After getting inspired by so many success stories on this forum and others , finally I get a chance to write my own debrief...
A little about my background. Indian female with 3 years of IT .
Anyways,I came back to India to my parents and started preparing for Gmat .I gave my second official gmat attempt on 6th june 2013 and scored 720 (q 47, v 42).In the first official gmat attempt I had scored 650(q47, v 34). Although at first I felt that since there is a plethora of people scoring 750+ all over the internet, maybe no one would be interested in my tips and suggestions but now I feel that even if maybe one person benefit because of it , I will get some good karma which will help in my application process
So without getting into spiritualism here are some pointers on what worked for me and what didnt
-->Materials used ( A lottttttttttt!!!! first I gathered all the stuff available on the internet.Believe me I have 7GB of Gmat material with me!!!!)
First Attempt scenario
1. IMS (in india)- Skip it... I had joined it since my basics got rustic . Maybe the quant material is good for practice but please dont rely on IMS material completely and dont even look at the verbal material... complete waste of time.
2. Kaplan- purchased kaplan 2013 premier edition 2013 and kaplan 800 . Kaplan premier edition was purchased for the sole reason of free tests with it so cant comment a lot on it. Tests are not very indicative of real gmat and the scores were very much inflated. I was scoring 730+ on all the kaplan tests and was obviously disappointed with only a 650 in my first attempt.......
3. Official guide 13 edition: Dont go to the test hall if you havent gone through this book... no need to comment on the importance of this one. The practice questions are from the retired exams
4. Manhattan guide Books- All the books are good but cant say about the CR one as I was following powerscore for CR
So now for the mistakes which I made during the preparation of the first attempt and how I rectified them during the second attempt
1. Did not realized the importance of the error logs
. Although I had read the importance of the error logs and tried maintaining one I was just too lazy to go through my mistakes and analyze them in detail.2. Used tests for studying- Biggest mistake. Use practice tests wisely to analyze which areas you are weak in instead of preparing from them
3. Didnt came across Thursdays with Ron videos- RC was my weakest area and my accuracy was 50%-60% in this section
. After my first attempt I made it a point to sincerely watch the recordings of Thursdays with Ron and make notes from those study sessions.... I attribute the increase in my verbal from 34 to 42 solely to Ron 4. Didnt make notes- after my first attempt, I came across a success story on a forum in which the person said that he had maintained detailed notes . After that I again reread the manhattan guide books and made notes from them.
So this was the main crux of how I improved my gmat score by 70 points.( lets say my verbal score by 8 points
)In case of any queries feel free to PM me
