How I Scored 770 on the GMAT at age 20: My Preparation Process

Through this article, I hope to share my GMAT preparation process: the timeframe, resources used, and my approach toward studying for the GMAT. Before we dive in, keep in mind that multiple equally valid and effective study approaches may exist. The process I am sharing here has brought me through other standardized tests including the SATs (1600/1600) and the Oxford TSA. Feel free to adapt it to suit your personal learning needs.

Personally, my GMAT notes are collated from GMAT’s Official Guide, Manhattan Guides, Princeton’s Cracking the GMAT, and other sources. Hopefully, it would give you a boost in your preparations, especially if your timeline is tight. You may access and purchase them here.

The article consists of the following sections:

1. The Metrics: Breakdown of my GMAT Score
2. Select the Optimal Test Date
3. Internalize the Test Structure
4. Build a Strong Foundation of Content Knowledge
5. Timed Practice
6. Practice Reviews & Error Logs
7. Bringing it all together
8. Additional Tips

The Metrics: Breakdown of my GMAT Score

• Total: 770/800
• Verbal: 45/51
• Quantitative: 50/51
• Integrated Reasoning: 7/8
• Analytical Writing: 6.0/6.0

Select the Optimal Test Date

The GMAT is unique in that it is generally offered throughout the year. This allows you to pick the best date for yourself, after considering your other commitments. You want to ensure that you have sufficient time for preparation and that there would be few to no distractions in the days leading up to the test.

Now, to address the elephant in the room: who on earth would take the GMAT at age 20, before starting his/ her undergraduate studies? My choice to do so was all in the spirit of choosing the ‘optimal time’. Hopefully, sharing my thought process of choosing when to take the GMAT could assist you in selecting your test date. If you already have a confirmed test date, feel free to skip this section.

In June 2020, I scheduled my GMAT for October 2020 for the following reasons:

1. Preparation time: It would provide me with 4 months of preparation time (in retrospect, this is excessive). I did not want to feel pressurized or stressed, and thus intentionally gave myself a long runway. This timeline gave me significant buffer time: there were consecutive weeks during this period where I had little to no GMAT study, due to other commitments. You may choose instead to have a few weeks of intense GMAT study. However, that leaves you prone to unexpected disruptions, and I believe learning and applying concepts over time is more effective as compared to cramming content. 
2. Fits GMAT’s 5 year validity period: Pick a date based on the approximate year you intend to take your Master’s degree. You don’t want to end up in a situation where your great GMAT score expires before you can use it for applications. I am under a scholarship that would only fund my master’s degree on the condition that it is taken directly after the completion of my undergraduate degree (in 2024). Hence, taking the GMAT in October 2020 isn’t too early.
3. Consider other commitments: Preferably, select a date where you would be less busy. I have heard that life at Oxford gets quite academically rigorous. To make my future life easier, I decided to get the GMAT out of the way before entering university. I also selected a date close to the completion of my military service, where I expected myself to have more free time for the final round of preparation and revision.

Internalize the Test Structure

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

For any standardized test, the first thing I would do is to read through and familiarize myself with the test structure. Beyond the overall structure (Verbal, Quantitative, Integrated Reasoning, and Analytical Writing Assessment), you should be familiar with all the different types of questions within each section.

For instance, in the verbal section, there are three broad categories of questions: sentence correction, reading comprehension, and critical reasoning. Each of these can be further broken down into different question types. Some examples of critical reasoning questions types include: identifying assumptions, identifying conclusions, detecting the argument’s flaw, finding evidence that most strongly strengthens or weakens the argument, resolving or explaining an apparent contradiction etc.

Knowing the test structure inside-out is an important first step to tackling the GMAT and identifying areas or question types that you struggle with.

Here are some steps you can take to get started:

1. Carefully read through the structure on the official website.
2. Read through the Official Guide’s “What is the GMAT Exam?” section.
3. Familiarize yourself with GMAT’s user interface using their interactive exam tutorial
4. Take a timed diagnostic test or a full practice test. This exposes you to the many question types you would encounter in the GMAT exam, allows you to approximately gauge your starting point in the preparation process, and gives you a sense of the time constraints of the test.

Build a Strong Foundation of Content Knowledge

After familiarizing yourself with the test structure, you should ensure that you have all the required content knowledge. There are two main content knowledge areas for the GMAT: grammar rules for the verbal section’s sentence correction questions and mathematical concepts for the quantitative section. 

Grammar rules are perhaps the most significant set of notes you need for the GMAT. Even for native English speakers like myself, the sentence correction questions in GMAT can be quite tough, especially with the time crunch. It is much more effective and fast to eliminate options and select answers based on studied grammar rules rather than depending on your ear and ‘feel’ of the sentence.

Meanwhile, the Maths concepts tested are quite simple and most of us should have studied them in school. However, you may be rusty or have forgotten a lot of concepts, and it is advisable to prepare a short page of notes of tested concepts that you are less familiar with.

During my preparation, I collated notes from the Manhattan Guides, Princeton Review’s Cracking the GMAT, and the Official Guides. For grammar rules, I also used my SAT grammar notes as a supplement. Beyond content knowledge, I also noted down common mistakes, strategies, and tricks from these sources into my notes. You can access and purchase my personal GMAT notes here.

Timed Practice

Once you have your conceptual foundation and strategies set, it is time to put them into practice. Here are some practice resources to get you started*:

1. GMAT Official Starter Kit (free): 15 PS, 15 DS, 15 RC, 15 CR, 15 SC questions; 2 full practice tests
2. GMAT Official Guide**: 1 diagnostic test, 230 PS, 174 DS, 139 RC, 124 CR, 140 SC questions
3. GMAT Official Guide Verbal Review**: 105 RC, 188 CR, 301 SC questions
4. GMAT Official Guide Quantitative Review**: 176 PS, 300 DS questions
5. Princeton Review’s Cracking the GMAT: 104 Quant, 73 Verbal, 24 IR (2 sets) questions; comes with 6 full online practice tests
6. Manhattan Online (free account): 1 full practice test
7. Veritas Prep (free account): 2 full practice tests
8. Experts Global (free account): 1 free practice test
9. Kaplan (free account): 1 free practice test

*PS = problem solving; DS = data sufficiency; RC = reading comprehension; CR = critical reasoning; SC = sentence correction; IR = integrated reasoning

**These are numbers are based on the 2019 edition.

Note that some of these free accounts (Veritas Prep) may only be accessed if you opt for them in GMAT Club’s registration process.

As much as possible, I tried to simulate test conditions when practicing. Here are some good practices to follow:

1. Keep track of your progress: I set up an excel sheet that keeps track of all the practice resources I have access to, my completion rate for each resource, my scores, the number/ type of errors for each practice etc.
2. Time each practice: this allows you to practice speed alongside accuracy. It also helps you learn how to make the judgment of when to give up and make an intelligent guess if solving a question takes up too much time. Time is extremely important for GMAT, as each unanswered question carries severe penalties.
3. Take full practice tests: this is useful for building stamina. Taking a full 3h test is very different from taking six 30min tests, separated by work, meals, and rest.
4. Keep the section order for tests consistent: choose one order and stick to it. This allows you to practice “switching gears” between each section. Personally, I selected order two: verbal, quantitative, integrated reasoning, then AWA. I chose this because it was similar to the SATs which I took a year ago (October 2019) and my desire to get the hardest sections (verbal and quantitative) out of the way first.
5. Exceptions to the full practice test rule: the number of practice tests you have access to is limited, and that should not be the limiting factor in the amount of practice you do. The GMAT Official Guide, Official Quantitative Review, and Official Verbal Review provides a database of questions with answer explanations, split by question categories. This allows you to get extra practice in areas you are weak in. However, these practices should still be manually timed, and as much as possible, done in sets of similar length to GMAT’s sections. For example, complete 36 verbal practice questions under 65 minutes.

As you practice time management during the tests, here are some figures which could help you:

1. Verbal Section: complete 6 questions every 10 minutes (leaves 5 min buffer)
2. Quantitative Section: exactly 2 minutes per question (no buffer)
3. Integrated Reasoning: complete 4 questions every 10 minutes (no buffer)

Practice Reviews & Error Logs

Doing practice after practice can be futile if you do not review your mistakes. To extract the most value out of each practice session, you should look at what questions you got wrong, understand why you got them wrong, and think of how you can avoid making any similar mistakes in the future. Here are some remedial steps you can take depending on the cause of getting a question incorrect:

1. A careless mistake: make a mental note and try to avoid being careless for such questions in the future. If you notice that you are consistently making similar careless mistakes, write them down and revise that before future practices (eg. mistaking the percentage more than ‘x’ with the percentage of ‘x’).
2. A gap in content knowledge: learn the new grammar or mathematical rule and add them to your notes. Revise and internalize it.
3. Lack of experience applying a known concept: you may have already noted down and revised the grammar rule tested in the question, but you were unable to pick up the error during the practice. This just means that you need more practice and more revision to strengthen your foundation of content knowledge.

For error types 2 and 3, I also keep an error log, classified by question types and categories (one document for the verbal section’s sentence correction, another for the quantitative section’s data sufficiency questions etc.). Error logs include a screenshot of the question, the correct answer, and a brief explanation of why other options are wrong. 

Error logs are useful in two ways. Firstly, by revising these error logs, you can prevent yourself from making similar mistakes in the future. Secondly, they allow you to identify and tailor your future practice efforts to focus on your weakest areas.

Bringing it all together

How does all this advice fit together chronologically? Here is how my preparation process looks like:

The preparation process is quite iterative. Once I prepared and revised my initial set of notes once through, I started with timed practice and reviewed errors. This allowed me to identify gaps in my knowledge. I would then update my personal notes and revise them based on the errors I made. Thereafter, I would do more timed practice: either more practice tests or practice questions focused on my weaker areas. The process then repeats.

Additional Tips

1. Save an official practice test for the day before test day
2. Prepare yourself physiologically: This tip may be a little extreme, but it’s something I do for good measure. Test centers do not allow water to be brought in. Hence, in your timed practice tests, restrict your access to water and toilet breaks to the 2 scheduled breaks catered for in the test. Also, note that you would not get to use the full 8 minutes of the break as there is some processing time before you enter back into the exam room. As I took my test during the Covid19 period, I had to wear a mask throughout the examination. To acclimatize, I wore my mask while doing my final 2 practice tests before test day.
3. Familiarize yourself with the on-screen timer: In all my practice tests, I relied on my stopwatch to track time rather than using the on-screen timer. However, I was told that it was not allowed into the exam room on test day. As my stopwatch counted up rather than down, this unfamiliarity gave me a bit of trouble with time management during the test.
4. Make all decisions well before test day: which order of sections you would choose, which 5 schools you would send your results to, and in what scenario would you cancel your score.
5. Reach early: plan your route before test day and consider the estimated traveling time. GMAT requests for you to reach 30 minutes early, and from my experience, the test center allows you to take your paper up to 30 minutes earlier than your scheduled time. I planned to reach 45 minutes in advance to give myself time to go to the restroom, calm my nerves, and have some buffer time in case there are traffic delays.

Here’s one final plug for my notes. If you would like to connect, chat, or follow more of my content, you can find me on: LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium | Product Hunt. 

All the best for the GMAT!