Giving entrance exams is an art in itself. As much as your preparation matter, so does your state of mind in the exam. One thing that impacts this state of mind is the flow of the exam that one chooses. As far as I am concerned, I chose to begin with the section that I used to find the most exhaustive – Verbal, so that my initial fresh state of mind helps me in going through with it. After Verbal, I chose to keep Quant, something which I enjoyed, and treated it as a break till the next exhaustive section – Integrated Reasoning. I used to keep my hobby for the last – Essay writing. This was the flow of the exam that I chose based on my capabilities.
My Success Mantra
One thing that is worth noting is that initially, I was not scoring well in mocks, scoring in the range of 680-700. However, I soon stopped taking GMAT rules’ word for it, and began asking the great question – “Why? Why is the rule saying so?”. Soon after I began going to the depth of the rules, knowing the rationale behind them, I got to the epitome of my scores – 760-780 in mocks! But, this was not until the third, and final month of my preparation. Till that time, the only motivation that was keeping me going was that I was getting to learn something new each day, through real-world problems mentioned in GMAT questions.
D-day
When I began scoring 780 frequently in mocks, taking them every alternate day, I decided to appear for D-day. I fixed my birthday as the day of my GMAT exam, August 31. I fixed my exam for evening, thinking that I should have some buffer time in case I don’t get a good night sleep thinking of the exam. The next day, I woke up late, sleeping in bits and pieces, and went to the exam centre. After over 4 hours, there was the sweetest birthday present ever on my screen, a 720!
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