720 from 530: What I Wish I Knew From The Start

After what I've just been through, I felt I had to share this with Beat The GMAT. Don't be arrogant about self-prepping, or prepping with some of the mediocre freebies out there. I wasted 8 months, trying to do it that way, and it didn't work.

After 8 months, and probably 80-100 hours, my scores went from 490 to 530. I even thought about putting business school off or applying to lesser competitive part-time programs to avoid the GMAT altogether. I asked myself, why am I trying to do this all by myself? To save money? How much am I really saving? It's stupid. It turned out that free is very expensive. I wasted so much time.

At that point, I had an awakening. Here's what worked, and here's what I'd tell everyone to do right from the start to avoid going through what I went through.

A Plan
You need a highly structured plan. Magoosh has some plans, and EMPOWERgmat has plans. Of the two, I find EMPOWERgmat's plans to be the best laid out, but check them both out to see what works best for you. I specifically used the EMPOWERgmat total score booster study plan. Map out your schedule week by week, and be prepared to put your social life on hold if necessary for a couple of months.

Invest
I remember when I was prepping for the SAT, all we had were expensive retail courses, but times have changed. These online courses have brought the price to prep down so much. Business school and advancing my career are important to me, so I decided to drop the $100-200 to just do it right. That's really nothing if you think about it. Not when you consider the upside. The courses have guarantees too so if you don't hit your target, you're covered. It's basically like a stock option, or an insurance policy. You get the full upside, but are only exposed to a small downside. I used some of the Magoosh free resources, but I chose EMPOWERgmat because I found it to have a much better emphasis on both the material and the strategies.

Stop Being Stubborn
You have initial tendencies, and they're probably all getting in your way. For example, when the quant or verbal sections would start I'd start off like I was in some sort of a race to the finish. That's so stupid though. If you really examine any GMAT question, it's loaded with little twists and turns you're guaranteed to miss if you try to race. One of the things that made a big difference in improving my verbal score was learning how to read on the GMAT. The material taught me the optimal reading pace and things that I could do to get more from my reading. That made such a difference for me. The other thing to stop trying to pretend I'm a mental math genius. I'm just not, and I never will be. Instead, take notes and do your work on the pad.

Actually Change
Just watching a lesson doesn't miraculously mean you can now do what it says. You have to work really hard to change how your habits and thought processes. Thinking of the GMAT as a set of skills rather than just a block of information to be memorized made such a difference.

The Result? 720 The 92nd percentile.

It took 8 months to go from 490 to 530, but only two to go from 530 to 720. Insane right?

Bottom line: be smart from the start. Don't be an idiot like I was. In fact, I wish I had read this very breakdown first.

For those interested, here's everything I used to go from 530 to 720:
GMAT Official Guide 13th Edition
GMAT Prep Software official software
Magoosh free SC videos
EMPOWERgmat Score Booster Total Study Plan
EMPOWERgmat 2 month's access
Veritas Quiz Bank
Beat the GMAT
GMAT Club

Here was my practice test progression. As you can see, there were some ups and downs, and most of my improvement kicked in later on:
GMAT Prep 2: 540
MGMAT 1: 510
MGMAT 2: 570
MGMAT 3: 550
MGMAT 4: 640
MGMAT 5: 690

Real Test: 720

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