Tiger has roared (620 -> 700)

Here you go:

First of all I would like to thank everyone on this forum / community that have helped along this journey:

As you all must have guessed from the title of my post this was my second attempt, the first one was a very poor score of 620.

Story of the First attempt :

I started preparing for GMAT in July of 2009, but the real preparation began around Nov 09. I took my first Practice test around new year and got a poor score of 580. Score was pathetic and I knew after giving the test that self study is not going to work out for me. I Started looking for online courses, as I could not attend classroom ccourse due to work related issues. Narrowed down to knewton. I gave their exam to get a baseline score, got a 650. Their guarantee of 50 point increase really sealed the deal for me and I joined the course. Along with the course I kept on giving MGMAT tests also just to see how I was progressing, my score was constantly going up started from 580 and went upto 690 on MGMAT tests. I also gave all the knewton exams, but never scored more than 650 on their exams. After completing the course I gave gmatprep multiple times got scores ranging from 620 to 710, but only broke the 700 mark onces that was the 710, seeing the 700+ score on the GmatPrep, I went ahead and booked my test date and rest is history, a score of 620

My feedback on Knewton, its a very good course but only for those who have strong basics.

Story of the Second Attempt :
Beaten up by the first attempt I decided to do a thorough review of all courses that were available for GMAT. My focus was on the courses that are good for verbal score improvement. Finally narrowed it down to MGMAT and VeritasPrep, but decided to go with MGMAT as their classes fit perfectly in my weekly schedule.

Couple of things that I decided that I would do in the second attempt that I avoided in first
- Go out with friends.
- Watch all good movies.
- Develop some kind of sports activity, I started running and played tennis, racquetball.

MGAMT Course :

I attended all the 9 classes and did all the assignments. I read the MGMAT SC book thoroughly from Start to Finish, made notes. Read all the Quant books. All this heavy lifting I completed by June and started giving practice exams through out July/Aug. One more thing that I did was not to book the test date and decided that once I consistently start getting 700+ score then only I will get the test date.

MGMAT SCORES:
Test
1=690
2=680
3=670
4=730
5=700
6=680

Gmat Prep
1=690
2=710
Gmat Prep (reinstall, but had no repeats in Quant and very few repeats in verbal.)
1=750

After the 750 score I was itching to go for the real deal, so after giving the GmatPrep (750), this was over the last weekend (08/15), I started looking for the next best test date, 18th Aug popped up close to my house. I jumped on the date and registered for the exam. This left me with 2 days of time to refresh formulas, basics etc. On Monday night looked at all the quant formulas and Tuesday looked at all SC fundamentals.

What was different from the last attempt?
- I did not panic at all.
- Was very confident

Some Pointers :

- Be cool, dont panic
- Work on basics.
- practice a lot
- Do OG, again and again

On the test:

Quant was very similar to OG, I would say if you 45-49 in MGMAT dont worry about quant, you will end up getting 48-50 on real thing. I was cruising thru quant till I hit DS question that I thought I had to solve and spent 5 minutes on it but still ended the exam with 8 seconds to spare.

Verbal
My arch nemesis , verbal started of pretty bad with SC question that I spent 4 minutes on and I think still might have got it wrong.

SC

If you have done MGMAT SC book thoroughly you will do good on SC section, just dont make stupid mistake, GMAT has lot of trap answers that you will learan about as you practice more and more questions.

CR
During 3rd or 4th MGMAT exam, I had an aha! moment for CR, what I started doing was to re-phrase the CR's in my native language and after that CR's were a child's play for me. I dont know if this strategy will work for you or not but if you get a chance try it out.

RC
If you are ok in verbal, this can make and break your score. Every time I reviewed my mock exams I saw too many RC questions wrong and decided to develop a strategy to tackle this problem. What I did was to write down quick notes for each paragraph of RC, writing down helped me remember or retain stuff for longer time in my head. I actually never referred my notes for RC in answering the question. The notes were simple to help me index stuff in my head for quick retrieval.

So thats my story, I wish all those who have to appear in the test a very best of luck.

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