Preparing for the GMAT has been a loooong & an arduous
journey. However, that moment when you anxiously stare at the screen, which
unassumingly displays your score, and see a 750+, is worth all the sweat,
stress and sacrifices. If you want to feel that surge of euphoria throughout
your body and want to punch the air as Nadal does after crushing his opponent, study;
and by ‘study’ I do not mean ‘slog’ in any of the parallel universes.

Just like everyone else, I started with the ambition of
getting a 700+ score. I gave myself three full months starting mid-August 2012.
I started attending lectures at a local GMAT coaching institute. After three
weeks, I found that I was comfortable with Quant but needed to develop a
GMAT-specific approach for the Verbal section. I left a query on the CrackVerbal
website and Shreekala enlightened me with certain hard truths about the
MBA-application process in general and the GMAT in particular. I was sent links
to certain free lectures. I found that Arun’s insights on GMAT-verbal were exactly
what I was looking for. Combined with OG, these lectures will help you develop
the right mindset for the GMAT.

Therefore, twenty days before my test date, I was in a
comfortable position in terms of my preparedness and was confident about
crossing the 700 barrier. I had also taken a leave of absence from work for a
fortnight before the D Day so as to polish my test-taking skills. However, due
to certain unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to utilize this valuable time
in the right manner and was not able to focus. I ended up with a 660(Q50 V30).

Obviously, I wasn’t happy. I decided to take the exam again
within a month during which I simply concentrated on getting the right mind set
(I’ve talked about this later in this debrief) for the verbal section and
polishing all the approaches that I had cultivated. Now, I spent more time on
analyzing the wrong questions than on practicing new questions. Gowri from the
CrackVerbal team, with her signature statement ‘Happy to help J’, was very active in
addressing the doubts I had with difficult questions. A week from the test
date, my confidence-level notwithstanding, I was still in doubt about the
proximity of my 2^nd attempt to my 1^st attempt. The last
week before the exam was spent attending a wedding, an engagement ceremony in
another city and a visit to a client in another state.

My goal was to get 750+ in my second attempt at GMAT on 29^th
Dec 2012. I scored 760(Q50 V41).

I am thankful to the CrackVerbal team for being an integral
part of my preparation.

Groundwork:

To start with, collate all the material that you plan to refer.

Estimate of the amount of time you would need to go through
it.  

Make a plan and come up with a date by the end of which you
should be able to finish referring all the study-material you have.

Set a date roughly a month after that to give yourself time
to take sectional tests and full-length mock tests. Assume that this would be
the date you would take your GMAT and start working.

Set weekly targets for yourself and work on one area at a
time initially – if you are practicing quant, don’t think about verbal; if you
are working on SC, stop worrying about CR or RC.

After a few days, revisit your original plan. If you find
yourself on track and are expected to continue working at the same pace, register
for the GMAT on mba.com. Registering for the exam will automatically give you
the kind of seriousness that you need to have.

If you find that you are unable to keep up with your plan,
relax! Take a day or two off. Set realistic targets now and plan again.

Once you think you have referred enough material in all
these areas, start taking up sectional tests and time yourself. During this
phase, try and schedule quant and verbal sectional tests back-to-back. You need
to get into the groove for this – you should not have to look at the timer
after each question. Dissect your sectional tests. Get into the nitty-gritty’s
of why you got a certain question wrong – was it because of a wrong
approach,  a wrong interpretation, less
time, unknown area, etc. You need to explain yourself where you went wrong. Analyzing
the questions is as important as practicing them. You should also go through
the questions you get right. Just make sure that you got them right because you
were able to comprehend them, apply a certain strategy/approach/method of
reasoning, eliminate the rest of the wrong answer options and come up with the right
answer and not because you ‘felt’ it was the right answer. Arun could not have
stressed this more in his lectures.

There would be times when you’ll be tired, bored, fed up
with studies and end up cursing yourself.

Relax… just look at the light at the end of the tunnel; imagine
the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; imagine the wonderful world outside
this prison… All of that is waiting for you at the other side.

During such times, try and spend time with people sailing in
the same boat. Visit forums. The crack verbal forum is a good place to hang
out. You can post all the questions that you get wrong here and expect answer
within a couple of days from Gowri. Also check out GmatClub. You’ll find hordes
of other prisoners just like you. Moreover, these forums are full of difficult
questions which people would have posted. Try and solve them and provide an
explanation on the forum. This is one of THE best ways of refining your thought
process pertaining to a question. When you are explaining your answer to
unknown people on the internet, you’ll try to be as clear and precise as
possible since you want to prove that you are awesome 😉

Now, when you think you are more or less done with all the
subject areas, take up a mock test from gmatprep. This test is to be taken very
seriously. If you did well, don’t assume that you are good to go, and if you
didn’t do well, you know where you stand. In either case, you’ll have to
dissect the test to understand what you need to work on. In the next few days
work on those areas. While you do this, also spend a few minutes daily to take
up a few questions from your comfort areas – do not assume that you don’t need
to practice them.  

More on not taking your comfort areas for granted- http://www.crackverbal.com/your-%E2%80%9Csputnik-moment%E2%80%9D-on-the-gmat

After a few days, you should take up the second mock test
from gmatprep. This test will more or less be an indicator of what you will
score on the actual test. Remember that the standard deviation on the GMAT is +
30 – this means if you score 720 on gmatprep2, u could end up with a 690 or 750
on the actual test. I would suggest you take this test at least 5-6 days before
your actual GMAT so that you have some time to calm down, let your brain
segregate and organize all that information inside your head and be prepared
for any kind of contingency. In simpler words, you need to chill-out!!

Gmat –

Well, by now, you already know that you’ll be spending one
full hour on an essay and the IR section before beginning the core sections – Quant
and Verbal. Consider this hour an ice-breaker. During this time, your brain
automatically starts focusing on the test and forgets everything else. By the
time you are about to start the core sections, you are already zoned out and
oblivious to the world outside.

Use your breaks. Splash water on your face, look at your
reflection in the mirror confidently, point a finger and say things to
yourself. Imagine you are a boxer inside the ring fighting your opponent and
giving the bookies a hard time. A round has just ended and you are now seated
in a corner and your coach is giving you accolades for your performance in the
first round, shouting at you asking you to have faith in yourself and go out
there and win the second round as well. Well, say such things to yourself, of
course not conspicuously, while looking into that mirror. It works!

Quant: You should
be having fun if you have not left out more than one area which you found
difficult. Try saving seconds on questions that are from your comfort zone. Don’t
unnecessarily spend time verifying your answer more than once. You’ll
eventually end up saving a few minutes for questions that are tough and require
you to check for all possibilities. Or as Arun would put it:  If you are 90% sure about an answer choice,
you are good to make that choice. If you are 100% sure, you have perhaps spent
too much of time on that question. 

Break
2: Wounded? Bleeding? Bored? zoned out of
the universe? feeling sleepy or feel like listening to Pink Floyd??? Let the boxing-coach
slap you, pour a bottle of water on your head and say to you that this is the
final round, the final frontier.

Verbal:

One question at a time.

SC:

Steps to approach a question in SC, as per
one of Arun’s lectures:

(i) Eliminate answer options using basic
grammar: sva, pronoun, parallelism, modifiers, comparison.

(ii) Eliminate using rules for tenses,
idioms, active-passive

(iii) Eliminate for clarity and word
meaning

I would suggest that these steps are internalized by
practicing so that you need not consciously try and recall them while you are
taking the exam.

So what if there are tens of idioms to
remember. Humbly accept that you will NOT be able to remember all of them. The
good news is questions on GMAT are more likely to have multiple errors and
hence you don’t need to spend time thinking whether ‘native to’ is appropriate
or ‘native of’. Just skip that bit and look for other errors in such sentences
and you’ll eventually get to the right answer. Knowledge of idioms, however,
will help you getting to your answer faster.

CR:

Steps to approach a question in CR, as
mentioned in one of Arun’s lectures:

(i) Identify the Question Type and Task

(ii) Read the Argument and Extract Necessary Information

(iii) Formulate an answer to the Question

(iv) Eliminate answer choices that are obviously wrong

(v) Compare remaining choices

Remember: GMAT will be testing you more on your reasoning
than on your knowledge of English. All official questions are designed such
that we, non-native English speakers, would not be at much disadvantage. Hence,
practice questions only from official guide or from gmatprep. Dig out old
gmatprep questions from forums or, better, ask CrackVerbal to give you a
document which has hundreds of such questions.

RC:

Well, IMO RC’s are simply long CR’s. You are given
information and you’ll be asked questions about it. However, there would be no
specific question type associated with RC’s except for the ones that ask you to
identify the ‘main point of the author’.

There is only one way to move forward – read the passage. Avoid
reading the questions and then looking for answers in the passage. You would not
get any bonus points if the passage belongs to any of your comfort areas. So
what if the passage is on “the adoption of western classical music by Eastern
musicians during the era of King Louis XVI”. Even if you are a classical
musician and know its history inside out your answers have to be strictly based
on the passage. You cannot give an answer based your own knowledge of the
subject, else you might mess up.

Going back to approach – I had devised my own approach for
tackling RC’s.

I used to converse with them. Imagine you are sitting at a
table in a restaurant somewhere in, say, Mexico and this gentleman arrives and
starts a conversation with you. Suppose he tells you –

“Linda Kerber argued in the mid-

1980’s that after the American Revolution

(1775-1783), an ideology of “republican

Line motherhood”
resulted in a surge of edu-

(5) cational
opportunities for women in the

United States.”

You: Oh! I didn’t know that, tell me more…

Kerber maintained that

the leaders of the new nation wanted

women to be educated in order to raise

politically virtuous sons. A virtuous citi-

(10) zenry
was considered essential to the

success of the country’s republican form

of government; virtue was to be instilled

not only by churches and schools, but

by families, where the mother’s role

(15) was
crucial.

You: So Kerber in a way was trying to promote the role of women
in instilling virtues. Hmm.. interesting(although it might not be as
interesting as the address of Agent Smith to Morpheus while the latter was tied
to a chair and the former was comparing human beings to viruses, you simply
will have to listen to this RC). So how was it received by the public? 

And so on..

After each para, just pause for a bit, summarize what all
information is given. Note it down on a piece of paper. These notes should be
as precise as possible.

You: so basically, in the first para you are saying bla bla
bla..

<repeat this for the rest of the paragraphs>

I found this approach to be good for such passages which did not
interest me at all.

For the passages which were from areas familiar to me, I would
simply read the passage without complicating things.

I used to try applying the above-mentioned approach while
reading editorials from ‘The Hindu’.

The
‘Right mindset’ which I made a fuss about in the beginning:

One-thing-at-a-time was my ‘mantra’ of
sorts.

While solving the verbal section, DO NOT
waste time thinking whether this question is easier/harder than the previous one
or why haven’t you seen any bold-faced questions yet(for the record, I did not see
any on my test),etc. In any case, your prime focus is to get the current
question right. That’s it. It is just not worth your priceless time and energy.

Focus, focus like a laser…

Distribute your mistakes.

http://www.crackverbal.com/gmat-scoring-algorithm-demystified-partly/

Stamina was not a problem for me. I focused
on channelizing all my energies to the question at hand and not on thinking
about how many more to go, how far I have come, have I made it large :p etc.

Misc:

– While you are preparing/taking sectional
tests, try not to be distracted by your cell-phone and/or the internet.

– If you are a working professional, try
not to do injustice to your work by studying at office except during breaks.

-Keep your mind and body healthy by good
food and some exercise.

– Occasionally, take a day or two off from
studies. This will help your brain retain information better.

– Studying regularly for a couple of hours rather
than for five hours during the weekend is always better.

-Schedule your gmat such that you have
enough time to work on your applications and/or taking the gmat again in case
you are not satisfied with your score.

– http://poetsandquants.com/2012/12/21/the-mistake-high-gmat-scorers-make/

– http://poetsandquants.com/2012/10/01/why-you-dont-deserve-a-700-on-your-gmat/

That’s IT, pretty much, for now at least…!

The GMAT is just one of the steps towards getting into your ‘dream’
school. The next few steps are equally or even more challenging!

p.s.  Arun is the Gandalf for
all us Frodo’s out there. J

Thank you Sachin!

To address your questions:

Hi Kaushal,

Congratulations !! That a wonderful score .. and a great de-brief ..

How did you prepare for the test between the first time and the next attempt ?
What did you do same/different that helped you ?

I am in a similar situation –  I took the GMAT a month ago and scored a 660 although I was consistently scoring above 700 in my preps.
So, I am back to my books and studying again and trying to build my stamina and working on how to keep my cool under time pressure.

Thanks,
Subhankar

First of all Congrats Kaushal for getting such a great score, can i request to schedule a visit to CV and share your experience with the fellow mortals, like me, who are struggling to get a decent score.

Thanks Bhupathi for your warm wishes..

Kaushal,

Thanks for your reply.

1. My mortal fear is Quant. I scored a 46 (only) and a 35 in verbal in my first attempt. I always seem to run out of time on quant.
I am trying to solve and reflect on the questions that I am getting wrong, as you mentioned and then trying to see if it was the concept that i did not know, or did i fail to apply it under time pressure or something else ..

How did you prepare for your quant ? You got  a 50 in both the attempts  ..

2. I was very nervous on the test day and probably a few extra sips of red bull did the rest .. Also, I misjudged the break and took a few minutes extra and that added to the pressure ..

For now, I plan to take all the 6 mock tests of MGMAT with AWA and IR and build up my stamina  and when I feel ready, book a date and take the test again and hope for the best ..

regards,
Subhankar

Its ok Kaushal in that case and my request was based on the assumption that you are in Bangalore. Wish you all the best for your next stage of the application process.

1)