Great Score Brian! Congratulations!

Brian151515 wrote:This is my first post, but I have been a reader of this blog for the last 5 months. I took the GMAT yesterday and scored a 760 with pretty strong splits of (90th % / 97th %).

I just wanted to say thank you to the fellow posters for the inspiration you all have provided through this process.

The one piece of advice I would give (if anyone is looking) is to study over a long period of time rather than over 30 days like I see suggested elsewhere in these blogs. I know time is a premium, but the key to success is training your mind to think differently. By studying over 5 months I got to the point where I was assessing everything in the way I would a GMAT problem.

Thanks again, and feel free to respond to this post for any specific information about my journey.

Could you please tell me how did you go about with your Verbal strategy for CR ?

Thanks,
Ankit

Ankit -

I worked almost exclusively with Kaplan for the verbal section. The biggest key for me was realizing that there are only so many "types" of fallacies or assumptions used by the GMAT. I spent about 2 weeks working exclusively on CR to the point where I could tell you the answer before even reading the options. So my suggestion would be to practice extremely hard, but realize that there is a finite amount of issues that will arise.

Good luck with the exam!

Hey congrats,thats a great score!!
What kind of questions did u encounter during the exam,especially in quant.Which topics u feel one should stress more on in quant?
Do u think the level of difficulty was the same as that of gmatprep exam?

Thanks,
Shreeraj

Congrats on the great score! You give great advice to everyone to study over a period of time.

Hey man, your rocked your GMAT, hands down!

So,are you a native speaker of English language?

Could you elaborate upon verbal section approach, how would you tackle RC, the same Kaplan method?

Brian151515 wrote:This is my first post, but I have been a reader of this blog for the last 5 months. I took the GMAT yesterday and scored a 760 with pretty strong splits of (90th % / 97th %).

I just wanted to say thank you to the fellow posters for the inspiration you all have provided through this process.

The one piece of advice I would give (if anyone is looking) is to study over a long period of time rather than over 30 days like I see suggested elsewhere in these blogs. I know time is a premium, but the key to success is training your mind to think differently. By studying over 5 months I got to the point where I was assessing everything in the way I would a GMAT problem.

Thanks again, and feel free to respond to this post for any specific information about my journey.

Hi and congratulations to your score

I'm aiming for a 720-740 score and I was planning to devote about 3-4 months of prep. I hope you can answer these questions, it will be really helpful if I could get some insight

May i ask how divided your study time in your gmat prep?

And how did you do to not forget what you learned in another part while studying a new section of gmat?

Brian151515 wrote:Ankit -

I worked almost exclusively with Kaplan for the verbal section. The biggest key for me was realizing that there are only so many "types" of fallacies or assumptions used by the GMAT. I spent about 2 weeks working exclusively on CR to the point where I could tell you the answer before even reading the options. So my suggestion would be to practice extremely hard, but realize that there is a finite amount of issues that will arise.

Good luck with the exam!

Thanks Brian,

Did you first focus on the accuracy of getting the questions right or did you time your questions as well ? I face issues with time constraints on a CR question.

Any tips on this ?

Thanks,
Ankit

Few thigs to respond to here, so I will attempt to answer them in 1 post:

I will preface the rest of this post with the fact that I am a native english speaker.

As far as how I allocated my tim over the 4-5 month journey: I would describe somewhat like a pyramid, where at the start of the process I was studying a lot, and I was studying everything. I would not necessarily focus on specific areas on a given day, but would rather create practice tests in Kaplan of all Quant areas. I believe in the addage of "practice like you play" and in the case of the GMAT, you need to learn to answer questions about different topics in random sequences. So like I said, I studied a lot, and I studied everything under the sun. I would say I did this for the first 2 months. At this point you should have a better understanding of which areas trip you up, and I focused my efforts there. I noticed that my verbal was much stronger than quant (relatively speaking), and as such, I would say I spent 75% of my time on Quant, and 25% of Verbal.

As I continued to progress I continued focusing my efforts. To Illustrate, I spend about 2 weeks studying only really difficult geometry problems as those seemed to get me (funny enough I saw almost no Geometry on the exam).

As far as CR prep, I would say that a great way to practice is by not looking at answer options. Your really should get to the point in CR where you can know a correct answer without seeing the options. This will help you avoid confusion when reading 2 or 3 answers that all sounds correct.

Hope this helps, and feel free to continue asking questions.

Ankit -

I always practiced against time as this is the most challenging part of the test. I never wanted to get a false sense of where I was in terms of progress. Now, that doesn't mean I wouldn't spend some extra time on problems, but I always looked at how long it took me to complete.