Imagine having major foundational troubles in some topics while preparing for your GMAT right from the beginning but ending up with a 99th percentile score with seeing nothing unusual in your actual exam.
That’s just what happened with Aasis Katyal, when he in his final year of college days before his fifth semester exams in college managed to score a fantastic 760 on his GMAT.
He had a pretty unique journey in his GMAT preparation. Apparently he had not even heard of Top One Percent in the beginning and had joined another institute for his preparation which just did not suit him and due a medical issue; he had to give up on his preparation for some time. When he recovered, his course at that institute had ended. Then he stumbled upon Top One Percent, took the demo, loved it and started the prep right away.
He shared that he did not face any major troubles in Quant but did have some in Verbal.
He talked about both the parts in depth and what all helped him ace the game.
For quant, he says: 1. He had lots and lots of silly mistakes and specifically in DS questions, the traps became an issue because initially he was hurrying. 2. For silly mistakes, he maintained an error log in which he put the all the questions he got wrong while doing the pre-work. He used to visit the log before every practice questions so as not to repeat the errors again. 3. For traps, he extensively resorted to the specific extra material that’s provided to build accuracy.
For verbal, he says: 1. He was really struggling with SC. He had some issues with the primary purpose questions in RC and conditional reasoning questions in CR specifically as well. 2. For SC, since he troubles with the concepts from the get go, he gave a lot of time to get clarity in all the concepts through the videos and the materials. 3. He did close to 300-350 questions in extreme depth by writing down the reason as well for explanations of the concepts applied in each question. 4. Having trouble in idioms and comparisons prompted him to make a list of idioms which he used to revise every time before he sat to do SC. 5. He also maintained an error log which he used to refer to extremely regularly. 6. For RC, he went through OCTAVE videos multiple times to completely grasp the concept for getting better in verification and elimination in the primary purpose questions. 7. He also did a lots of LSAT passages for practice of RC. 8. For CR, he resorted to gain ground in the fundamentals for getting better at conditional reasoning and for his issue of see the direct reasoning line with inference questions.
Then after his concept building phase, for practice he used to do 4-5 RC passages, 20 SC questions, 15-20 CR questions and 20-25 quant questions every single day.
After all of this, he found nothing unusual in his exam and was in fact quite happy that he ended his verbal part with 6 minutes to spare.
In the end he gave some advice for everyone who prepares for the exam by saying a few things to absolutely avoid and some to just do: 1. He recommends not to leave any concept unfinished and moving on to the next. He himself had trouble in SC when he thought of one topic as complete when he was just halfway through. It’s best to call a topic closed and then starting the next, always. 2. The one thing he says everyone must do is be consistent. Even if you have to take some downtime, adjust for your preparation here and there. Be on your own schedule and not someone else’s thereby not allowing anyone else to mess with your study calendar.
Thus, it shows, by just doing the requisite, you can score a really good score.
Just start and see yourself too!
Best of luck!