A brief on my background:-
I am a non-native Software Engineer having 5 years of work experience.
Score requirement/target:-
Coming from a regular IT background and not having much of a social work experience, i needed a high score to balance out some irregularities in my profile. I was targeting for a 750+ but would happily take a 740 as well
Challenges faced:-
The biggest problem that i had when i started my GMAT prep (in feb 2012) was that my Quant was really really really weak. I mean pathetic is an understatement to put it in perspective. I had feared maths (can anyone blame me for that
) ever since my childhood days. English wasn't too good either. Had a lot of difficulties in focusing on an RC passage.Currently at onsite and thus did not have a lot of time to prepare on a daily basis. For Feb and march i literally devoted the entire weekend into prep and then as and when my workload grew, i got lesser and lesser time to focus on prep. I was hardly able to devote an hour a day during regular workload days and almost no time on busier days.
Things that i did:-
Studied from the MGMAT strategy guides to build up basic mathematics and verbal skills. Took me 2 months to get done and over with the entire material.
Took 5 (800 score) and 1 GMATPrep (first diagnostic test) tests during these 2 months to gauge score buildup and performance improvements.
At the end of the 2 months, i realized that the score wasn't looking too good and that if i gave the GMAT then, i would certainly end up towards the higher 600 range of the spectrum.
I started looking for additional materials available on the internet and that is when i stumbled upon BTG. Immediately recognized the worth of this community and started looking at all the different questions and explanations to those questions by various instructors (who are all very helpful indeed). Subscribed to Question of the day from all the communities possible. This helped me get some challenging questions everyday and learn something new on a daily basis.
From the beginning of my prep, i had wanted to finish everything before the GMAT pattern change (1st June) but somehow my work pressure here always forced me to re-evaluate that plan.
Even by subscribing to all the different questions of the day, all i was able to get to was a 700, that too, not consistently.
This is the time when i realized that i needed something more to practice and improve. While looking for all the alternatives available, i came across MasterGMAT. It immediately caught my eye because it certainly looked very very promising as a tool. I took the free 7 day trial and literally got hooked up to the course flow and content structure of MasterGMAT. It was almost as if i was addicted.
This was the turning point. I knew that this is what i wanted. I needed something which would help me transform from someone stuck at 670-680 and get me the much required push to move to the next level. Started on the course and continued at a very good pace till a major release of my project pushed me off track.
This was another turning point. From here on, i knew that i would have to carefully manage my time and only then would i be able to score big on the GMAT. Once the project load was off (took almost 3-4 weeks), i got back on to track.
From this point onwards, it was an enriching experience and i looked at all the questions from a different perspective and tried understanding and developing the logic required to solve trickier questions.
MasterGMAT helped me improve my SC skills as well. Though MGMAT guide was a solid foundation for that, somehow, i was not so confident about solving trickier questions pertaining to SC.The variety of questions that MasterGMAT had helped me strengthen some loose ends in SC.
Ron's (from MGMAT) videos are really very good. Everyone should go through those videos once you are towards the end of your prep.
Tips for CR:-
No tips at all. Really! This was my weakest section. Even towards the end of my prep, i felt a bit uncomfortable about the whole CR section. I liked the simpler questions. The tougher ones just made me sick
. I could not understand the answer to a particular question even after looking at the explanation given by some of the best tutors here. All i can really say for this section is that you need to practice and practice a lot to improve in this section. The MGMAT tips to eliminate irrelevant answer choices are really good.The MasterGMAT explanation on the trickier questions was also very helpful in building a good POE logic.
Tips for SC:-
Go through MGMAT SC guide. Aristotle SC is also good. Once you achieve a certain level of confidence in solving easier questions, try solving harder questions and learn from each question that you answer. In the end, the Quality of questions that you solve matters the most.
I would suggest to focus mostly on Comparisons,Modifiers and parallelism issues. Mostly, all the higher level SC problems on GMAT are basically meaning based problems which are mostly solved by fixing the comparison and/or modifier issues. Modifier is a very very important topic and should not be overlooked under any circumstance. Strengthen this skill and you can be rest assured to reap benefits from it. I was able to solve SC questions with around 95% accuracy within 1:15 minutes.
Tips for RC:-
Mostly all prep companies will tell you to skim the passage quickly to get an overall idea of what the passage is talking about and then go to each question and then refer back to passage if required.
Somehow, this whole idea of skimming was not something that i felt comfortable with. I was getting about 50% of all the RC questions wrong when i was following this approach. Call me too naive or whatever else you would but for me the skimming approach almost certainly never worked.
I then decided to try out a different approach. I started reading and understanding the entire passage at one go. This was very very tough for me in the beginning because i have a lot of focus issues as i am not used to reading a lot of books. In fact i do not read books at all
. At first i found it too hard but later as i developed the focus i saw huge gains in performance on RC. I suddenly jumped to an accuracy level of around 85-90%. This was enough of an indicator for me to stick with this approach and i firmly believe that this combined with the SC skills saw me past through the challenging 700 barrier.The actual test day:-
I had visited the test center one week in advance to check out the route and bus timings and see if there is anything that i should be concerned about. I think this is one thing that everyone should do. It would really help in eliminating any chance of surprises on the test day. Any negative surprise/shocks on the test day would seriously put you in a bad position.
Take a good night's sleep (somehow my anxiety did not let me do this
)Coming back to the actual test experience. Here is what i felt about the test:-
1. The Quant section was certainly a whole lot tougher than what the GMATPrep or what even MGMAT mocks would have you believe. The difficulty climbed up exponentially and i could see some questions which i had not even known how to solve. I mean the combination of different areas on those problems was unexpected or perhaps i had not practiced enough. One thing that was consoling was that the questions were getting tougher, which indicated that i was somehow solving them correctly
2. During the break, i gathered myself up and self motivated myself to ensure that i do not let my (perceived) bad performance on the quant section overshadow my verbal section.
3. Verbal section was pretty much in line with what most of the prep material would suggest. The SC questions were a bit harder and tested a bit weirder idioms. Overall, it was an experience of almost the same level as the last GMATPrep that i gave even though i got a much lower score on the real test day (i got a 46 on the GMATPrep's mock the day prior to the actual exam).
4. The IR section went over my head. It was certainly tougher than the sample question set that GMATprep comes with and the MGMAT IR questions as well. I do have to confess that i had not prepared so well for the IR section anyways because i thought that it would only judge the same concepts that i knew of. The only problem is, that the combination of different concepts and the presentation of the problem make the IR section way more challenging than you would expect.
Once again, thanks a lot for having this awesome community. It is really very very helpful.
Even after reading such a long debrief if you are interested in the score progress that i had, it is attached to this post.
