Journey from 660 to 730

Hi Guys,

I gave my GMAT on July 14 and scored 730 (q49 v41).
I improved from 660 (q48 v33) that I got in 2015, when I had no clue on how to crack the verbal section. I used to attempt Verbal using how it sounds and more often than not I used to get it wrong. On the quants side, I had scored 48 and knew that I can improve it with more practice.

In my pursuit to crack verbal, I discovered eGmat about a year ago and realized that there is a method to crack verbal. I took the verbal online prep to begin with but after attending a few live prep free sessions, I upgraded to live prep course. I was a major procastinator as I never got myself to sincerely prepare for the exam till Feb-Mar 2017.

I finally took up eGmat seriously in April 2017 and worked on it during the weekends. The best part about the course was that I could immediately access the live sessions to fast forward the sections as I was running short of time. I went through the entire course content in about two months spending about 7-10 hours per week largely during weekends.

I know people say that you should work with just one prep company to save conflicting approaches but I would advise against this single prep company approach. I actually used resources from three different sources and took GMAT Prep mock test to ensure that I am on track.

To put some context, I am an Indian Finance Professional with technical undergrad degrees and work 60 hour weeks in the Investment Management industry. I am listing out the resources that helped me achieve 730:

Verbal:
1. Foundation was built on solid eGmat course material
2. SC and CR was further improved using separate set of books that I got from a friend who had cracked 770!
3. Practiced only the medium difficulty and high difficulty questions from Scholaranium
4. RC practiced from Aristotle RC 99 (only medium difficulty passages)

Quant:
5. I did the basics from eGmat and practiced a little bit from the OG book
6. Data Sufficiency book of Veritas Prep - Most amazing resource that I have ever come across that explains strategies in the most beautiful manner - MUST STUDY FOR ANYONE WHO IS STRUGGLING WITH DS!
7. GMAT club tests for improving PS and DS skills by practicing only medium and high difficulty questions

Few take-aways for approaching the exam if anybody has significant time for preparation:

1. Build a strong foundation of Conceptual knowledge - I would suggest eGmat for verbal and to a certain extent for quants too but supplemented with Bunuel posts

2. Evaluate yourself using the 800 score tests (free with eGmat) to check the difficulty level and chapters where you are failing to answer correctly

3. Do focussed practice of the weak areas while simultaneously keeping in touch with the strong areas

4. Ensure that you study daily atleast in the last three weeks to the exam - I used to wake up at 6am and put in about three hours of study in the day split as below:
> (RC) An hour before leaving for office,
> (CR) About half hour while traveling,
> (Quants) Another hour post office work,
> (CR) Half hour while traveling back home,
> (SC) About an hour before calling it a day.
If you notice, I used to ensure that I go through all the subjects in a day, it helps to make your brain agile to tackle all the subjects in the actual exam. Please note that all this was happening while I had a demanding 12 hour job so you need to be kind of driven to take out time for studies.

5. Use ONLY GMAT Prep mock test in the last three weeks for evaluation of progress near the exam date. I got disastrous results when I took mocks of prep companies during my preparation even though I was confident of cracking 40 in verbal. The progress through the final month provided below:

Veritas - 18 Jun - 660 (q46 v35)
800Score - 25 Jun - 700 (q47 v38)
800Score - 26 Jun - 650 (q48 v31)

> Then purchased two exam packs of official GMAT Prep
GMAT Prep Exam Pack 1 - 1 Jul - 750 (q50 v41)
Veritas - 2 Jul - 650 (q45 V34)

> Bought Manhattan tests just to figure out if any test prep co gives any worthwhile comparison
Manhattan - 8 Jul - 650 (q42 v37)
GMAT Prep Exam Pack 2 - 9 Jul - 710 (q49 v36)

Actual GMAT - 14 Jul - 730 (q49 v41)
Coincidentally average of the two GMAT Prep mock test scores!

If you notice, all the mock tests by test prep companies gave a severely deflated result largely due to significant time management issues, which was not the case with any of the GMAT Prep mock tests.

Anyways, I used to give mock tests during weekends and study during the week according to the outcome and focus on improving my skills of solving difficult questions. I have to say that Scholaranium helped me a lot in improving my SC and CR to achieve an accuracy that I had not expected out of myself.

I also wish to thank eGmat for providing me access to GMAT club tests and question bank, which helped me improve my quants.

I would have preferred to study for a week or so because I knew I lacked dedicated practice but I had to meet the minimum hygiene levels and move onto applications.
Result - GMAT score of 730.

I hope some of you find this useful to plan your studies. Please pm me if you have any questions and I will try to address them as soon as possible (currently completely tied up with applications).

Best,
Aditya