Student E | 675 (V88, 99th Percentile) — Quit European Banking to Ace the GMAT
Student E | 675 (V88, 99th percentile) | ~6 months prep (with break)
Background
不確定自己現在幾分？
12 題免費測出分數區間 →
- Profile: Graduated from a university in Taiwan, then pursued a master’s in finance in Europe. Worked at a European bank for about four years before quitting to study for the GMAT full-time.
- Study Materials: OG (including all subject Reviews), PP1-6, GWD (Verbal), A2 GMAT Online 7-Day Crash Course, Dustin Terminator single-purchase consultation, Target Test Prep, JJ, YouTube, GMAT Club
Scores
- Attempt 1: 655 (PR91) — V83 (PR83), Q86 (PR91), DI79 (PR76)
- Attempt 2: 665 (PR92) — V83 (PR83), Q86 (PR91), DI80 (PR83)
- Attempt 3: 675 (PR95) — V88 (PR99), Q84 (PR85), DI78 (PR69)
Timeline
I started studying full-time in August 2025. After two months of going through the OG and doing PPs, I took two PP mock exams at the end of September and didn’t break 500 on either one. So in early October I bought Target Test Prep (TTP). A week in, I thought it was helpful but way too slow. A friend recommended A2 GMAT, and after watching some of their YouTube demo lessons, I signed up. I took my first attempt in early November 2025. Three weeks later I took my second attempt. Then I had to deal with some personal matters and took a two-month break. I got back to studying at the end of January 2026, signed up for a Dustin single-purchase consultation to get a study plan and access to the AI platform, combined that with my existing resources, and took my third attempt in early March.
Why I Chose Dustin GMAT Terminator
When I was prepping for my first attempt, RC was my weakest section. But after watching Dustin’s YouTube videos, I had a real breakthrough moment (I’ll mention the specific videos in the RC section below). I also felt like Dustin’s learning style was very similar to mine — we both like to dig deep and understand the underlying principles. So after my first attempt, I booked a free 15-minute consultation with Dustin. Since my second attempt was less than three weeks away, I stuck with my existing A2 resources and didn’t use Dustin’s system at that point. It wasn’t until I decided to go for a third attempt that I purchased a consultation, and Dustin helped me put together a detailed study plan.
How Dustin GMAT Helped Me
This is very individual, but Dustin’s teaching style just happened to click with me perfectly. He breaks down why questions are designed the way they are, the reasoning behind test strategies, and even the logic behind how each section is structured and what it’s trying to measure. I’m the kind of person who needs to understand the “why” before I can execute, so watching Dustin’s videos felt like an instant match. That said, some people just want speed and conclusions, and this approach might not be the best fit for them. I’ve seen people score extremely high with both approaches.
He’s very data-driven and granular when analyzing weaknesses. For example, he’d look at my score report and adjust my study plan accordingly, telling me exactly which sub-area within which section needed more time, and which ones I could just maintain. I think this would have been even more helpful if I hadn’t had the two-month break before my third attempt, because when Dustin asked me about the details of my second attempt, I couldn’t remember a lot of what went wrong on specific questions.
The study plans are incredibly detailed. He doesn’t just write down what to do each day — he lays out how many questions to do, which resources to use, which question types to focus on, and stage-by-stage pacing targets for each section, so I could just follow the plan without thinking. For comparison, A2’s teacher would tell me something like “finish material X in the next two weeks,” whereas Dustin would go as far as specifying which questions to do on weekdays when I had less time, which ones to save for weekends, and how to keep an error log. I found that using both together worked really well.
Emotional support. I could tell Dustin is genuinely passionate about teaching. Whenever I had a real learning question, he’d enthusiastically explain everything in detail rather than seeming reluctant. This might not be strictly necessary, but when you’re being destroyed by the GMAT, having someone with that kind of positive energy really does help sometimes.
The AI platform. I love learning from videos, but for questions where the video explanations still didn’t click or where there was no detailed video, I’d go argue with the AI tutor. Beyond that, the GMAT Terminator platform has other useful features like question-type categorization and the ability to create variant questions. Of course, AI can still make mistakes, but I found its accuracy significantly better than Gemini or ChatGPT, plus it consistently uses Dustin’s methodology. Dustin’s newer PDT platform is also solid — I actually think the guided teaching approach of the AI Tutor on PDT is more effective than the one on Terminator, and the RC passages on PDT work well as additional practice after you’ve finished all the official material.
Section-by-Section Review
CR
I basically followed A2’s framework, mindset, pacing, and materials for practice. I found it much more efficient than TTP or methods I’d seen on GMAT Club forums — it’s very well-organized. I looked briefly at The PowerScore GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible and Manhattan Prep, and the frameworks seemed similar in structure, but A2’s approach is presented in a way that’s easier for non-native speakers to absorb and execute. For example, the first step is to read the question stem before reading the stimulus. At first I thought I’d been living abroad long enough to use native-speaker methods, but I found there was still a gap. After running out of time a few times, I obediently switched to A2’s approach.
In short, the process is: read the question stem first, then the stimulus, identify the logical chain and possible points of attack, then eliminate answer choices. I’ll leave the details for you to explore on your own.
For practice, I found CR review summaries to be very helpful. The idea is that during review, you should identify every possible analytical point, regardless of whether it ended up being relevant to the answer. Under exam time pressure, you obviously only need one flaw to eliminate a choice, but during review, the goal is to train yourself to catch everything. Dustin has some older videos demonstrating how you can paste CR questions into Word or PowerPoint and annotate each sentence with your thoughts and analysis after working through the problem (I used blue text in Chinese to avoid confusion). Then I’d compare against the detailed explanation videos, going sentence by sentence to see if I missed any points or misread something. This is time-consuming at first — a single question often took over ten minutes — but it was very effective for building fundamentals. At one point I had what I call “solving amnesia,” where I’d forgotten how to approach problems, and I went back through my old notes to see what my brain was thinking at the time to gradually find my groove again. Dustin now recommends using voice-to-text for speed, so you can skip videos and discuss directly with the AI. I personally still prefer typing it out because it’s more thorough and easier to review later. You can still feed typed notes to the AI anyway, and while voice-to-text might save time, the AI occasionally takes a while to respond or gives off-topic answers, so it ends up being about the same as watching a video. For questions where I had less time or they were less critical (like ones I got right but wasn’t fully confident about), I’d just do the voice-to-text to AI route, or if I still didn’t understand after watching A2’s explanation videos or reading top answers on GMAT Club, I’d go argue with the AI.
One more thing: I kept a Google Doc of solving techniques I tended to forget or found particularly useful — partly to organize what I’d learned, and partly to make sure I consistently applied those methods going forward. Also, if you’re reading GMAT Club explanations, I’d recommend finding ones whose strategies align with A2’s or Dustin’s — for example, KarishmaB, the Manhattan Prep instructors, GMATCoachBen (and a few others I can’t remember). GMATNinja and Marty Murray are very good, but their methods differ quite a bit.
RC
I was honestly terrified of RC at first — I could never finish on time. Although this is a testimonial about my overall experience, I do want to give a small shout-out to TTP — it genuinely brought my baseline reading speed up a notch. After picking up some fundamental techniques there, I moved on to A2’s videos and learned even more strategies, along with common passage structures. Then I watched Dustin’s YouTube videos — specifically “GMAT Terminator Series: Reading Comprehension Standard Solving Process” and “Dustin Teaches You How to ‘Track Structure Step by Step’ in RC” — and those two videos took my speed and accuracy to the next level. After that, I gradually watched all the practice-solving videos in his RC playlist, which helped enormously. That said, after my two-month break, I completely lost my feel for it. At that point, it was A2’s retaker section videos that brought me back to life. I think the combination of A2 and Dustin works really well.
For reading speed, I benchmarked against the pace of the TTP instructor reading aloud in their videos. There’s also a guy named Marty on GMAT Club who scored a perfect 800 and has some YouTube videos. I don’t think his methods are as good as A2’s or Dustin’s, but he speaks incredibly fast. I basically tried to match my internal reading voice to his murmuring speed — figuring that even though internal monologue should be faster, he’s a native speaker, so matching his pace would be a good target. There’s also a YouTuber named Justin Sung who made a video called “4 Steps to Read Difficult Texts Faster (Academic Speed Reading Comprehension)” — some of the techniques like grouping were quite useful. I also bought English e-books (no particular topic) and read them whenever I had free time, hoping that long-term exposure would help me get more comfortable with English reading in general.
In summary, RC is about learning to read for structure, using keywords to identify tone and testable points, summarizing the main idea and function of each paragraph after reading it, and having a fast baseline speed. The question-solving part I found less mentally demanding than CR.
Q (Quantitative)
Maybe I’ve been away from my student days in Taiwan for too long, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t finish with much time to spare, and I’d always miss 1-4 questions, even after specifically practicing my errors. When I took the GRE during college, I thought the prep materials were so easy that I just jumped straight into drilling. But this time, nearly ten years later, I realized I absolutely had to watch all of KH’s instructional videos because I’d forgotten so many concepts. For Q, I basically completed KH’s practice plan, found exercises on GMAT Club for my weaker areas, and compiled notes on concepts KH taught that I wasn’t comfortable with for last-minute review before the exam. The teachers all say you must redo your errors by hand. Dustin uses AI to generate variant questions for practice, but even without AI, redoing errors after a few days is important. My score isn’t high, but I can share that when I redid those error questions days later, they still took me a lot of time and I often still couldn’t solve them. One thing worth sharing is the mindset aspect: during my third attempt, probably because V was going so well at PR99 level, the early Q questions were really hard and long. I was confident I’d make up time later, so I let myself go over on pacing. By question 11, I had only 15 minutes left. Then I mentally collapsed. Luckily I managed to rush through and only had to guess on the last question, but the lesson is: even on a section you’re more confident about, you still need to manage your pacing carefully.
DI (Data Insights)
I didn’t score well here, so I won’t say too much. I basically finished the OG and also bought the DI Review. For TPA and MSR, I watched Dustin’s videos. My MSR accuracy was consistently pretty high, and I found that the following person’s approach is quite similar to what Dustin teaches, so I’ll share it as a reference. Just note that the demo questions are from PP2, so avoid watching if you don’t want spoilers: “How to Attack a Full GMAT Multi-Source Reasoning Set from an Official (Focus Edition) Practice Exam” by MyGuru Tutoring.
Additional Tips
On mindset: I think you should push hard during practice (but quality still matters — if you really have to choose between quantity and quality, choose quality). During the actual exam, though, you should go in thinking “if it doesn’t go well, that’s fine.” I was so nervous during my second attempt that I was practically shaking during the exam, and I performed worse than in practice. The night before my first and second attempts, I was cramming and too anxious to sleep. Before my third attempt, I had sushi and scrolled Instagram all evening — completely relaxed. For someone who tends to get nervous like me, that made a real difference.
I compiled notes on things I didn’t know, wasn’t familiar with, or frequently got wrong, and reviewing those in the hours before the exam was quite helpful. About two hours before the exam, I also did some timed error questions as a warm-up in addition to reviewing my notes. In the early stages of prep you don’t need to time yourself, but as you progress you should gradually add time limits. Once you’re comfortable, keep tightening the window until you can consistently finish within two minutes per question. As for JJ, aside from Q, the main value is getting a general sense of what to expect — don’t over-rely on it.
On section order: the teachers generally say to start with your strongest section. I originally planned to do Q first, but my Verbal kept getting derailed on PP mocks because the opening questions were so hard that both my pacing and confidence would collapse. So I decided to do V first (even though, looking at my third attempt scores, V ended up being my best section anyway).
Final Thoughts
Studying for the GMAT is painful, but it’s one of the few things after entering the workforce that has a clear path and a structured way to train. So keep telling yourself to train hard and seize the opportunity. Give it your all during practice, and on test day, let go and trust the process. Wishing everyone success.
Want to learn more about GMAT prep strategies? Contact Dustin GMAT for a free consultation.
