I just Beat The GMAT!

I found reading through people's debriefs and experiences with the exam to be helpful, so I thought I would pay it forward with some tips that helped me achieve the score I was looking for. I've also included a TLDR down at the bottom.

Being a native speaker and someone that graduated with a poli sci degree a couple years ago, I've always been stronger on the language/humanities side and struggled heavily with math growing up (even failed geometry in high school), my brain starts to shut off when it sees shapes lol.

Before prepping for the GMAT I had forgotten what an integer was, so I knew I had a large hill to climb.

The vast majority of my prep was focused on quant, while the biggest improvement in my verbal scores came from actually adopting different mindsets on different sections of the verbal section.

For quant, I signed up for TTP late last year after reading people talk about it on here constantly and bumbled my way through the program. I skipped around pages where I felt like I knew the concepts, and didn't follow the study plan. I just created custom quizzes and drilled those. During this time, I was also not fully committed to the idea of going back to school and was interviewing with other companies while working full time.

Naturally, my scores weren't really improving much. They hovered around a 36q and 40v in diagnostics and mocks.

I finally decided to commit to an exam date, and took my first exam in August of this year while studying on and off for about the previous 6 months. After getting Covid in the weeks leading up to the exam, I took it in a very diminished state and ended up scoring a 570 which I cancelled immediately.

After that extremely disappointing first attempt, I decided to completely revamp how I was studying. I actually signed up for another account on TTP as they don't allow you to wipe your progress and started from scratch. I followed the study plan to a tee, did every single example problem and ended up completing the vast majority of medium quizzes.

I did not touch any of the hard quizzes. After hours and hours of work, I was able to score above 80% on TTP mediums consistently, which I found sufficient to score a 48Q. For anyone else that is not aiming for an elite 50+ Q score, hitting a high accuracy on mediums is sufficient!!

For anyone else that chooses to use TTP as a prep source, my biggest tip would be to follow their provided study plan. Don't skip around, don't create custom quizzes aimlessly like I did the first go around. This was a waste of my own time and money. If you are going to pay the money, do it properly.

After putting in a good amount of time and completing all of the chapters and example problems on TTP, I started practicing OG Quant questions. I would solve the question, then look at GMAT Club for solutions that other people posted. GMAT Club was an invaluable resource for breaking down other people's solutions, as well as the difficulty level of each question. A really helpful trick for me was to learn how to identify the difficulty level of a certain question, and approach the question accordingly.

After seeing enough examples on GMAT Club, I could look at a difficult DS problem and pretty much immediately identify that this was a "Hard" problem and then start looking for traps that GMAC would use. For easy problems, it was the opposite mindset where I avoided psyching myself out and overthinking the problem.

Once I started scoring around past the mid 40s on quant in mocks, I knew I just had to hone some weaknesses and started reading through some of my weaker chapters on TTP, and redoing practice problems.

Now for verbal, while I had a fairly high baseline level of around 40V, it still took some adjustments and learning to push that to a 44+.

A lot of people say that verbal is the less teachable and formulaic of the two sections, and I found that to be completely true. My tip on verbal would be try to hone your own approaches by doing as many practice problems as possible on find what works for you.

While my RC and CR was naturally fairly strong, I really struggled with SC. While I first started trying to improve the section by focusing on different grammar rules, I quickly learned this technique did not work for me. I ended up psyching myself out, and justifying each answer choice.

I tried different approaches with RC as well, and eventually found that reading the passage intently the first go around and with the mindset of quickly identifying the intention of the passage worked best for me. I would immediately be trying to find the purpose of the passage, and identifying whether the passage was simply explaining a concept, refuting another concept etc.

After attempting a ton of practice problems on the OG Online Guide practice bank, I learned that taking a "zoomed in" approach on RC and CR worked best for me. I'd hone in and read the passage/argument intently. As soon as I found my eyes glazing over, I would take a quick second to close/rest them and forced myself to read the passage again with intensity.

I adopted the opposite approach with SC and took what I called to myself a "zoomed out" approach. I would try to look at the bigger picture, and the meaning behind the sentence and what it was actually trying to say as opposed to trying to immediately identify a grammatical error. I found this to be incredibly helpful with SC, and I started getting more questions right consistently using this approach.

I then signed up for my second exam in November, and took it this past Thursday. The exam felt extremely hard. I remembered in my first attempt in which I had scored a 570, the exam actually felt quite easy. This go around, the Quant felt difficult and the Verbal felt extremely thick and grueling. I actually ended up running out of time near the end of the quant section and guessed on the last 3 questions.

I distinctly remembered thinking that I was bombing the exam, and thought maybe business school wasn't in the cards for me. The RC section felt more difficult than any of the mocks, with denser passages. When I saw that 750 pop up at the end, I was honestly shocked.

I remember reading someone on Reddit say that if you are doing well on the exam, it should feel like you are drowning. The test is adaptive and the difficulty level of questions you will be encountering at the level needed to score a 700+ will make you feel as if you are struggling. This is completely normal, DO NOT GIVE UP and stay strong to the end of the exam. I almost phoned it in the middle of the verbal section because it all felt so difficult but I'm so glad I forced myself to slog through it.

I would periodically find myself zoning out during the harder RC passages and CR questions, and would have to force myself back to focus after taking a quick second to rest my eyes. This is completely normal!

I really hope this was helpful for somebody out there, as this sub was tremendously helpful when I was first starting my studies.

TLDR:
Completed all of TTP Chapters, as well as 90%+ of medium quizzes with an overall accuracy of 85%. Did not touch any of the hard quizzes.

Focused on meaning in SC instead of grammatical rules. Read RC passage intently on first go around, with emphasis on finding the purpose of the passage immediately. Is this an argument? What is this author trying to tell me?

Second exam where I scored well felt difficult, while first attempt felt far easier. Don't be discouraged if you feel like the exam isn't going well, and stick it out to the end.