I just Beat The GMAT!

I wanted to heap some praise at the wonderful people at TTP and let others struggling to hit their target score know that it is possible!

TLDR: TTP is the path to the GMAT score you need to move forward in your MBA application process.

Where I started: My background is in the arts, I haven't done "hard" math since I left high school over a decade ago. I knew that getting a competitive Quant score was going to be a difficult mountain to climb. I did a baseline practice exam and scored 550 then worked through the Official Guide. The Official Guide is supremely unhelpful for someone like me who really needed to get deep into the concepts behind the questions, particularly in the quant section. For quant, all it really gives you are answer explanations that are specific, include one method, and don’t provide a set of skills with which to attack the test. On the verbal side, given my literature background, I thought I would have to do very little to succeed, but that hope was quickly dashed from my baseline test. Here the Official Guide is even worse. The critical reasoning section is full of abstract logic proofs and totally incomprehensible, especially if you are a non-native English speaker with lots of useless jargon words that don’t help you understand anything about the questions being asked. Anyway, I wanted to do this process “on my own” cause admitting you need help and then asking for it is difficult! After working through the official guide and it’s problem sets I took another benchmark test and got…550

A New Approach: I turned to TTP after a woman I knew that was applying to MBAs said she had a good experience with the online learning platform. I started the trial to see what it was like and was quickly blown away by platform’s presentation and learning content. A word about UI: the official guide is an object lesson in how to present information in an inscrutable, dense manner – TTP is the opposite of that; navigation is easy, print is big, the colors are soft and calming. I quickly found that TTP’s UI allowed me to study for a few hours at a time because it was so much easier to look at and learn from. The platform is seamless to navigate and the analytics features (essential to identifying weak areas to work on) are digestible and easy to parse. I found that I really liked using the platform from a UI perspective, which goes a long way for a product you are going to spend hundreds of hours with.

Content-wise, I instantly knew this was the platform I needed. From the out, the learning modules are upfront about slowly and systematically building conceptual competence. (I have to stress that the 740+ course is not fast! Completing this course takes time.) The lessons are fantastically structured, laying out the information in a systematic way that builds on information taught previously, and includes structured practice in the lesson. I loved how the included practice questions rarely asked me to repeat processes shown in examples previously in the lessons, but instead forced me to apply the concept I had learned in the lesson to figure out how it could be used to solve a different type of problem, anticipating the next piece of learning. I think this is what makes the course SO effective: you organically generate so much of the learning that’s taking place. A fact may present x, and another presents y, and then you are asked to figure out how X+Y makes Z, where Z is a new fact, concept, or approach.

Features I liked about TTP: I loved the amount of quantitative practice available. For a student like me, who grasps conceptually what’s being presented by has trouble mechanically actioning those concepts in problems, I needed every last practice set TTP had to offer. Because my math skills were weak coming in, I was also prone to making several careless mistakes when solving problems. I often listed ratios wrong, set up word problems incorrectly, multiplied incorrectly…the list goes on and on. I would know how to solve the problem, but the execution was lacking. The enormous amount of practice demanded by the course is absolutely invaluable. Full stop. Nearing the end of the course, I started noticing that, because I had done so much practice, my hand and my subconscious brain knew how to solve a problem before I did intellectually, and the careless math mistakes started disappearing. It was almost as if I had practiced so much that I stopped getting in my own way, if that makes sense. I actually had to learn to trust myself when questioning if I had done a problem right, because some deeper part of my mind had taken over and knew what to do. I want to emphasize 1) how weird it is for an arty person like me to just know how to deal with quadratic equations and 2) how valuable this asset was on test day.

Test Day(s): I desperately wanted to find the path of least resistance to achieving success on the GMAT because it was the element of my applications that gave me the most anxiety. I tried to cut corners, and my long prep time is down to the fact that I tried to take the test several times before I was ready. On tests 1-4 I got, in order, 650, 690, 680, 690.
After my fourth test, Scott, the head of TTP reached out to see how I fared. I reported my frustration to him, including that I had been practice testing at 730/740. Scott personally reviewed my course analytics and quickly saw that I was trying to get my target score well before finishing the course. I was tired, psychologically burnt out, and frustrated that my score had clearly plateaued. I did not want to continue, but Scott encouraged me to finish the course and said I would get the score I needed if I went all the way through it.

By the end of the course I started noticing I had a test anxiety problem. Before I took my 5th attempt, I was practice testing at 760/750. But when I got my result, it was a 710. I noticed I had what I call a 50 point anxiety tax, where I would perform, almost to a T, about 50 points below my capability because of anxiety. I would question all sorts of things I knew and get straightforward problems wrong right off the bat. Not only does TTP have great resources for anxiety management, the amount of practice in the course started making this anxiety irrelevant. While my conscious mind was fretting about how the test was going and all those things you shouldn’t be thinking about while testing, my hand and my unconscious mind were knocking out problems.

I took the GMAT for a 6th and final time and scored 730 (Q50 V39) and was completely shocked when the score came up. I did all the things you aren’t supposed to do while testing: I started thinking about how I was doing and got super emotional, convinced that I was performing terribly on the Quant section, which I always take first. I was so upset at the end of Quant that I elected not to take a break and went straight into Verbal to get the test over as fast as possible, sure that I had already ruined my score. I am absolutely positive that this pouting and bad attitude cost me points, as evidenced by my (for me) lower than average verbal score. Further, to this point, Q50 was the best quant score I had EVER gotten on an official test.

The point I’m trying to make is that even when I did a bunch of things to harm my own test, the prep carried me through. The prep knew more about how to take the GMAT than I did. That’s what you get with TTP, relaxing into knowing that if you do the work and complete the course, you are capable of achieving your target score, even when you think it’s all going to pot.

Final Thoughts: There are no shortcuts in this process. You have to go all the way through it. That being said, the GMAT is not about knowledge or capability. As a standardized test, the act of getting your target score is more a test of discipline and effort than anything else. TTP understands this better than any other platform I’ve seen. Their messaging that huge score leaps are possible depending on the effort the student puts in is entirely true.

I want to give a special shout out to Scott, the content team, and Vivek the operations manager. These people cared about me getting through this process when I had no “cares” left to give and was ready to quit. I never expected that a self-driven learning platform would treat me with such compassion and encouragement. The people at TTP showed me that I was not alone in this process, which can feel very lonely and isolating, and that has made all the difference.