Well Defined Strategy, Endless hours of Preparation: 650-760

I will start with a brief introduction. I graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2009, having done my undergrad and masters in Mathematics and Computing. Post that I have been working with various financial services companies in various analytics roles.

My first GMAT preparation lasted about 3 months. I took an exam date for 23rd Mar'13 and started my preparations in Dec '12. I asked my friend, who had scored a 750 to help me out, and he said it's a pretty simple exam. He will send over some material and with the Manhattan GMAT test series it should be a simple affair.
Well I took my first GMAC official test in Jan, a week after starting my preparations. - Scored a 630 (Q48, V26). A little disappointed, I started with the Manhattan books. In my opinion, The Manhattan SC book is the best of the series (of Manhattan Verbal books.) The basics of grammar are all mentioned. What's not mentioned is the approach. And as I later realized the approach is what creates the difference. GMAT does not want us to become a grammarian but it wants us to be able to frame concise sentences, which are clear in meaning and expression. Well I will talk more about it later.

First Attempt

For SC, I followed the process of splits, as professed by Manhattan tutorials. Well the process works for many but unfortunately did not work for me. I would get 50-60% of the questions correct. The accuracy would drop further while tackling the more difficult questions - OG Q Nos. 100+ . Well I tried everything but could not get the accuracy any higher. Defeated, I started to concentrate on CR.

For CR again, followed the process as mentioned in the Manhattan CR book. I would take notes while reading through the passage and then straight away jump into answer choices. The book says that writing helps in comprehension. Well its partially true but what it fails to mention that one needs to spend time comprehending and thinking about the structure of the argument before jumping into conclusions. Well I was putting in the hard yards but was not getting the results - CR accuracy was close to 60%.

For RC, the story was similar. Anyways I, I kept on chugging through the Manhattan books, completed them one by one, Started taking the mocks, consistently scoring in the early 30s in verbal. On a good day I would score a 36/37 and would touch 700 with a quant score of 50/51. My preparations were not up to the mark. The danger signals were all there; I was just not able see them. Anyways a week before my final exam, I took the second GMAC official exam and scored a 650 (Q50, V29). I was devastated; I had spent 3 months preparing for an exam and had achieved so little. I thought of cancelling my exam but since I would lose my registration fees anyways, thought might as well go and give it a shot.

Well if you have read till here, you can guess my score in the actual GMAT - It was 650 (Q50, V29). What are the odds? Right? Is your performance in your last official GMAC test the biggest predictor of your performance in the actual one? Well I will need more data to prove that but at least my second performance definitely defied that. I can see the funny side now â˜º

Ok So things learnt:
"¢ Well not every advice coming from an intelligent friend is a good one and what works for others may not work for you.
"¢ The verbal part of actual GMAT is a little different from the verbal part of Manhattan GMAT tests. I found the GMAT questions a little more tricky and conceptual than the ones in Manhattan.
"¢ I needed more help with Time Management. In the exam, I had gotten stuck in a RC passage for far too long.

So what now? I went back to the drawing board. Drew a strategy, again around Manhattan books and Manhattan tests. Deep inside I knew that there wasn't anything I would have done differently the first time and hence this strategy would not work either. (Read through my earlier post - I was really frustrated https://gmatclub.com/forum/first-attempt ... 49956.html)) Just around that time I received an invite from E-GMAT for a free of cost strategy session. I attended it and found it deeply informative. Some of the insights around timing, the importance of the last 10 questions (Which I feel are as important as the first 5), the time required to answer each question, correctly, were eye openers. I also went through some of the free lessons and found them pretty neat. The best part was all these lessons were in the form of Audio/Video format, which make learning fun/easy. Well I was looking for an alternate preparation methodology and this was it. I took the GMAT verbal course.

Second Attempt
The entire preparation was designed around E-GMAT course. Well here is how I prepared the second time around.
"¢ Since the lessons are in the Audio/Visual format, even after spending 12 hours in office, you can easily spend an hour everyday on the lessons. I tried to spend at least 1 hour everyday on E-GMAT. I do not remember having taken a break for more than a couple of days during my 5 months of preparation.
"¢ As I mentioned earlier, the approach is very important. You might know all the grammar rules but you may get the simplest SC question wrong if you do not have the right approach. This is where E-GMAT's "Meaning Based" approach comes in pretty handy. In my second attempt on GMAT - I clearly remember 3 questions, which had multiple grammatically correct choices and the only way to identify the answer was basis the meaning.
"¢ On the same lines, for CR - pre-thinking helps so much. I have read in a number of debriefs, people who have done well in the CR portion of GMAT have spent some time pre thinking their answers. This again is the methodology that E-GMAT proposes and it works like a charm. I would practice on Grockit wand would be repeatedly asked how do I get those 16 and 32 point questions correct, and my answer would be "Pre-Thinking".
"¢ For RC, even though there are different kinds of questions, every question will seem simple if you comprehend the passage well. And there is the issue of time management. Hence the lesson on "Reading Strategies" becomes so very important. These strategies help in comprehending the passage better. Though, the strategies seem very simple and straight- forward, the important thing is their implementation. To achieve that, I re-did all the reading comprehension passages on OG-12 and OG-13, trying to instill the strategies in my reading.
"¢ To complement that, I would also read an article every couple of days, on "The Economist", trying to summarize the story in my mind once done. In the beginning, the reading becomes slow, but slowly as you practice more and more, you will get that speed back and with the improved comprehension the accuracy in the RC question improves.
"¢ One major difference this time was, I stopped taking notes altogether. This was intentionally done to save time. I challenged myself to comprehend every CR question and every RC passage without writing a thing. Though I would take a little longer to understand the argument structure or the passage, the understanding of the passage/argument would help me breeze through the questions.

Well the methodology is done. Let's get to the results part.

"¢ I gave my first mock (With the new strategy), in the month of September. I scored a 660. Not impressive. Well that was my first impression. Let me tell you the entire story. I had scored a 46 in Quant. And 34 in Verbal. The only difference was, in the first 25 Verbal questions I had got 21 correct, an accuracy of more than 80%. After that, I had run out of time, attempting last 15 questions in about 10 minutes. Well that was different, that was nice. Now all I had to do was practice.
"¢ Practice I did. I solved the all the OG12, OG13, OG Verbal review questions again. Diligently I would solve the GMAT question of the day and Kaplan question of the day. I would make myself feel guilty if I missed them for a few days.
"¢ While practicing, I would not try and hasten through the questions. I would try and attempt every question in the right way, so that I could learn the approach. Slowly, my speed improved. I started comprehending a CR/RC question without jotting anything down. Also I started discarding OFS answer choices without much trouble. I was able to see through the mistakes in a SC question much easily.
"¢ I took the next mock 3 weeks later and I scored a 720 (Q46,V42). Well I was happy. I was there. I just wanted to be doubly sure. So I gave another mock 1 week later and scored a 720 again. (Q44, V44). I registered for the GMAT for the 9th Nov'13.
"¢ Now I started focusing on Quant, as I knew if I scored a 50, there was a good chance I would end up with a good score. Well Quant has always been my good friend. A couple of weeks of preparation and I am ready. Well this time it was a little different. Because of the lack of practice I kept on committing silly mistakes. A week before my official GMAT exam took the GMAC test and scored a 720, V38,Q49. Disappointed, I looked into my mistakes and made a few minor adjustments in my strategy. Revised SC and went through all the questions I had gotten wrong.

Now the finale:
"¢ The exam was on Saturday. I had taken Thursday and Friday off for some final preparation. It was a hectic week and I remember working till 11 on Wednesday. I spent Thursday and Friday revising some quant questions.
"¢ Well the D-Day arrived. Fortunately had a good night's sleep. Had the exam from 5. Reached the Exam - Center, got over with the photograph, iris scan, etc. Finally got started with the exam.
"¢ The IR section was as usual difficult. Got started with the Quant. Well there were a few difficult questions and that was a good sign that I was doing well. Quant ended and I had done relatively well (At least that's what I thought). Before the Verbal section, I said to myself, "I have prepared all this while for this, I will trust my preparation and give my best". It started with an easy SC question and then with back-to-back 4 CR questions. I think I got them all right. After that It became a little tricky. The questions seemed easy. I had this ache in my stomach, was I getting them wrong? Anyways this continued till the end. After those nervous "Next" icons. finally the score arrived - 760 (Q49,V45). Satisfied, relieved, happy, ecstatic,

What did I learn?
"¢ To succeed, firstly you need a process, which works. In my case it was E-GMAT.. I had read stories about Non Natives who had done well and after having first hand experience of the course had no doubt about the quality.
"¢ Secondly you need to trust the process and keep working on it. Hard work does pay if mixed with a smart technique.
"¢ One needs to learn from mistakes. One needs to make those minor changes at every step, keep tuning those techniques.
"¢ In the end, trust your preparation. You will do well.

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