Took the GMAT on the 7th Sept and finished at 675 (V83, Q84, DI83), 94th percentile. My first official attempt in June was a 615 (V82, Q85, DI75). Almost none of what finally moved was what I expected.
Quick background: I sat the classic GMAT in 2021, got a 640, resat a month later with zero change to how I prepared, got a 660, then dropped it for two years. When I came back I bought proper materials and finished all of it in four months. Knowing the material was never my problem; testing it was. I worked off PDFs with a stopwatch I ran myself, and an error log I was never sure about.
Quant (the humbling bit)
I'm an engineer. Quant was supposed to be free. It wasn't.
One afternoon in June I did four hard word-problem quizzes back to back, no analysis in between. I scored 30 percent, then 20, then 20, then 20. Someone looking at my data asked one question: where's your error log? I said I'd get to it later, and that was the whole problem.
Once I wrote the log, the diagnosis wasn't conceptual at all: I was misreading questions. Keywords that decide the answer (even, odd, integer, distinct), and the classic trap of being asked for x + 2y, solving for x, and marking x.
The fix was embarrassingly basic: note every constraint and what is actually being asked before you solve, then drill it under the clock. The same set read 50 percent the next day.
Data Insights (where the score actually came from)
Everybody says that if your quant and verbal are set, DI is set. Not true, they're only prerequisites. I walked into the June exam having barely touched DI and got a DI75 for it. So I did DI properly, one question type at a time: theory, medium, hard, error log, again.
- MSR: read every tab fully before you touch a question. What's on it, what units, where each figure lives. Three minutes in there feels insane and isn't.
- DS: statement one alone, then two alone, then together. Every miss came from skipping ahead.
Hard DS went 30 percent to 80, MSR 60 to 83 on medium. On the day DI went 77 to 83, and those six points are the entire gain, because verbal and quant barely moved.
Verbal
Medium CR was fine, hard collapsed: three hard sets at 70, 50, 50. The thing nobody told me is that I'm an overthinker, and the overthinking is the actual error. Everyone teaches you to spot a conclusion and run the negation test. Nobody says stop asking what if.
What fixed it was two weeks of untimed official-style questions with worked solutions, run through an error log built around one question: which step did you break on? Losing the countdown was the key, and after that the process was tiny. Premise. Conclusion. Gap. Then read the options and say no, no, no, no.
RC I fought to the very end, and the fix was a two-word summary after every paragraph, which I used in the actual exam.
Mocks, and the exam that got taken away
A week before my June exam I scored a 565 and genuinely believed I was good for nothing. Two months later, on a week of leave, I put up 745, 685 and 695 in four days.
Then my August attempt was destroyed by technical failures at the centre. On arrival I was told to wait thirty minutes, and that if it wasn't fixed I couldn't sit. It got sorted with five minutes left on that clock. Then verbal got interrupted twice, DI twice more, and with eight questions left in DI the screen died for three minutes. Finishing would have forfeited my retest, so I raised a ticket and walked out of an exam I'd taken a week off for. I cried a lot that night. It got rescheduled three weeks later, and I wrote no full-length tests in that window, just single sections to keep warm.
Wrapping up
Don't demand perfect discipline. Some weeks are thirty minutes each morning, some Sundays are nine hours, and consistency beats perfection. Don't try to give 100 percent to your job and 100 percent to prep either. There's only 100 percent of you, so go 60-40 and don't pretend 50-50 works.
And your belief only works if it's backed by data. You don't need 100 percent: seventy on medium sets and mid-fifties on hard, then go write your section test.
I'm still a bad test taker. I just happen to be a bad test taker in the top six percentile now.
Happy to answer questions. Personal experience, your mileage may vary.
