From 610 to 760 in GMAT With Hope and Keeping It Simple

                                                                                                                                               Author: Advait                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

GMAT Success story: From 610 to 760

2017: Beginner’s luck fallacy

A bit about my background. I belong to a very rare, totally non-competitive pool of demographics – Indian, Male, Engineers (sigh!). Inspired by Robert Frost, I decided to take the road not taken – pursue an MBA (such intelligence, much wow!). If you would have asked me why an MBA then, I would have recited commandment#2 from Life of Indian Engineers – which is to get an MBA for the sake of it.

I was working as a data scientist back then, and I loved my job, but as they say, you gotta respect the commandments! (source: Society of Overachieving Indian Engineers!)
Anyway, I enrolled for a coaching class in India then. In all fairness, I don’t think I was hungry enough for a 750+ score back then, and did not put half the effort I should have.

Result – Attempt 1 – Feb 2017 – 660 (Q49, V31).

This has nothing to do with the classes, it is purely my lack of sincerity which led to this score.
Here’s a BIG mistake which I did then. Instead of persisting with the flow of my prep, I played the classic excuse card – cursing my fate! I parked the thought of doing my MBA for a while

2018-19: Going through the motions

Fortunately or unfortunately, life did take some drastic turns.
Fortunate part: During this period, I progressed well through my career, got an opportunity to move internationally, started working for a leading tech company (yup, FAANG branded!) and things looked bright.
Unfortunate part: My MBA plans took a back seat (mind you, my reason for doing an MBA was still commandment #2 then). I remember registering for GMAT thrice in this period. I did not visit the test center twice, because of the workload (I am a very generous person in life btw!). The third time, I started my prep, booked the date, and chalked out a plan to work backwards according to the date. One week into my studies, I got sucked into a crazy work assignment, and could not do justice to my GMAT prep. I was too embarrassed to forfeit the attempt then, and visited the test center, as if there was a lottery draw happening.

Result – Attempt 2 – Oct 2019 – 610.

For all practical purposes, this should not be counted as an attempt. It still didn’t stop me from cursing my fate though 🙂

2020: Pursuit of excellence

Before I talk about 2020, a bit of context. Although I am working for a leading tech company, I don’t think the job is a right fit for me. I enjoyed the work environment, the travel opportunities, and the free meals (yup – spoilt for life) at work, but the work per se did not excite me. This was very unlike the 2017 me. When the 2020 pandemic hit, and the travels and free meals stopped, coupled with some personal life events, I suffered from existential crisis. This pandemic really gave me an opportunity to pause in life and think what I should be doing in the next 10-20 years. And I did find the answer, and that was my WHY for doing an MBA! Now, I badly wanted to pursue this long lost dream, and was willing to do whatever it takes. By now, I had a decent idea about which courses to refer (more on this later). I was prepared for the grind this time. Rather than cursing, I was determined on deciding my fate this time!

The weight of expectations

I put in the effort, spent 2-3 hours every day for 2.5 months preparing, and that reflected in my mock scores. Scoring in 740s and 750s in GMAT Prep tests gave me the confidence.
Having thought I was well prepared, I went into the test with this confidence. The pressure of previous attempts played its part though.
I attempted verbal first, since I thought I can tackle quant with ease later. SC was my strength, but the very first question baffled me. The dent in confidence remained throughout the test, even in quant.

Result – Attempt 3 – Aug 2020 – 700(Q49, V35).

Crossed the 700 barrier, but courtesy Society of Overachieving Indian Engineers, this score would have not take me to the schools I was aiming. This well and truly hurt. I drank till 2 am that night (my Indian friends can probably share a laugh on the Hindi translation).

Once bitten, twice mauled

I just considered the previous attempt to be a bad day at office, and took the next date 3 weeks later. But I changed my strategy post that. Decided to go ahead with quant. I had almost exhausted the resources then, so I just kept attempting mocks every alternate day (retrospectively, this was a poor idea). Went to the exam center, with the same confidence, and with the same pressure. I went extra cautious on quant, which impacted my later half of quant. Disappointed with my performance, I fared poorly on verbal too.

Result – Attempt 4 – Sep 2020 – 680(Q49, V34).

This was it! I felt my fate was asking me to approach Seema aunty for Indian Matchmaking Season 2 instead!

Keep it simple, silly!

Dreaded by my fate’s hints, I took a break from GMAT for a couple of weeks. The whole journey had taken a mental toll by now. I decided not to attach so much importance to GMAT (worst case, apply with a 700 score!). I resumed my workouts, and picked up tennis as a new hobby (one of the few allowable sports in lockdown). I studied for 30-45 mins daily post that for 4 weeks, giving mocks on weekends, and decided to give the exam online this time (just to test my hypothesis whether the test center was cursed!). The only change I did here was practice humanities and history passages over the 4 weeks.
I went into the exam without any baggage. No overthinking, no fuss. Additionally, I was aware that there is no break between Quant and Verbal, so I decided to pace accordingly. Managed to finish Quant 5 mins prior, and verbal 2 mins prior to the end!
I was happy with my performance, but did not keep high expectations this time. Simply waited for the score, which I received post 2 days.

Result – Attempt 5 – Oct 2020 – 760(Q50, V41).

FINALLY! My watch had ended. I would be lying if I said that tears did not well up in my eyes. 25th October will remain a memorable day.
I drank till 2 am that night too, albeit for completely different reasons!

Study prep strategy

Sharing what worked for me!

Quant

PS: I think my views would have an engineering bias, but I found this section to be the easiest. My advice to fellow aspirants would be to prepare well to make this section your strength. I had a decent quant base, which I strengthened using GMAT Club Quant book. For areas that were my weaknesses (PnC and Probability), I subscribed to Target Test Prep for a month. For someone who wants to learn all the basics, ScottTargetTestPrep has done an amazing job in building such a comprehensive product. I had to optimize for time, and my verbal needed more focus, but I can vouch for TTP in terms of quality.

DS: Hands down GMAT Club tests FTW! ‘Bunuel is a genius’ is a fact, not a claim! The kind of questions prepared are so much fun. They may not be the hardest, but they introduce traps which are very similar to what GMAT does. My brain got trained to look out for such traps post practising GMAT Club tests.

Verbal

I had done enough research to realize that for a non-native English speaker, e-GMAT was the best choice, so went ahead with the same. Fair to say, I was not disappointed. P.S. General thumb rule to follow across verbal – Always eliminate 4 wrong choices than selecting 1 right choice. Etch this fact in your brains!

SC: This is e-GMAT ‘s USP IMO. The depth and width of concepts that they cover is amazing, and I got clarity in the SC concepts. But on the higher difficulty level questions, this would have eliminated only 3 options. This is where the meaning based approach helped me. Always gauge the sentence by the meaning / logic it wants to convey, and then look for the grammatical errors in the sentence. This will reap dividends. I complemented my SC prep with GMATNinja ‘s videos on YouTube, and damn, I have since become a fan of you Sir.

CR: I definitely benefitted from e-GMAT ‘s 3 stage approach. Identifying premises and attacking the conclusion keeping premises in mind by pre-thinking helped a lot. I complemented this with Powerscore CR bible to perfect my CR as much as possible

RC: Blessed are the souls who took reading as an early habit! I, for one, was among the unfortunate ones who chose our fate to suffer on RC because of lack of reading. I wish I could tell you there is a magic formula, but there really isn’t! Yes, full marks to e-GMAT in simplifying RC concepts. But IMO, RC is just about practice. The answers are already with you in form of the passage. You have to be focused to be attentive, and be present throughout the passage. I think I benefitted in the last 4 weeks by practising 3-4 passages daily from humanities and history.

I found e-GMAT ‘s Scholaranium tool to be really valuable as well. It covers a good mix of easy to difficult questions, and allows you to test your skills accordingly. It helped me track my performance as well and gave me confidence that I was progressing in the right direction.

Special callout for Nava from e-GMAT when I reached out to them seeking help post my two failures in 2020. The level of detailed ESR analysis and recommendations provided by him was commendable.

Mock Tests:

If you want to gauge your performance and estimate your true score, no other test prep company can answer that apart from GMAT Prep. Highly recommend you to take all 6 tests from GMAT Prep. Apart from this, use either of the options among Manhattan, Veritas, or Experts’ Global only for practice purposes. Each company has its own pros and cons when you compare on 3 parameters: Level of quant, level of verbal, score evaluation. I tried these 3 over the last 4 years, and do not have any strong preference (Maybe would suggest Veritas if you want to practice tough verbal questions)

Final few words:

As for me, the journey is far from over. Bracing myself for R2 applications. Hopefully things go well. I have a huge decision to make in terms of choosing US vs European schools for my MBA. I am sure I will be using this forum to the fullest!

As for final tip for fellow GMAT takers, it is always good to aim for excellence, but from my personal experience, GMAT may be a part of your life for a while, but do not make it your life! And if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying (8 times to be precise!). Because as they say,
‘Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies!’