I just Beat The GMAT!

The beginning

I’d considered applying to MBA programs starting back in 2019 but it wasn’t until August of 2022 that I realized I needed to make a change in my career more immediately. There was no way to get everything together by September deadlines, but I learned I could still apply Round 2 and have a decent shot at getting into some decent schools.

I was never that naturally great at standardized tests, but I’d studied a ton over the course of a year my junior year of HS to get a great SAT score (800 on both the Math and Reading sections). Naively, I thought I’d retained a bunch of this knowledge and that it would easily translate into a great GMAT if I did some minimal studying. I was totally unfamiliar with the format of the exam. The GMAT is so different — I hadn’t realized I couldn’t come back to questions if I was unsure of my answers to them, and that the content of the exam was significantly more difficult.

I learned a bit about the exam, and I started studying for it in early September and realized I was more behind than I’d originally thought, but I still wasn’t too discouraged. I purchased OG materials, did a bunch of practice problems, and took a mock. After drilling problems, I took my first OG mock — 700. Not so bad but a little discouraging. I realized I was really struggling with timing.

I studied quite a bit more over the next month, and got a 740 on my second mock. I wasn’t super thrilled with this either, since I’d read that the practice exams were a bit easier, and I hadn’t taken it under perfect conditions (I took a long break between sections). I didn’t think much of this at the time though, and with my time crunch I thought drilling practice questions felt like the simplest way to brute force my way into a decent score and so I kept approaching the exam that way.

The 3 730s and Application Phase

I took my first GMAT in October 2022. I got a 690 (42Q/42V) and I was upset, but not super discouraged. I was confused though — I’d almost always been stronger in quant in any exam I’d taken previously. I knew that my issue, though, was that I’d run out of time on my quant section, mainly because I found myself unable to move on from not being able to solve certain questions when I knew in my heart of hearts I’d be able to derive the correct answer if I had more time, and I wasn’t really ready to accept it. I was still in denial about the time management/smart guessing strategies you sometimes need to employ to do well on the GMAT. I also hadn’t studied for verbal too much at all, aside from reviewing some sentence correction, and my verbal score was in line with what I thought was reasonable. I think in retrospect the reason my verbal score was a bit higher than it was on subsequent exams was that I knew I’d messed up and there was no recovering from it, and I wasn’t as stressed about the verbal section at that point. I just approached the verbal section as best as I could and I think the lower pressure I put on myself during that section resulted in the V42. I was still very committed to applying Round 2, so I needed to take it again, and I was still aiming for a 750+ to compensate for my less-than-ideal GPA.

I subscribed to TTP after reading about it on Reddit. While I could solve most quant problems untimed, I wasn’t privy to certain tricks that could make things speedier, and I was not very good at certain problems — overlapping sets/probability/properties of numbers/absolute value & inequality problems. I also wasn’t quite as good at geometry as I’d assumed. I didn’t use TTP as much as ideally would have had I had more time. If I could go back 2 years, I would change a lot about my life, but I was stuck where I was and I just focused on the sections I knew I was weak in. I had a good idea of what these were from not only my ESR, but also the problems that took me significantly longer as I was using Wiley to practice the OG problems. I did a LOT of TTP practice, and booked another exam for November. I didn’t take full advantage of TTP, and my studying was very ad-hoc. I did have a very good sense of what I was weakest in at this point, though, and I just focused on those topics in addition to doing more OG practice questions. I felt great about quant going into the next exam.

(11/9/22) 730 (51Q/37V)
In early November, I showed up to the test center and chose my section order as Q-V-IR-AWA (again). I came out of it with a 730 (51Q, 37V). I was thrilled with my quant score, since clearly my studying had paid off (THANK YOU TTP — I’m serious. I had a strong foundation but I really needed the “targeted” practice). I was pretty horrified at my verbal score, though, since I had never scored so low on any of my mocks. I figured it was fine, and that I had simply over-indexed on studying for quant this time. I could just focus a bit more on verbal going forward and that would be enough. I at least had a score I could apply with to certain top b-schools, and I started thinking about next steps there.

(12/3/22) 730 (49Q/40V)

I scheduled my next exam for early December. Work was hell at this point. Performance reviews were coming up and I’d seriously neglected work to study for the GMAT. It was fine, though, I told myself. I’m getting a 740+ this time for sure. I was confident I’d do well on quant and I believed I’d get something like a 42 in verbal. I did many more CR problems, since that was my weakest section the first time around. I barely studied RC. I’m still not sure what happened during this exam, since my RC/CR were decently strong. My SC ended up being a 38, and my RC was a 31... I think it was a time-management thing, but also I’d neglected RC severely. If I recall correctly, I ended up having to guess on a lot of questions and (in retrospect) had probably guessed on quite a few easy questions towards the end. I ended up with a 730 AGAIN. (49Q/40V). The section order I’d chosen was Q-V-IR-AWA.

(12/22/22) 730 (50Q/39V)

I’d already scheduled my next exam for late December (12/22/22). This was the one, I thought again. Here’s where I fix this verbal issue once and for all. I studied SOME quant (reviewing some TTP problems once again), but mostly focused on verbal. I studied additional SC problems using TTP, since I’d exhausted the OG prep materials (aside from the additional advanced verbal question prep that I ended up purchasing after this). I unfortunately had gotten very sick 2 days before my exam, and I went into the test center after having had a fever the night before (irresponsible, I know, but I wore a mask and I was desperate and worried about taking the test online) I got my score back, and I got my 3rd 730. This time I was at 50Q/39V. Again, I’d chosen my section order as Q-V-IR-AWA. I could not understand why this was happening, but I think at this point I’d finally realized that my concentration/test-taking stamina must have been what was preventing me from scoring higher on verbal.


Online Exam #1 (Technical Error)

I couldn’t accept that I’d gotten yet another 730. I was working on wrapping up my essays throughout this entire process, and had to devote more time to those, but I couldn’t move on from having scored so much lower than I was expecting to. My OG mocks at this point had been so much better (ranging from 750-780). I figured at this point that the section ordering must have been the culprit, since I knew I could do better than 40 on Verbal. My essays were nearly done, and my LORs had been submitted, so in the Uber home from this exam, I scheduled an online exam and was hoping to take it before R2 deadlines.

4 days later, I logged on, ready to take my first online exam. My experience was awful. Something was very wrong with my computer — during the exam, I kept getting disconnected from my WiFi. I wish, in retrospect, that I’d just bit the bullet and gotten what I needed for a wired internet connection/borrowed a computer from a friend, but it was over. I needed to apply with my current scores and there was nothing I could do now.

The aftermath (Jan 2023 onward)

I ended up emailing GMAC support and they marked the exam as “technical error”. They send me a voucher to take another free (online) exam. I contemplated submitting an updated score in late January, but I was SO over it all at this point with applications and having taken the exam so many times within a few months that I just could not get myself to do it.

I ended up getting interview invites to all of the schools I’d applied to, including one from my top choice school. I thought that if I did well, I was already competitive enough to move forward. On March 23rd, I got the update that I was put on the waitlist. I was more devastated than I’d expected to be, since I believe I’d done very well on the interview, but I knew what it was that most likely my below-average stats — both my GMAT and GPA didn’t really cut it.

I decided to try and get off of the waitlist. I’d already started imagining my life at this school. After getting waitlisted, I did a campus visit and I fell even more in love with it. It was EXTREMELY hard for me to try to start studying again at this point. I felt pretty defeated, but I spoke to my consultant and he told me getting my GMAT score up or taking the GRE and getting that score to be above the school’s average was likely the most effective way of getting myself off of the waitlist. It took me about a week or so to really convince myself to do it and I knew I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself later on if I didn’t at least give it my best and try one more time.

I’ve always been pretty strong at vocab, so I didn’t study any of it for the GRE. I took it basically cold (1 free practice exam and some minimal vocab studying + ~10 cumulative hours of RC studying for both GMAT/GRE) the end of April and scored 165Q/165V (330). I think I underestimated a bit the difficulty of the quant section on the GRE based on the 2 free exams they let you take. I was a little discouraged about this, but whatever. Next waitlist update is mid-May, so I had to buckle down and just take my GMAT so I could send a better update to the school before then. I continued to study RC and CR all weekend and did some minimal quant review, and took the GMAT on Monday, May 1st. I’d purchased a new computer after my first online GMAT debacle, and I’d decided to just schedule an online exam despite my poor experience last time. I had zero issues.

I started with verbal first, instead of my historic quant first. I think this was the key. I felt just OK during verbal, a little uncertain of some of my answers, guessing between 2 answers on most of the CR questions, but I felt VERY good about SC and decent about RC. I had not studied much because of the emotional toll of getting waitlisted/having to make a school decision had taken on me. I looked over some geometry questions, but not much else. My quant section didn’t feel so great, honestly. There was a lot of coordinate geometry and a lot of percent word problems that I hadn’t reviewed thoroughly enough in quite a while. I spent 6(!) minutes on the very first question, which was likely a huge mistake, since I needed to guess on quite a few DS questions later on. I kind of thought it was over at this point. I half-assed my IR section, but I wrote a decent essay for AWA since I thought the particular topic I got was kind of fun to argue.

I ended up with a...


760 (49Q/46V/6IR/6AWA)

I truly could not believe my eyes when the unofficial score popped up. I am both thrilled and just a little frustrated at myself for never having tried to switch up my section order strategy earlier on. My key takeaway from this is that I don’t think I was ever actually so weak at verbal (at least RC & SC), but I think I was putting myself at a disadvantage by not attempting starting the verbal section first. I’d never even tried to switch it up because I felt like I wanted to go into the verbal section with confidence after acing quant, and I didn’t take into account the fatigue I was feeling after the first section.

I believe I probably could have done even better if I had studied quant just a bit more prior to this, but I didn’t have that much motivation since the only reason I was doing this was because it could help me get off a waitlist and as I mentioned, I was already feeling a bit defeated.

One could argue that I got lucky with some of my verbal questions, but I truly don’t think this was the case. The RC passages were not my favorite, and it was pretty difficult to keep my focus, but not nearly as difficult as it had been during previous exams. One could also argue that taking the exam at home was more conducive to my focusing better, but I would argue that this was much more of a stressful test-taking environment for me. I was constantly worried that I would end up doing something that could result in my score getting canceled, or that I’d experience another technical issue. While I did study a bit more intentionally for verbal this time around (taking notes while reading, etc), I did not study nearly enough or differently enough to account for such a huge increase in my verbal score.

Takeaways (If I could do it over I would…)
* Maybe take the GRE first? I think this exam is more suited to my natural strengths. I started with studying for the GMAT and I think my stubbornness led me to not even consider taking the GRE in its place.
* Start my GMAT prep well over a year before I intended to apply to schools
* Start TTP immediately for quant review after doing some OG problems and realizing where my gaps are
* Study in a more balanced manner (i.e. not just quant at the expense of verbal)
* Take OG exams as close to under real exam conditions as much as possible so that I could be honest with myself about where I was (this is obvious to most people, but I was a bit all over the place during the application phase and in a time crunch and somehow thought it didn’t matter so much — perhaps part of me did not want to accept that I was not as well prepared as I thought I was since I was truly so desperate to get the apps in by R2 deadlines)