GMAT 770 Debrief / 23F

Q50 V44 IR 8 AWA 6/6 (GMAT offline)

Since a lot of people have been reaching out to ask about how to prep/tips/my GMAT experience, I thought I’d pen this down as a starting point of reference.

Disclaimer: I am no expert on the subject, I merely speak from the POV of someone who has been through the process and got a decent score.

Context
I am an IIT Delhi graduate (batch of 2019), with a degree in Chemical Engineering. I took CAT in 2018 and 2020 (simply because I wasn’t sure about my career trajectory back then) and got a %tile of 99.83 and 99.57 respectively. Studying for IITJEE, for my courses at IIT and for CAT both times gave me a pretty good starting point for GMAT Quant. As a result, my GMAT prep was focussed more on Verbal than Quant.

Duration of prep
Working a full time consulting job, I took a 10 day leave to prep for GMAT. Even though I intended to study on the weekends prior to this 10-day period, that never panned out as weekends are the only time I can catch up on my household chores. I found these 10 days to be sufficient for the prep.

Study resources

• I got my hands on mainly 2 books — the Original Guide (called OG hereon) and the Manhattan subject guides.
• Apart from this, I used the official mocks and GMAT club questions
• r/GMAT was a great source for getting to know other people’s experiences

Mock 0
I took an official practice test as a diagnostic test to assess my level in various topics, and familiarise myself with the platform/format early on. I recommend a thorough analysis of all incorrectly answered questions to identify your weak and strong areas and prioritise your time accordingly. While the GMAT website gives you answers, it doesn’t give you the solutions. So I looked up GMATClub for those, where many many helpful people have answered these questions and many more! :)

Verbal
Sentence Correction :- Mainly referred to Manhattan verbal guides for this section. They explain every rule pretty well, with examples and practice questions. I found OG to be less helpful in this section as it was extremely complicated to read. However, I do recommend practice questions from OG once you have completed Manhattan.

Critical Reasoning :- For this section, I found OG to be the most helpful, as the questions were very close to the actual GMAT exam.

RC :- Mostly practiced questions in the official mocks (of which I took 5!!!). I did refer to Manhattan to understand the strategies for reading through passages (e.g. skipping through examples, technical terms) so I do highly recommend that.

Quant
As described in the Context section of my blog, Quant was not as much of a struggle for me as Verbal was. However, I did practice OG question from the topics I needed to brush up (for me that was coordinate geometry and algebra).

IR
IR is largely just quick math, data analysis and logical reasoning, so if you’re good on those accounts, you should be able to skip preparing for this section. (many people do!)

AWA
I found a great blog on writing the perfect essay. Linked here.

D-day

Some tips for d-day! :)

• Take both the optional breaks — As anyone who’s been out of school for a few years, staying focussed for ~3 hours is one of the hardest parts of the exam. So don’t skip the breaks! Get a snack, drink some water or just take a walk around the centre.
• Keep a tab on the clock. I did run out of time in the last 2–3 questions of each section. But it is better to make flukes and complete the section as penalty for not completing is much higher
• Do take the time to think about the 5 B schools you would be applying to at the centre, and the order you would be attempting the sections in. This will save the hassle at the test centre

That’s all on my end :) Feel free to shoot me an email/comment if you have any questions!