2 year long journey to 710 - Thank you eGMAT!

After my third attempt in Jan 2021, my confidence was at its lowest and a 700+ score only seemed like a distant dream. This was until I met Dhananjay (DJ) who completely changed my outlook towards the exam.

In our first call, he broke everything down for me from my ESR analysis and identified my gaps - RC was a weak area, there were some process gaps in SC and issues in quant which were collectively affecting my score. In addition to this, he also pointed out how my habit of not letting go of questions was keeping me away from achieving my target score.

Since I had gone through the egmat course for verbal earlier, he did not ask me to go through everything again but rather made small achievable goals for me.

I started with quant, as egmat launched its quant 2.0 course right around the time I started my prep. This was a total game changer. The course is extremely exhaustive and teaches you all the concepts you need to know along with the RIGHT PROCESS you should follow, which is key and something I didn't pay attention to earlier. I immediately began looking at my mistakes in quant in a different way - I could identify what step I made the mistake at - translation, inference, constraint, visualisation, simplification etc.
After finishing each block in quant, I would update DJ and share my error log with him and he would send me an analysis and detailed next steps.

For verbal, egmat taught me way more than just concepts:
- importance of meaning in SC
- visualization and prethinking in CR
- reading slowly by applying learnings from master comprehension in RC and making para summaries

One difference in my prep this time around was the emphasis on error logs - both for quant and for verbal. I learnt that it's okay to make mistakes, but not to make the same mistake twice. In all my previous attempts, I was crazily chasing accuracy and was doing questions after questions. It didn't take me anywhere and I was stuck at 680-690.
Making a concrete error log and focusing on my mistakes is what took me to 710! Another helpful strategy was to really learn the art of letting go of questions, which is where DJ helped.

Key takeaways:
- Follow the egmat plan exactly as prescribed
- If you don't understand a concept, don't rush through and move to the next one. Understand it completely before moving forward.
- Make error logs! They are supremely helpful
- Solving 100s of questions wont help, doing them right would
- Learn to let go of questions if you too are someone who struggles with timing

Lastly, I want to take this opportunity to highlight that this won't have been possible without DJ - the first call he had with me to analyse my ESR and share an action plan and the countless videos and emails he shared with me analysing all my mistakes, timing, scholaranium stats!