The 730-Day Battle: The Longer You Drag It Out, The More Painful It Becomes. How I Overcame Adversity.
Author: inoice (tcice)Board: GMAT
Title: [Experience] (Posted on behalf) First Attempt 730 – The Longer You Drag It, The More Painful It Gets
Time: Thu Apr 6 13:34:13 2017
Exam Score: First Attempt 730 Q51 V36 AWA: IR:6
2017/03/30Educational Background: NCHU ACCT
Preparation Time: March-May 2016 (Training Course)
January-March 2017Study Materials: OG, A2 Handouts, PP, GWD, Kaomanfen, Dustin’s Blog (Highly Recommended)
Foreword
The process of taking the GMAT is truly a mental torment. I started tutoring last March and dragged it out for a whole year before taking the exam. I kept putting off registering because I really wanted to do well on the first try, and I also had over 20 credits to take that semester, so I couldn’t dedicate myself to studying GMAT every day. Later, I realized I had a graduation trip in early April and couldn’t delay any longer, so I registered for the exam at the end of March. Registering created the pressure to study; no matter how busy I was, I’d squeeze in time for GMAT. Preparing for the GMAT is like playing sports; you have to practice every day to maintain that feeling. Everyone, just register first. Once you register, you’ll realize you weren’t short on time before; you were just avoiding it.
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SC
In previous English exams, most questions could be solved by “feel”; you’d plug in the options, and whichever sounded smoothest was the answer. But when I encountered the GMAT, I realized I had no fundamental grammar concepts. Kory’s first class was a real wake-up call; I realized how terrible my English was. My old grammar intuition was completely useless; instead, the options that sounded a bit strange were often the correct answers. In class, Kory systematically builds up all your grammar concepts, but after class, you must remember to regularly review the A2 handouts. They actually contain most of the testable points. Once you start practicing, be careful not to just blindly do questions. The quantity of questions you do isn’t as important as understanding every testable point in every option of every question. A single question might hide several testable points. If you don’t understand even one option, first read the A2 handouts, then look up how Dustin or Ron explain it online. It will be painful and frustrating at first, and you won’t be able to do many questions in a day, but slowly you’ll notice a significant improvement in your accuracy. Finally, don’t keep trying to do new questions. I recommend reviewing the OG multiple times, because people forget, and each time you go through it, you’ll often discover testable points you missed before! Lastly, I highly recommend Dustin’s self-study website; it was a huge help. For example, one question I remember most vividly was: “Starfish, with anywhere from five to eight arms, have a strong regenerative ability, and if one arm is lost it quickly replaces it, sometimes by the animal overcompensating and growing an extra one or two.” Dustin’s explanation was truly brilliant!
CR
Kory’s analysis of CR is very thorough. The problem-solving approaches for each question type and the keywords that often appear in correct options, which he taught in class, turned out to be the most important in actual practice. For someone like me with a limited vocabulary, I relied on Kory’s techniques to solve problems. When I first started practicing, my accuracy in this section was consistently high, so I didn’t touch it for a long time, focusing instead on my weakest sections, SC and RC. But during my final sprint before the exam, I suddenly realized this was my most unstable section. At that point, I went back to review the A2 handouts, retrieved the thought processes I had forgotten, and increased my practice. Slowly, I was able to identify which options were incorrect distractors. Sometimes, even if I didn’t fully understand the question, I could still avoid those plausible-sounding but wrong options, and my accuracy improved. Finally, I recommend checking out Dustin’s self-study website for three articles on what to do when you’re “stuck” on CR; they’re quite helpful!
RC
Initially, this section was probably the most frustrating. Out of 14 questions across four passages, I could often only get 4 or 5 right. In the first class, I had no idea what an entire passage was about; it was almost all unfamiliar words. But watching A2 dissect long and difficult passages using tone shifts and keywords, turning them into easily understandable overall structures, was amazing. A2 is truly brilliant; he loves to crack jokes in class, but every technique he teaches is incredibly useful: main and secondary information, author’s arguments, transitional phrases, etc. Combined with extensive personal practice, you’ll gradually develop sensitivity, knowing which words to pay attention to, which might be testable points, and your accuracy will slowly improve to 70-80%. You must thoroughly understand the A2 handouts. Many concepts and techniques that initially seem unimportant often turn out to be testable points you overlooked. Through these methods, this section actually became my most confident one before the exam. After all, there’s not much variation; the questions are always similar. So, don’t give up even if your initial accuracy is shockingly low, thinking you’ll rely on SC and CR to compensate. This section might become your most stable one by the time of the exam. Finally, vocabulary size isn’t the most important thing. My vocabulary is truly pitiful; I often only understood one or two out of four passages, but with these methods, you can still arrive at the correct answers.
Q
I really liked KH’s teaching. He can help you quickly and completely rebuild those long-forgotten math concepts in the shortest amount of time. I suggest that if your math is already pretty good, you might not need to do the OG. Instead, directly do the 20 GWD sets KH recommends. After completing them, if you consistently get fewer than five questions wrong per set, you should generally be able to score 50 or above. GMAT math isn’t really about difficulty; it’s about carefulness, especially for DS questions. You must clearly understand the initial conditions. I started doing Jijing (exam review) two days before the test and found its help to be only moderate. Although I was lucky enough to encounter a few questions during the exam, I still recalculated them because the answers from Chinese netizens aren’t necessarily correct. I’d say Jijing is a way to feel more at ease, but not a way to get a high score. It’s probably like going to pray, haha.
IR
A week before the exam, I did ten questions a day. After completing all 50 questions, I could generally score above average. When encountering overly verbose or annoying questions, it might be better to skip them and save time for other questions.
AWA
A week before the exam, memorize the templates, review the “seven deadly sins,” and practice one essay a day. You generally won’t have too many problems.
Exam Review (Jijing)
The day before the exam, I reviewed the RC and Q Jijing on Chasedream. During the test, I seemed to encounter two RC passages, but the help was really limited. After all, Jijing are fragmented; they can only give you an overall structure and aren’t entirely accurate. When you encounter them in the exam, you’ll just feel like “this Jijing seemed to appear,” but that’s about it; the help for the answers is very, very limited. For Q, the help was greater, as you can indeed encounter a few identical questions. But it’s really just those few, and you still have to calculate them again because some netizens’ recalled questions aren’t complete; there might be an extra condition in the actual exam, and the answer will often be different. I’ll emphasize again, Jijing is like praying; it just gives you peace of mind.
Conclusion
This past year has truly been painful. There was always a lingering worry, a feeling that I should be studying for the GMAT, preventing me from fully engaging in anything else. I advise all students: better a short pain than a long one. Be brave, register, push hard, plan your daily schedule, and I believe the final results will be quite good. After all that hard work, seeing 730 pop up on the computer screen will truly be one of the most exhilarating moments of your life, haha. To be able to score 730 on the first attempt, I really highly recommend Dustin’s self-study website. Since I took the exam so long after my tutoring, I had forgotten quite a lot, and that website helped me regain many concepts. I hope students who haven’t seen it yet will really take the time to read every article. The YouTube public lectures are equally recommended! Although I wasn’t taught by Dustin in class, I’m truly grateful to Dustin!
