Hi All,
I recently scored a 710 on the GMAT after a long and arduous journey in which I crawled my way up from a 430
I began to realize what worked and what the most effective methods are to get there in the shortest amount of time possible and I created a couple of videos (with more to come if you find them beneficial) to help others who are in a similar position or who want to maximize their score.
Feel free to ask me anything.
Enjoy
I apologize as this may be in your video, but since you said I can ask you anything I would rather prefer asking directly.
I’m wondering if you found any GMAT prep courses useful for improving your verbal score. I’ve seen methods online and it is like you said very subjective (I did see a bit of your video). I saw your post on reddit too, congrats on your accomplishment. Do you think it’s possible to improve your verbal as a native English speaker by just doing the Manhattan SC, PowerBible, Thursday’s w/ Ron, and GMAT Ninja plus some extra reading on the side? I heard it’s mostly about practice for verbal as you have to pretty much just get used to the GMAT content.
All good. Happy to answer.
Probably the biggest takeaway that clicked with me in the last bout of my prep is the logical path to succeed.
Assuming you haven't touched the GMAT study before, for all topics, but speaking in reference to verbal, you need to go topic by topic:
Logically this looks like this:
When you break the streak, make a flash card/ note in google sheet that essentially reviews the question you broke. In this review you will literally type out "A is incorrect because..." "B is correct because.."
This forces your brain to begin to articulate why answer choices are correct./ incorrect.
Do this for the remaining SC topics below only after you have finished one topic (I refer to topics as sub-components in my video).
You do only 1 sub-component per exam sub-section at a time. This means you work on say Comparisons (Sentence Correction) and Weaken the argument (CR) in the same day, but not Comparisons(Sentence Correction) and Parallelism (Sentence Correction)
B. Parallelism C. SV Agreement D. Modifiers E. Meaning F. Idioms and Style G. Verb Mood/ Tone/ If Then H. Fragments & Run-on Sentences (grammatical construction/ clauses) I. Verbs Tense J. Pronouns and Antecedents
Critical Reasoning A. Strengthen B. Weaken ... and so on
Reading Comprehension For RC I simply went by passage difficulty and achieved streaks that way. I suggest you do the same.
Easy Passages (sub-600)
So, back to your question - in all honesty it depends where you start. Some people are amazingly good at this test from the get go and they start at a V40 (90-92nd percentile).
Assuming you have a ways to go, I suggest just using the resources in my video, so SC: Manhattan (if you did some standardised test already or were taught grammar in school) otherwise I prefer Aristotle's SC Grail (its way more succinct) and again.. you only need this for the content part of the above outline. CR: Powerscore CR and nothing else RC: reading small amounts each day helps. Consistency over volume. I found it more beneficial to read 5 pages a day than to read 30 pages 1 day, nothing for 2 days then 20 another day later.
Thursdays w Ron and GMAT Ninja (videos I assume) are good resources, but they're complementary to your foundational resources, so stick to the foundation resources as they go through the content in depth, then augment to Thurs w R/ GMATNinja to help you achieve those streaks.
how long did it take to go from 430 to 710?
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