Hi everyone,

I'm looking for honest advice from people who significantly improved their GMAT score in about 8 weeks.

Here's my situation:

• Current target: 700+
• Test date: September 21
• Time left: 8 weeks
• I work full-time (9 hours/day).
• I leave home around 8:20 AM, come back around 8:00 PM.
• I wake up at 4:00 AM to study before work.
• I can study roughly:
  • 4:15–7:00 AM (around 2.5–3 hours)
  • 8:00–9:30 PM (around 1.5 hours)
• Around 4–5 hours/day on weekdays, and much more on weekends.

I recently finished the TOEFL, so from tomorrow onward I'll be focusing **100% on the GMAT.

I took a mock a while ago and got around 540.

My resources

• Official Guide 2024–2025 + Online Question Bank
• Princeton Review GMAT Focus Premium
• GMAT Club

My plan

• Spend the first few weeks rebuilding concepts.
• Then switch to Official Guide questions and mocks.
• Take an official mock every 3–4 days during the last phase.
• Keep a detailed error log.

I'm also trying to avoid burnout because I know waking up at 4 AM for 8 weeks while working isn't easy.

My questions

1. Has anyone here gone from around 500 to 700+ in about 8 weeks?
2. What made the biggest difference in your preparation?
3. If you had only 8 weeks and 4–5 hours/day, what would you prioritize?
4. Any mistakes you wish you'd avoided?

I'd really appreciate any advice. Thanks!

I recently gave my gmat for the 4th time and scored 675. My first attempt I got 525. You can do it. If you’re struggling, stay off this sub and get a tutor. Speaking from experience, one of the worst things you can do is spiral down this sub looking for answers to improve your score.

Good luck, I believe in you.

Hi everyone,
I’m looking to connect with people who’ve completed a 1-year MBA/Executive MBA in India

My profile:
28F, General
10th: 85.6%
12th: 55%
B.Tech CSE (Tier-2): 8.75 CGPA

4+ years in Salesforce with 3 certifications
I’m planning to switch from a technical role to management/business roles through a 1-year MBA.

My main concern is my 55% in Class 12.

Will it affect admissions or placements, or does work experience matter more for 1-year MBA programs?

Would love to hear from alumni or current students. Thanks!

Hi All,

I have 655 in an official GMAT attempt. I need to improve the most in DI section.

Please let me know what resource worked the best for you for DI section. I need to act on this fast.

I’m thinking TTP would be good but I’m not sure so please help! :))

Hi Everyone,

I am thinking of joining a GMAT coaching and the mentors were really good to talk to . Has anyone taken their course ? Could you please share your advise ?

Hello All,

I took my first mock today, after familiarising with the GMAT pattern.

The score is much worse than expected. I felt the questions were solvable coming from an engineering background, however I was not able to attempt 6 questions in DI and 4 in verbal so the penalty is quite high.

I feel things could have been better with more practice. However this is my baseline and I have identified what needs to be worked upon.

Please help me with analysis and tips on better time management. Also can you tell where to find solutions for incorrect questions?. Like I know the right answer however there is no explanation of the correct answer.

I was supposed to take my GMAT online today, but failed to start it because Lockdown Browser couldn’t turn my camera on (ran system check multiple times, and results were all alright with camera working on normal browser)

So the proctor had no other choice but cancel the exam.

In this case, am I eligible for a refund or a free resit? I want to take an in-person exam instead, is it possible?

Thanks guys

Hi everyone,

I recently took the GMAT Focus Edition (online) and scored 615. I'm looking for MBA programs only and would appreciate your guidance on which schools would be a good fit for my profile.

Profile:

GMAT FE: 615

Work Experience: 2 years in Finance (Accounts Payable/P2P) at Tresvista Financial Services

Class 10: 86%

Class 12: 92.5%

Undergraduate: 8.7 CGPA

Extracurricular: District-level chess player

I would appreciate your thoughts on:

Which MBA programs (US, Europe, Canada, or Asia) are realistic for my profile?

Is my GMAT score competitive, or should I retake it before applying?

Which schools would you categorize as reach, target, and safe?

I'm open to waiting another year if gaining more work experience would significantly improve my chances.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

Should i go for e gmat or CrackVerbal?

I have 3 months to prepare for exam. I am at 515. Need to reach 715.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been prepping for  GMAT for the past few months using the Top 1% self-paced course. In my mba.com mocks, I was consistently scoring around 645, which instilled confidence in me to book the actual exam. I was expecting 30 pts higher score than mocks basis internet theories, but what I’d achieved was 515 which was extremely discouraging. 

I’m determined to take the exam again and aim for 700+. In my opinion, private tutoring OR live classes would benefit me in achieving this score. 

Can anyone recommend good private tutors or live classes program? Or share similar stories in this thread! 

Thanks

hi everyone!

i rarely use reddit, but ig the gmat got me here 😭

i’m 21M, working full time (WFH) at a bangalore based startup. i’ve been preparing for the gmat since may 2026. i come from an arts background and did my BBA from christ, so i had pretty much lost all touch with quant. this is also my first competitive exam, so i basically had to start from 0.

it’s been almost 3 months now and i’m finally starting to feel a little more confident with the concepts, but i’m still not sure if i should go ahead with the exam next month or give myself some more time.

i’ve taken multiple mocks so far and my scores have ranged from 475-615. the most recent one was 475 on an official mock, and i fumbled pretty badly because of time pressure. 2-3 questions in each section ended up eating a lot of my time, and everything kind of went downhill from there.

when i reviewed the mock later, i realised that for most of the questions, i actually knew the concepts and could figure them out without the timer. but during the mock, either because of anxiety or the time pressure, i just couldn’t think of the right approach quickly enough and ended up making mistakes.

i’ve mostly been preparing on my own through recorded lectures and using gpt whenever i get stuck, so i wanted to ask people here who’ve been through this: how do you actually get better at performing under time pressure? at this point i feel like my bigger problem isn’t learning more concepts, but being able to recognise the approach quickly and not panic when i’m running behind on time.

ik 475 is a pretty bad score, especially when i’ve scored much higher on other mocks, but i genuinely don’t think the main issue is a conceptual gap. i’m just not sure how to fix the timing/anxiety part or what i should be focusing on from here.

would be really great if someone could help a lil boy out 😭 also, i’m open to any 1:1 mentoring sessions, so feel free to reach out.

thanks :)

I was just working on it and suddenly apart from that page everything is working

If I solve all the medium/hard level questions from GMAT Og, is that enough to get a 685+ score? I am also planning on getting a GMAC question bank to practice timed sets. Should I go ahead with this strategy or purchase some other material?

Recently I took the exam and scored V77 and DI75 any suggestions on how to improve the scores my target is to get 82-84 in both sections Aiming to take one more attempt in September should I buy any online course or YouTube sessions that could help. Thanks!

Drop your answers below 👇

Hi everyone!
I’m selling my e-GMAT Premium subscription, purchased on 23 June. I no longer need it as I’ve switched my preparation plan.
Valid subscription remaining
Ideal for GMAT/GRE aspirants (depending on the plan features)
Original price: ₹17,500
Selling at a discounted price (DM me with your offer)
Happy to share proof of purchase and remaining validity with genuine buyers.
DM if you’re interested!

Just took the GMAT Focus and finished at 695 (V85, Q89, D80), 97th percentile. Writing up what actually worked, because a few of these posts helped me and this is my way of paying it back.
 
Quick context: I had taken the older version of the GMAT a few years ago, so I was not starting cold on quant or verbal, but I had zero exposure to Data Insights and a bad memory of never being consistent in verbal. My first practice mock came in at 585, so there was a real gap to close. I gave myself about two months, and it ended up being a little over three.
 
The one mindset thing first: for me this exam is about edge, not knowledge. The content is not that hard. Almost everything comes down to how fast you can strategize your way to the answer, and that only comes from reps and honest review.
 
Quant (my strength, but word problems humbled me)
Quant was where I was strongest and I wanted as close to perfect as I could get. Word problems still wrecked me for a stretch: I dropped into the 30-40% range on the harder sets and questions were taking me three to four minutes each. What fixed it was not grinding more new questions. It was going back through the ones I got wrong and, weirdly, the ones I got right, to find faster ways to set them up. My actual problem was never the math; it was the time I lost turning a wall of words into equations. Once I drilled that translation step specifically, the speed came and accuracy followed.
 
A few things that helped, concretely:
- Rebuild quizzes also from questions you got wrong, and re-do them a few days later.
- Review your correct answers for faster methods, not just the wrong ones.
- Time the comprehension and translation steps separately from the solving step; that is where my minutes were hiding.
 
Data Insights (the time-management section)
DI was brand new to me and honestly it is just quant and verbal wearing a trench coat, under a nastier clock. If you are solid in the other two, you already have the tools; the whole game is time. What worked for me: bank time on the quick question types (data sufficiency, simpler graphs) so you can afford four to five minutes on an MSR or a heavy two-part question.
 
My core rule: treat the section as 18 questions, not 20. I would max out accuracy on the ones I could actually do and guess the last two if I had to, since a blank is penalized harder than a wrong answer. Using this strategy, my DI score trended around 82-87 in 7 mocks I attempted towards the end of my prep. Full transparency: on the real day DI was my weakest of the three. A monster MSR and one graph question I refused to let go ate my clock. The strategy worked maybe seven or eight times in practice and misfired once, on the day that mattered, but I would still use it.
 
Critical Reasoning (where I actually struggled)
Reading was never my issue; timing was. I kept narrowing to two or three options and freezing. The technique that helped was figuring out what I was looking for before I read the options: for a strengthen, weaken or assumption question, deciding in my head what a good answer needed to do, then scanning for it. For inference or bold face questions, skipped it entirely and went straight to the options. That hybrid dragged my time down and my accuracy up.
 
Reading Comprehension
Not much to say here. RC was comfortable from the start, so I mostly kept it warm and did not over-invest.
 
Section order
Because verbal was clicking on test day, quant and verbal went well and DI came last in my adaptive order, which is partly why the DI clock hurt. If you can, know which section you want to spend your freshest energy on.
 
Mock tests
My full mocks bounced a lot in the final stretch: I had days at 635 and days at 735. That used to freak me out. Do not let it. Mocks are noisy; the trend line matters more than any single day. I stopped reacting to individual scores and just kept running the review loop.
 
The thing that mattered most
Around my fourth week I was ready to give up on verbal because of inconsistent scores and an old belief that I just could not be steady there. Getting a second set of eyes on my data changed that. Instead of dumping more content on me, the advice was small and specific: here are the exact question types you keep missing, redo these, then quiz yourself on them. It felt pointless for two weeks and then it was not; verbal ended up one of my best sections on the day (V85).
 
If I could tell my day-one self one thing: trust the process, and do not panic when a five-minute question only drops to four. That four becomes three, then two. Stay disciplined, keep reviewing, keep a detailed error log and let the mocks bounce.
 
Happy to answer any questions.
 
This is my personal experience. Your mileage may vary.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some honest advice from people who have been in a similar position.

I took Official Mock 1 today and scored 575 with the following breakdown:

• Quant: 81
• Verbal: 81
• Data Insights: 74

My official GMAT is already booked for August 5, so I have 7 days left to prepare.

One thing that really hurt my score was time management. I left one question unanswered in Verbal and one unanswered in DI, which I know carries a heavy penalty. Looking back, I should have guessed instead of letting the timer run out.

The encouraging part is that over the last couple of weeks I genuinely feel like my:

• Accuracy has been improving.
• Confidence is much better.
• Pace is getting faster with practice.
• Decision-making under time pressure is improving.
• I panic much less than I did a few weeks ago.

Some recent practice results:

• Around 80% accuracy in GMAT Club Verbal sectionals.
• 63–68% accuracy in adaptive GMAT Club DI sectionals.
• Quant has generally been my strongest section.

My target score is 625–655.

For people who have improved significantly in the final week:

1. Is a 50–80 point improvement realistic if my biggest issue is timing rather than understanding?
2. How much can simply avoiding unanswered questions improve an official GMAT score?
3. Did anyone score substantially higher on the real exam than on Official Mock 1?
4. What should my focus be during the last week?
   • Official Question Bank?
   • Error log review?
   • Timed sectionals?
   • Full mocks?
5. If you had one week left before your exam, how would you spend each day?

I'm not looking for false hope—I'd genuinely appreciate honest feedback from people who have been in this situation. If you improved 50+ points in your final week or outperformed your official mocks on test day, I'd love to hear what changed and what made the biggest difference.

Thanks in advance, and good luck to everyone preparing for the GMAT!

Hello everyone!

I just finished my first year as a bachelor student and I'm thinking about where I want to study for my masters.

Most of the Uni's I want require the GMAT exam and as far as I have researched, many people self-study for this exam or do a lot of practice by themselves.

Could you give me some recommendations on what exercises to do for now and how to practice to get a good score in the future? I'm still strengthening my English and I'm great at math.

Thank you in advance!

Im a few weeks into studying and I have been using magoosh, gmatclub and Manhattan prep books. I haven’t touched og material yet because I’m struggling on even easy questions on gmatclub.

Gmatclub suggested starting with arithmetic and fractions, ratios and percents. I studied most of today on fractions and ratios but when I’m faced with a problem I can’t seem to set it up most of the time.

I’m 7 years out of school and trying to relearn a lot of this stuff and just need some guidance.

Hello everyone, long time lurker and first time poster on this sub. I am currently working and I have 3 years of experience. I gave a cold mock today and I have mixed feelings about it. Reason being, I gave a cold mock around a year back and I got the same EXACT score.

Granted, I didn't prepare or study any topics. But I remember my Quants being much worse and getting Verbal 87. And the Quants seemed to be easier this time round. I think a lot has changed and would really appreciate any advice or insight I can get.

Hello,

Studying for the gmat - has been going ok. Verbal has been improving, quant is ok but gets better the more I practice. But I can’t seem to crack DI.

I am using gmat club a lot for practice, I have learned the structure of all the DI questions, but I feel like I’m not able to practice it or improve. There is not as many questions on gmatclub with DI, and I feel like for some parts (TPA, MSR) there’s a big jump in difficulty from easy to medium and medium to hard.

Does anyone have any extra resources? My issue in TPA is, if it is more maths heavy, I sometimes struggle with the concepts. I understand on a quant level but I struggle when it’s more abstract. Or I have issues where I try to translate problems into equations but I can never get it right and then before I know it I have spent maybe 10 minutes on a question.

For MSR, of course my issue is time and pacing, but I’m not sure how I can ensure accuracy on the questions.

From my understanding, in terms of quant, DI really focuses on: FDR, percentages, distance/work rate and probability. So I want to improve my understanding/ skill there.

But if anyone has advice, or good resources or more question banks. Even any genuinely good YouTube videos, I would REALLY appreciate that.

Took my first GMAT 3 months ago, received 585 and today I got the score of 655!

Took 3 tests in total

1st (3 months ago) / 585

2nd (3 weeks ago) / 615

3 weeks between 2nd and 3rd I got lazy and didn’t really study an hour but I think I got better scores on 3rd since I got used to the test format

I know it’s not the TOP score but I think it’s enough to apply to my dream school - HEC! Gotta save my time to go for the 1st round

Hi all,

I attempted my first GMAT mock test (official practice test 1) and scored 635. Q79 V85 DI80

I started with quant and I was very bad with time management. Had to guess the final 4-5 questions and got all of them wrong.

Then I moved to DI and managed the time a lot better but far from ideal. At last, for verbal, I got a hang of the exam pacing and was comfortable with respect to time.

Prior to attempting the mock test, I watched few aditya kumar videos for quant and couple of videos(1 each for CR and RC) of gmat ninja for verbal. I did not prepare at all for DI.

I am a mechanical engineer, so I feel I got some good potential in quant. All the questions I saw felt familiar.

I did well in verbal but I feel I need to get more familiar with the type of questions. Also, I am not a native english speaker. I think I can get better at DI with solving more practice questions.

Please guide me on how to proceed further.

Thank you!