How I Got a 770 Score on the GMAT - YouTube

hi i'm erica i spend most of my time working  as the sat act senior curriculum manager here  

at magoosh but i'm also a gre gmat  expert with 99th percentile scores  

years of experience teaching and tutoring and some  youtube videos that you may very well have seen  

in today's video i'm going to talk about how i got  a 770 on the gmat the first and only time i took  

it now your gmat study experience may not look  exactly like mine more on that later in this video  

but these are strategies that anyone can apply to  get a top score so the first thing that i did to  

get a 770 on the gmat was to really understand  how the test is designed and scored now it may  

surprise some of you to know but your score on the  gmat isn't so much a measure of how many questions  

you miss on test day but more a measure of the  difficulty of the questions you miss on test day  

and specifically your score is meant to represent  the difficulty at which you are missing 50 percent  

of the questions you see and getting the other 50  right and the way that the test does this is that  

the algorithm will keep feeding you harder and  harder questions until you're missing half of them  

and if you're missing more than half it'll lower  the difficulty but the big takeaway is is that  

you are supposed to miss questions the test is  designed to push you until you do now true at the  

99th percentile the test is starting to run out of  questions so you're probably not going to miss 50  

of the questions that you see on test day if you  are in the very tippy-tippy top of test scores  

but perfection is not required for a perfect score  you can still miss questions as long as they're  

at a very high difficulty level so i know that i  missed questions on test day and i intentionally  

missed questions on test day in order to keep the  pace so rather than agonizing over a problem that  

i wasn't gonna get right anyway and then messing  myself up for time later i accepted that i was  

gonna miss the question and moved on because i  knew i didn't need to get it right to get the  

score i wanted little side note gmat scoring is  deeply misunderstood especially when it comes to  

section scoring which is super different between  quant and verbal so let me know in the comments if  

you'd like a video specifically on that subject  the second thing i did to get a 770 on the gmat  

was to know where to focus my study now again  you can miss questions and get a high score on  

the gmat and i did but those questions were at  a particularly high difficulty level if you're  

missing questions at a lower difficulty level you  run the risk of the algorithm artificially setting  

your level lower to match those questions so even  if you can get questions in the high 700s right  

you won't get the opportunity to because the test  won't show them to you so what i did to counter  

that was to focus on the easiest questions i was  missing so anything that i was missing in the 500s  

or the 600s were the things that got my attention  and i prioritized those over the questions in the  

700s because i knew that those were ones i was  allowed to miss now if you're aiming for a score  

in the high 700s and you're missing questions in  the 500s and 600s i really recommend you go check  

out our video on how to avoid an average gmat  score for more tips the next thing i did to get  

a 770 on the gmat was probably the hardest  and that was to try to never make a mistake  

more than once now i didn't do this perfectly but  i really really tried and part of my rationale was  

that i didn't want to waste my time what's the  point of making a mistake 10 times when i can  

learn the same lesson from making it once but more  important than that is that i didn't want to build  

any bad habits because every time you make the  same mistake you're making it more likely that  

you're just going to follow your habit and do it  on test day so instead of drilling and drilling  

and drilling every time i made a mistake i would  stop and i would spend as much time as i needed to  

to come up with a strategy that would prevent me  from making the same mistake in another question  

so part of that is coming up with what can i  recognize in another question that might cause  

me to make the same mistake and then what can i  do to avoid that in that question then i would  

review those strategies periodically as a reminder  so again i didn't fall into that same trap again  

now this sounds like it'll take a lot of time but  because it's taking the place of repeated drilling  

it actually ends up saving you quite a bit of  time and you get a ton more mileage out of it  

let me know in the comments if you'd like a video  on how to use this study strategy effectively i've  

seen it work miracles for students who've been  stuck in plateaus the final thing i did to get  

a 770 on the gmat was to study consistently and i  hinted earlier that your gmat study might not look  

all that much like mine and that's because  i had a major advantage here i was already  

working in test prep when i decided to take the  gmat and that means that i was literally working  

dissecting gmat problems for a living every day  now this is not meant to discourage you this type  

of volume is not at all necessary and definitely  not encouraged if you have other responsibilities  

like work or school but the regularity is  something that i encourage because i was seeing it  

every day i was able to build on prior knowledge  things i remembered from the day before to build  

connections recognize patterns identify common  traps and so on now this makes me a much better  

gmat teacher but it also made me a much better  gmat test taker so the takeaway here is not to do  

what i did and try to get a job in test prep but  instead to try to break up your study throughout  

the week that way you can more effectively build  on what you've learned before and take advantage  

of your study time more effectively and that's  how i got a 770 on the gmat now if you're thinking  

about aiming for a 770 gmat score yourself i  highly recommend checking out our video on average  

gmat scores for top business schools for advice  on how to pick a score goal that's right for you  

spoiler alert it probably isn't a 770. and if  you're looking for more resources on the gmat or  

on b-school admissions in general i recommend  checking out the links in the description from  

magoosh let us know if this video helped you by  liking or commenting and subscribe for more videos  

from me and the other gmat experts at magoosh  thanks for watching and see you in the next video