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