680 to consistently 700+ in 2 months

Before meeting Harry Duthie from GMAT Ninja, I had studied independently for over 6 months and was unable to cross my desired 700 barrier on my first exam attempt even though my 4 practice exam attempts were all in the early 700s. I had a real mental block as I felt I had done all I could and couldn’t figure out where I was going wrong. As someone who feels more naturally at ease with words than numbers, I was disheartened that I couldn’t once cross the V40 barrier in any of my practice tests. My confidence in my quantitative abilities was low and I struggled with silly errors.
Harry was instrumental in helping me get past my mental block. In particular, he helped me to reconstruct my thought process and make my exam technique much more efficient. Specifically:

Quant:
- He advocated a question answering process that helped me to almost entirely eradicate silly mistakes;
- He trained me to be much more intrusive and disciplined when it comes to my time management, providing me with confidence to bail on questions EARLY when I couldn’t figure out a path to answer a particular question;
- His bespoke worksheets on particular topics helped me to attack my weaknesses and learn from my mistakes
- Drilling me to work 15 hours a week+ helped me to internalise my question answering processes and eliminate weaknesses
- In the past, I would not always pick the most efficient path to answering questions. His guidance on certain question types (conversions, geometry and statistics in particular) helped me to save time on easier questions and set me up for success on harder questions
- A focus on methodology and discipline over “trickery”
- Fantastic advice on alleviating exam pressures/stresses and also eradicating any cobwebs/preconceptions about quantitative ability.

Verbal:
- Drilled into me to read for meaning not detail (but without missing important details!);
- Advocated using harder LSAT materials – these were a life saver for critical reasoning and reading comprehension. Going through passages/questions I got wrong/found difficult with Harry and having him continuously challenge my thought process was instrumental in improving my verbal scores
- Previously I was finishing verbal sections with 10/15 mins to go – Harry helped me to read in a more targeted fashion to fully utilise my time. Small tips like deep breaths before critical reasoning questions allowed me to concentrate on passages more
- Instilled critical reasoning question technique discipline – this was crucial. Test prep companies/books seem to advocate 1000s of different techniques for every time of critical reasoning question. Harry’s advice was simple – identify the conclusion precisely! It’s the key to any type of question and completely decluttered my mind!

As a result, I pushed my practice test scores from 700/710 to 740-760. I finally achieved my desired my 700+ score in the actual exam, achieving 710 (Q46, V41) vs 680 (Q43, V40) which massively helped me get into my dream business school, INSEAD.

What can’t be summarised about GMATNinja with just data however is how much they truly care about their students. Whether it was a query about MBA applications, stress, exam technique, interviews (before and after my GMAT sessions with Harry), Harry and Charles would go out of their way to get back to me as quickly as possible. To this day, 7 months on from my GMAT exam, they continue to stay in touch and offer their help which speaks volumes for their character.

I can’t recommend GMATNinja and Harry enough.