck, I would read a complicated sentence twice if not thrice to be doubly sure I knew what was going on.
So here’s another thing, you don’t exactly need anything beyond the official resources for GMAT. A lot of people have this misconception that official material = official guide. There’s a ton of material from Verbal Review, Advanced Guide, paper tests, etc. that a lot of you probably aren’t using. I found this great collection by Chiranjeev Singh of all official questions, and trust me, you won’t need anything else. Although there may be a few repeat questions here and there, it honestly isn’t that big a deal. I think I have a list of passages in my error log with some incredibly tricky questions. If anyone is interested, let me know, I’ll share them with you.
Final Advice:
If I had to summarize, I think the biggest mistake I made was not consistently reviewing my error log and spending too much time and money on mocks. For context, prior to my first attempt I wrote a total of 14 mocks, both official and unofficial (once every few days).
Somehow I felt that the official mocks were too easy (especially the quant part) and all the others ones on the market were too hard. There’s really no perfect substitute for the actual exam; perhaps the pressure on the actual exam really gets to you. My advice to you all would be to not give up after your first attempt. A lot of us are years out of college and have lost touch with exams in general. The hardest part for me was to keep moving after scoring lower (710) on my second attempt (vs. 720 earlier). I had decided at that point: the GMAT has 8 attempts, so either I’m going to get the score that I want or I’m going to run out of attempts. Thankfully my journey ended at attempt 3.
It’s easy to say that this was all me but I do believe that there is some amount of luck involved in getting a 770 as well. I was hoping for a 740/750 on the final day but was a bit surprised with my score given how my previous attempts at the exam were. Humans are creatures of habit, and we probably make the same errors over and over again. The lesson here is to keep going over mistakes and make conscious efforts to avoid them. Having a daily routine would definitely help. I would solve 10 CR, 10 SC and 4 RC passages, plus a min. of 30 Quant questions every day so that I’d never lose touch.
In case any of you need any specific advice, please do let me know either on this thread or PM me; I’ll try my best to help you out.
List of Resources that I used:
1. Official Guide and Verbal Review (obviously, lol)
2. Manhattan Guides (SC, RC and CR)
3. Chiranjeev’s Collection of Official Questions
4. GMATClub questions
5. All 6 official mocks
6. Veritas mocks
To begin with, I have written the GMAT thrice now, beginning at 720 (Q49, V40, IR5, AWA 5.5), then 710 (Q49, V39) and finally 770 (Q50, V44, IR7, AWA6). It has been an enriching journey, although
Attempt 1 & 2: 720 (Q49, V40)/ 710 (Q49, V39)
Anyone who belongs to a competitive demographic knows that this score just isn’t going to cut it. I’ll share some of things I think I did wrong in the first two attempts so that you all know what not to do.
Quant:
Here’s where I made my first mistake. Since I was from an engineering background, I thought Quant would not be a problem at all. But here’s the thing; when you’re years out of college, you tend to lose touch with a lot of things. I was making silly mistakes right, left and center: whether it was cross multiplying ratios in my head or plain adding/ multiplying numbers. As a result, my ESR showed a skewed 47th percentile in PS and 84th in DS. You have your guard up with DS because most questions are logic based, but can make errors on PS. And it doesn’t help that the clever folks at GMAT have options available for every permutation of errors you can make. Shout out to ScottTargetTestPrep for helping me figure this out.
My advice, take 10 seconds at the end of each question to know for sure that you are selecting the option for the EXACT thing that the question is asking for and not the result you got from some intermediate calculation. GMAT uses this trick so often that it isn’t even funny anymore. After writing the exam thrice, I see the same pattern again and again in each exam.
I know a lot of people maintain error logs for the verbal section, but do not underestimate the importance of one for Quant. If you are going for multiple attempts, invest in an ESR, it would give you insights for $26 that would be useful if you are going to spend $250 on another attempt.
Also, please use the GMATClub’s search function to get all official questions for Quant and solve all the ones that are of 700+ difficulty. While there are a ton of non-official questions for Quant and they don’t suffer from the same quality issues that verbal questions do, you should move to them only once you’ve exhausted the official ones. If you’re like me, trying to chase the toughest questions on the forum, I have some news for you. GMAT questions are rarely incredibly tough; they use a lot of tricks to mislead you and what you should really be focusing on is understanding the questions and your mistakes correctly.
Verbal:
Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start on this one.
Sentence Correction:
I think the biggest lie I told myself when I was preparing for the verbal section was that I was terrible at Sentence Correction and that Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning would be a breeze. I was so committed to this vision that I didn’t even see why I would get 1-2 RC and CR questions incorrect in every mock. Why? Because I was so distracted by those 4-5+ mistakes in SC I made in the first few mocks.
When you’re aiming for a 750+ score, you cannot afford to ignore any error you make. I had maintained an error log only for SC till this point and realized how big a mistake that was.
Sure, SC is a huge problem for non-native speakers. But it is also a problem you can solve. I would definitely recommend the Manhattan SC guide; it’s a heavy read, but worth the effort. You might want to skip the Idioms section, it’s not worth the effort and in all the exams that I wrote, I found no questions with a split based only on idioms. There are better, definite errors always, and GMAT, I believe no longer tests obscure grammar rules either. After you get the first 3-4 grammar based questions right, I’m pretty sure the GMAT begins throwing meaning based SC questions at you. No grammar rules are going to help you here. Once I was down to two or three options, neither of them were grammatically incorrect.
Critical Reasoning:
Moving on to CR, I would constantly make errors on assumption and weaken questions. Never realized it. Why? Overconfidence. Because I had no error log, I never realized this. I would never approach the questions methodically and relied solely on intuition. And the GMAT knows how to punish individuals who do that. They will slip that one word: ‘may’, ‘could’, ‘may not’, in one of the options or worse in the question prompt that you skim over and end up selecting the wrong option. Do you ever feel that you are down to two options can can’t decide what’s wrong with either? It is subtle word placement of the kind I mentioned earlier that you probably missed.
My advice, look at CR in a formal, methodical manner. I used the Manhattan CR guide here as well. They have some good insights; I would recommend it even if you score well in CR, so that you know how to approach questions methodically. I never used techniques such as Assumption Negation and that was a mistake.
Reading Comprehension:
Ah finally, RC, my mortal enemy. I paid the least attention to it and was punished severely for that. Punished how much you ask? On my 2nd attempt, my ESR showed a 96th percentile in SC and 60th in RC. The folks at GMAT have the most classic, subtle tricks up their sleeves here. Do you ever feel that you’ve read through the passage and while attempting a specific detail question you just can’t find where the damn reference to an option is? And then you don’t select that one option and go for your best guess because well, what are you supposed to do? Guess what. The option you never thought could be true was the right one.
While you need to pay attention to specific words in the passage (eg. However, but, although, on the contrary (transition words basically) etc.), GMAT often camouflages correct answers with a single word somewhere in the passage that you glossed over. You cannot afford to just run through a passage and hope that you will re-read the passage every time you find a specific detail question. Worse, if you just read a passage and cannot rephrase it in a sentence or two, you’re doing it wrong and need to slow down. (Important for mail point questions).
Note on LSAT RCs:
Here’s where I made another mistake between my first and second attempts. I tried to work with LSAT RC passages. Now, LSAT RC passages are great but I feel that you need to be really careful when you do use them. I would take 40-45 minutes for the 4 passages in one LSAT question paper, but I feel that it was too little time. I developed a bad habit doing these passages: I began to gloss over passages because they were so long and dense. So if you plan to use LSAT RC passages, bear that in mind. GMAT RC passages are not that long, plus you get 2 short and 2 long passages, so you don’t need to worry about timing so much and need to instead focus on grasping the passage. Don’t fret about reading a sentence you do not understand multiple times. Heck, I would read a complicated sentence twice if not thrice to be doubly sure I knew what was going on.
So here’s another thing, you don’t exactly need anything beyond the official resources for GMAT. A lot of people have this misconception that official material = official guide. There’s a ton of material from Verbal Review, Advanced Guide, paper tests, etc. that a lot of you probably aren’t using. I found this great collection by Chiranjeev Singh of all official questions, and trust me, you won’t need anything else. Although there may be a few repeat questions here and there, it honestly isn’t that big a deal. I think I have a list of passages in my error log with some incredibly tricky questions. If anyone is interested, let me know, I’ll share them with you.
Final Advice:
If I had to summarize, I think the biggest mistake I made was not consistently reviewing my error log and spending too much time and money on mocks. For context, prior to my first attempt I wrote a total of 14 mocks, both official and unofficial (once every few days).
Somehow I felt that the official mocks were too easy (especially the quant part) and all the others ones on the market were too hard. There’s really no perfect substitute for the actual exam; perhaps the pressure on the actual exam really gets to you. My advice to you all would be to not give up after your first attempt. A lot of us are years out of college and have lost touch with exams in general. The hardest part for me was to keep moving after scoring lower (710) on my second attempt (vs. 720 earlier). I had decided at that point: the GMAT has 8 attempts, so either I’m going to get the score that I want or I’m going to run out of attempts. Thankfully my journey ended at attempt 3.
It’s easy to say that this was all me but I do believe that there is some amount of luck involved in getting a 770 as well. I was hoping for a 740/750 on the final day but was a bit surprised with my score given how my previous attempts at the exam were. Humans are creatures of habit, and we probably make the same errors over and over again. The lesson here is to keep going over mistakes and make conscious efforts to avoid them. Having a daily routine would definitely help. I would solve 10 CR, 10 SC and 4 RC passages, plus a min. of 30 Quant questions every day so that I’d never lose touch.
In case any of you need any specific advice, please do let me know either on this thread or PM me; I’ll try my best to help you out.
List of Resources that I used:
1. Official Guide and Verbal Review (obviously, lol)
2. Manhattan Guides (SC, RC and CR)
3. Chiranjeev’s Collection of Official Questions
4. GMATClub questions
5. All 6 official mocks
6. Veritas mocks
14 Sep 2020, 19:38
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Hey, very nice debrief. You raised a very good point there on the quant mistakes coz of being out of touch for so long - definitely facing difficulty because of calculation errors. Will try and incorporate the error log in my quant routine. Also, I'm facing similar issues with RC - could you please share a link to the tricky passages you mentioned with me?
Posted from my mobile device
Posted from my mobile device
14 Sep 2020, 19:55
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My3Mac
I guess you would find most of the passages here. Just sort them by difficulty.
Posting the links to a few from my error log, although some might be from GMATprep so please be careful!
https://gmatclub.com/forum/early-models ... 40187.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-impressi ... 89579.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/masterpieces ... 88639.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/micro-wear-p ... 19602.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/it-was-once- ... 58490.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/in-1988-serv ... 37033.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/historians-s ... 01249.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/exactly-when ... 42703.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/it-is-an-odd ... 07145.html
