After 5 years since her first attempt in 2017, Smita reappeared for her GMAT and ended up scoring a fabulous 750!
She shared with us her entire journey, what worked out for her, what didn’t and special tips for you all test takers to follow.
Initially, she says, in 2017, she took coaching from E-GMAT and found that they were teaching stuff some of which was absolutely useless and unrelated to the exam.
Later, recently, she was recommended TOP from her friend Harjas from SRCC (GMAT 750 from TOP) post which she took the demo and had her mind blown away. “Truly shocking!” she said it was.
The demo made her realise that she didn’t have the best aptitude and would just have to put in the efforts, which she did.
She had special comments on each of the section.
For quant, she said the best advice she followed was from Sandeep Sir which was not to pick the pen in the first 30 seconds at all and just think of the question in the head. Doing it for 15 days got her time to do questions down to just 1 minute & 30 seconds. To avoid the silly mistakes, she created and duly followed an error log which she used to refer to before each practice session.
In RC, during the initial 12 passages, her accuracy was a 27% but right after learning about OCTAVE, her accuracy went up to 80% accuracy. She subsequently actively practiced the technique in 300-400 passages that led her to a 100% accuracy in RC on the test day! She also practiced the LSAT passages. She shared was how much the awareness videos were of use and another interesting thing was that whenever she came across a topic which was alien to her, she used to search and learn more about it. She had trouble with earthquake related passages for which she saw some videos about it and as a chance a question did come in the exam based on earthquakes which she was able to crack on well.
She also says marathon practice for her was extremely beneficial wherein she did more than 75 passages at a stretch ever-day a few days prior to the exam.
For SC, she read the rules, did the 200 questions with the reasoning and elimination knowing why each option is correct or not and completed the given first 45 pages of material with the 2 important PPTs in great depth all of which combined gave her a 100% accuracy straightaway.
In CR, while she was good with Inference and Boldface questions, she had trouble with the strengthen & weaken argument based questions even 10 days before the exam. In the beginning, she had 50 questions completely wrong post which she realised the use of elimination employing which helped her get the next 50 questions all correct.
In the end, she saw nothing unusual in the exam.
During the exam, she was really nervous, and had to calm down midway after which she proceeded.
She shared three golden tips to follow: 1. Be consistent. Even after having 14 hour workdays, she studied every single day for at least 3 hours. Having a clear why for your “why” will help you a lot.
2. Follow the given material. She emphasized multiple times how in depth and vast the course is and how capable it is to help students procure a 99the percentile score of a 760/770+.
3. Focus on the basics. She cemented all the basics, learnt all concepts and practiced accordingly. She herself says that she too was just average but her learning through the basics helped her a ton. Don’t rush but master each topic.
Follow the advice and have greats score too, best of luck!