My GMAT Debrief

I started my GMAT preparation in June 2021. Before beginning my preparation, I was in doubt about subscribing to any online course for GMAT because being an engineer, I was good enough in Quant and only needed more self practice, and being an ICSE student in 10th standard and pretty good in English, I thought any online course can’t teach me anything extra and only practicing more questions is what is going to get me through. So I bought the GMAT Official Guide 2022 and practiced each and every question, even revised my mistakes and revisited every wrong question. When I had completed the OG 22, I thought of appearing the first two official tests from mba.com. Scored pretty well in both with a 680 and 700 and gained more confidence. So I planned on appearing all the tests from the online test series of Manhattan and practiced questions side by side from GMAT Club from topics on which I committed most of the mistakes. I also had some study material for verbal from which I studied selected topics which I was not good at. As usual Quant section of the test series was very tough and the panicked me started emphasizing more on Quant and less on Verbal. Also, scores in verbal were okay (V 33- 34).
When I saw that I had gained much confidence, I appeared for the GMAT in October 2021. Scored a 650 with Q50 and a V28! Could not believe the score. Thought how on Earth could I go so wrong in Verbal ! Back that evening when I sat back and pondered on my preparation, I realized I had only gone through and understood the study material for verbal but I never learnt how to apply that learnt knowledge in avoiding mistakes. So then I decided to appear for the GMAT once again, now with proper coaching in verbal. At that time, E-gmat came to my rescue. The questions I was asked in my consultation call were whether I got confused with the final two answer choices after applying process of elimination, also whether I understood the meaning before moving to the answer choices. My answers to the questions were yes and no respectively. I realized those were my real problems. As I had only one month more at hand before the application deadlines I was offered a one-month E-GMAT course and immediately a mentor was assigned to me. I would say DJ was very patient with me and understanding, guiding me at every step and telling me what next to do. Also, the course and its modules were very informative. By going through the meaning-based approach and first finding errors in the original sentence and then moving to the answer choices, I started to actually feel that I was improving in sentence correction. Also, pre-thinking in critical reasoning and summarizing in reading comprehension were the tools that reduced my time taken on each question. Also, the emphasis on maintaining an error log really helped me focus on my mistakes. The study plan was extensive but by studying diligently I started getting more and more confident in verbal. After completing the module, I appeared again for the GMAT and this time I could score a 690 with a verbal improvement to V34.
With this, I realized that only knowing stuff is not important. Having a proper strategy and the right approach to solve the questions in the GMAT pattern is equally important.