I just Beat The GMAT!

Finally, my GMAT Odyssey is complete. Achieving my score goal took a fair amount of preparation, and it seems that, in the end, my scoring 800 on the GMAT was greatly facilitated by the use of some methods that I have used to achieve other things. Here's what I did during this phase of my training for the GMAT to drive my score up and make sure I hit my goal.

A few months ago when I took the GMAT, although at that time also I was shooting for scoring 800, maybe I was not quite ready and also I had some distractions the day of the test, and I ended up scoring 780 (Q49 V50).

I wrote this post about how I prepped for that test.

780-debrief-and-takeaways-t280962.html

I still wanted to score 800. So I kept working toward that.

In order to achieve an 800 GMAT total score, I had to score 51 on quant. Since my official quant score was 49, basically I had two more quant section points to go. That might not seem like much, but those two points were not all that easy to come by.

The main thing I did to raise my quant score was work some more on weaker areas, and the more I looked for areas to work on, the more I found.

Among other resources, I used some question banks containing quant questions broken down into many categories. One interesting thing I discovered in using these question banks was the way my weaker areas matched up pretty well with the categories in which I hadn't done many practice questions. For instance I had done many statistics questions and I could generally rock questions of that type when they showed up, but I had done only a few overlapping sets questions, and, in taking the test, I spent seven minutes on one of those. I would realize that I was not that good with, say, absolute value, and sure enough I would then see that I had almost ignored that category when I was practicing.

Another thing I noticed was that a quant question type seeming easy or to be something I understood pretty well did not mean that I was ready to quickly get to answers to questions of that type. The GMAT is not a math test testing knowledge of concepts. The GMAT tests skill in getting to answers. So, in addition to learning about things I was not clear about, I had to work on getting good at handling questions that involved things I did understand but was not that great at working with.

So I worked on covering the categories on which I had not previously worked much, using question banks and practice CATs to take my quant skills to a new level.

I also wanted to lock in 51 on verbal, and the thing that, was even though I was getting 50 or 51 on verbal on most CATs I took, practice or real, at times I would get smoked by verbal questions and score less than 50 on the section. A verbal score lower than 51 would not get me to a total score of 800, and in a way I didn't even know what to do to make sure I would get all of the verbal questions correct.

Getting all of the Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions correct seemed challenging but doable. I realized that correctly answering GMAT Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions does not really require much GMAT specific knowledge. So I figured that, if I were just a little more skilled and really careful and determined, I could get all of the CR and RC questions right. So I learned a little more about those types and practiced with care and determination in mind.

Then there was Sentence Correction. Sentence Correction seemed to involve a sea of rules and idioms and some of the questions are pretty tricky, and the thing that made Sentence Correction seem particularly challenging was that sometimes in a way the credited answers didn't even seem right. So, getting them all correct seemed like an impossible or at least rather impractical dream, but maybe some of Mitch Hunt's attitude rubbed off on me, and after a while I convinced myself that I could nail SC too. The truth was that there were certain things that consistently got me on Sentence Correction, things such as quantity words and certain idioms, and I figured that maybe if, along with doing some more general practicing, I could just get good with those dozen or so things, I would be OK.

With working on timing, doing practice problems from various sources, learning SC concepts and taking regular practice CATs, I was getting better and my scores were showing it, at least for the most part, as I scored 800 on two practice tests in a row, but then six days before my scheduled test I took a GMAT Prep practice test and scored Q50 V48 780. Not cool. I was still fighting to finish quant on time, and, on verbal, I had been tripped up by one sick SC question. Wow, just six days to go and scoring 800 did not seem like a sure thing. What was it going to take?

I was pretty sure I had the answer.

About twenty years ago I started learning about the powers of meditation and resolving inner conflict. Since then I have used these methods to make major changes in my life and in the lives of others. It's amazing how changing one's inner workings can dramatically affect the results one gets, and I figured the methods would work for this too.

So, I started doing inner work to find and resolve conflicts I might have with scoring high on the GMAT and with things that are key to doing that. I meditated on speed, math, efficiency, accuracy, success, clarity of vision and anything else that I could come up with, and sure enough, I found conflicts to resolve. For instance, when I meditated on the concept "Do it right the first time." I found that I had a really negative attitude toward it, and I meditated to change that.

I also visualized myself taking the test and meditated to dissolve the tension that came with that image.

I had read in someone's 800 score GMAT debrief about how, when he had finished the test, he had seen his score, 51, 51, 800, come up on the screen. So I continued doing something I had been doing for a while: getting myself used to the idea of seeing those scores on the screen when I finished, using an approach similar to people's visualizing outcomes before participating in athletic events.

I meditated for hours day after day and the night before the test, and what happened on test day was freaky, even taking into account some more actual studying I did.

I did the essay and IR sections, no big deal, and after the break got into quant. Now previously, I had had to do something along the lines of running scared on quant, but one thing I had realized after meditating on efficiency was that errors in calculation were killing me on quant, both by getting me to wrong answers and by sucking up extra time even when I ended up getting right answers. So this time I was really being careful, even double checking my answers, basically doing some of the problems twice. I was checking the clock and, "Ok cool," it was nice to see that I was just a minute or two behind.

Oddly though, the questions seemed relatively easy. I was cruising, and I noticed that, even with all the care and double checking, I was catching up with and then getting ahead of the clock. That happened even though the test center people were talking loudly enough to be heard through the glass and I had actually stopped to ask them to take the volume down a notch.

The more questions I did, the further ahead of the clock I got. Sure, I had gotten stronger in some quant areas, but the way things were going was so different from what I had experienced before that I actually looked closely at the screen to see if I were really taking the GMAT. It was surreal, and when I had about twenty-one minutes left with only seven quant questions to go and I knew that I had Q51 in the bag, I was pumped. It looked as if the meditation, along with the preparation I guess, had done the trick, bigtime.

I took a slightly over time ten minute break, I usually finish verbal early anyway, and got to work on verbal. Verbal went pretty well. My main things for handling GMAT verbal are logic, care and determination, and I used them to the max and went more slowly than usual. Wasn't messing around. Other than my running a little tight on time, of all things, the only real hitch on verbal was the Sentence Correction question of doom.

I found the Sentence Correction questions to be rather hackable, more so than were the ones on many of the practice tests I had taken. All the same, it seems that in any GMAT verbal section there is at least one Sentence Correction question that is long, convoluted or somehow basically bonkers, and this CAT was no exception. I got to this CAT's Sentence Correction question of doom and fought that thing for maybe four or five minutes. I finally clicked an answer choice and then somehow read the choices again and realized I had chosen the wrong one. I chose the right one and maybe that was the key moment in verbal. I kind of buzzed through much of the rest and barely finished in time.

I guess the meditation, and preparation, worked on verbal too, because I got my scores and I can't take the GMAT again for five years.(That's GMAC's rule for anyone who scores 800 on the GMAT.)

So my plan came together, and while I guess most people don't really care to get so caught up in the GMAT, there are from my experience some takeaways that anyone can use. One of them is that there is always some improvement one can make to get a higher score. In my case, the more I looked the more I found areas of quant in which I could become more skilled. Also, Sentence Correction seemed at first to be an almost intractable issue, but I was able to come up with a reasonable, practical strategy for improving my SC skills and acing verbal. Being careful and very determined was also a huge factor, and was so key in getting correct answers, including the one to the Sentence Correction question of doom. Finally, although maybe there is some other explanation for how easy quant seemed and for my perfect accuracy on verbal, my take is that the meditation sealed the deal and allowed my energy to flow and my mind to run like clockwork so that I could finally rock the GMAT the way I wanted to.

Such an inspiring story about your devotion to get perfect score and you got it. Kudos. Its a big achievement.

if you wish to share, I am keen to know more about your meditation practice? As you say, "meditated on speed, math, efficiency, accuracy, success, clarity of vision" - how do you exactly meditate on these individual topics? I meditate but never thought about it in this way.

Thanks

Congrats on your score. And thanks for writing this post. I've been toying with the idea of using meditation to help ease my test anxiety and this post shows that it can be helpful.

All the best!

hamant.maini wrote:if you wish to share, I am keen to know more about your meditation practice? As you say, "meditated on speed, math, efficiency, accuracy, success, clarity of vision" - how do you exactly meditate on these individual topics? I meditate but never thought about it in this way.

We all have things going on semi consciously, unconsciously and subconsciously that