I just Beat The GMAT!

I would like to start off this post by thanking all people associated with this forum. Thanks to Eric, other moderators and everyone who has answered even a single question, we all have benefited.

On the test day, it was pretty cold and my hands were barely moving. Typing helped warm my hands up. Despite facing a minor mishap between the awa section and quant section, i managed to start the quant section after only 3 mins. Do not try to answer each question within 2-3 mins if you need more time. It is better to take more time on each question and get it correct than guess on many questions just because you want to have 2-3 mins for every question. My philosophy has always been to solve each question quick so that i do not have to blindly guess any question. Despite the 3 min late start and seeing some astronomically hard questions, I finished with ~3 mins to spare.

verbal section was kinda hard too. I saw 4 sc questions and 1 cr question in the first 5 questions. then ques 6 was a rc question that was highlighted. i made the mistake of getting too happy after seeing the highlighted question but i managed to refocus. all rc questions i saw were very long but fortunately i understood the matter of all rc questions. the cr questions were hard too and ultimately i was drained by the time the test was done.

I gave gmat a month back and scored 700. I realized soon afterwards that I had many holes in my game and I needed to plug as many as possible. After making some changes I gave gmatprep and mgmat tests again and got the following scores:

gmatprep 1: 740
mgmat 1: 780 (do not believe the results for mgmat tests, I gave almost every test on mgmat and afterwards I knew almost every question)
gmatprep 2: 760
mgmat 2: 780
gmatprep 3: 740
gmatprep 4: 710 (very devastated)
gmatprep 5: 740
gmatprep 6: 740

real gmat : 760 99% (quant 50 93%, verbal 44 97%)

Some key factors to remember:

1. Try to study smart, not just study hard
2. Always remember your mistakes and try to reduce their number.
3. gmat quant has become much harder, I got 2 questions on pentagons. I had to guess on one of them.
4. i faced more ds questions than ps questions. the hardest questions are ps questions in which the same question can be framed as a ds question.
5. do not get too happy once you see either a boldface cr question or a highlighted reading comprehension question. you still have to face a total of 41 questions and you must not get happy too soon. I was very happy when i saw the sixth question as a highlighted RC question but soon I realized that some of my focus had disappeared.

Thanks again to all of you who have been a part of this website. If there are any questions, I would be happy to answer them.

what was ur break up like, how did u prepared rc..congrats...

first of all, congratulations!

I have a few questions.

On quant did you end up guessing on questions?

And on verbal how well did you pace yourself?

I appreciate the good wishes, thanks to everyone so far.


The break-up was:

Quant: 50 (93%)
Verbal: 44 (97%)
Total: 760 (99%)

Only one method seems to work for me when I prepare RC. I take mental notes as I read the passages and then summarize each paragraph after I read it inside my mind. For example, after you read any para, recite a 1-2 line summary in your mind that highlights the main point/s of the para. Do that for every para and that should give you a mental picture.


On quant I was done with the questions with about 3 mins to spare. The key for me is to realize when I cannot answer a question. After I realize that, I make an educated guess and move on. In verbal, I was done with about 1 min to spare. The key for me was again not to not take too much time on any question that I cannot answer. Take an educated guess and move on.

How were RC's again three small one big total 14 questions? did you got boldface RC's...how were math DS..

I got 4 RCs. To be honest, none of them was a small one. The first 3 were almost 1.5 times the length of a "normal big" RC one would see in the gmat prep tests. the fourth one was bigger than a "normal small" RC. The first RC question I got was a boldface, question 6. After that I did not see any boldface questions. Math DS was hard. I practised well but I still got pretty hard questions.

Congrats on the outstanding score!

Hi,

First of all congrats for the great score. I was wondering how you managed to solve complex CR's.

I am typically good in CR's but when I see difficult CR's (720+) either I take too long (3mminutes+) or mark them incorrect.

The biggest problem I face is comprehension of a convoluted CR, specially where the conclusion is hidden in a several sentences, surprisingly I am fairly decent at boldface.

Do you paraphrase your CR's, I tried but I am unable to make written notes. Can you please advice something on this.

Thanks in anticipation.

Vineet

Thanks to everyone for the good wishes


Vineet:

For any CRs, I never take notes. For me, it takes time to first write things down and then understand them. I take mental notes about different information given. According to me, for difficult CRs, it is ok to take 3+ mins to solve them. It is alright to spend more time on CRs if you know that you can get them correct if you were to spend more time. Just make sure that you do not run out of time on the verbal section after spending too much time on CRs.

Thanks Ashton,

Vineet