I just Beat The GMAT!

First off I have to thank this forum and people who are so active here. I found a lot of help here to get me through, stories - good and bad, flashcards, do's and dont's and much more.

I took my GMAT this morning and got a 710 which is slightly above expectations and just what I needed. Not very detailed but my prep story is on my blog - https://maymbajourney.blocked/

As far as what worked and what did not goes, I'll be happy to help and contribute in anyway possible. Its funny how a good score instills that sort of confidence.

I'm not adding what worked and what did not here as I have that written on my blog and will keep adding more on it.

The most important thing is to know yourself and identify what works for you and what does not. There are plenty of stories to read through and pick what you need.

Everyone says that you need to know your weak points in content. While I did know that clearly in quant I could not pin point whether my sc went wrong in parallelisms, sva or tenses or anything else. I just knew that when the question was difficult in verbal I had more chances of getting it wrong and that I'm in the habit of overlooking and not reading everything. Reading carefully and avoiding carelessness is all I needed to improve verbal. With that advice I'll stop myself from pretending like I'm an expert.

Wanted to post this on the forum because most of my friends and family don't understand what a good or bad score is in GMAT and I needed to show off my success a bit.

Congratulations

Hey Shina, firstly congrats! and and I went through your entire blog, gives me some confidence, although I am not as strong in quants as you, how did you approach DS, any pointers?

Congrats. This is a great score.

Thank you guys =)

jaskaran, for DS the first step is to begin with solving the question itself. Most of the times it let's you know what further information is needed to find the answer. This is what I read on forum, used in practice tests and helped me on the dday - look only at the first option and see it gives you the answer, if yes then write AD down if not then BCE. Next look at second option in isolation, its easy to carry forward from the first one so need to be careful. If second option doesn't work then try together. The AD and BCE eases the stress by eliminating half the answers.

There are some typical questions that you get and some things you can keep in mind -

- In algebra where the options provide value of x and y, on solving the question, a lot of times value for only one of them is required. Don't get carried away into marking both are required when only one can give the answer. I got a question in which when I solved the equation all that was needed was value of y; the options were x=sthing and y=sthing.

- the number line questions are usually the scary ones, take them easy because half of them have simple answers. In number lines watch out for whether its mentioned whether its integers. If not consider fractions.

- Sometimes its easy to try with samples, use x and y as both negative, positive, one of them -ve other +ve, fractions if real. I use the following and cancel what doesn't fit. What this gives is whether I'm looking for an option such as 0<x or X>0 etc
x y
+ +
- -
+ -
- +

With quant its always practice and practice more

Hope this helps!