The GMAT and GMATICO

The first thing I did, when starting my GMAT journey was asking people in my network who had done well, how they did it. I was pointed towards existing prep-providers and told to expect spending ~4 months. My experience is that the platforms can take you a long way, but in a very inefficient and expensive manner.

My first exam had all the symptoms of that. I was drilling questions category by category, scoring ~80 for quant in mock exams. However, I only scored 74 on test day, making my score non-competitive for my desired schools. Bummed out by this, I took a break from the GMAT for a while.

As anyone studying for the GMAT knows, the process is expensive. Therefore, I wanted to be thoughtful and deliberate to avoid making the same mistake twice.

My first attempt taught me that even the premium providers seemed too focused on mechanical solutions that were too procedural, making them fail under the time pressure of the real exam. I began believing that if I could internalise the recurring skills beneath the questions, rather than memorising the patterns, the skillset would become much more transferable across unfamiliar problems.

On top of that, the price was impossible to justify. I had to pay 3 figures a month for the full suite of products despite quant being the only section I needed. To make things worse, I felt the analytics layer was quite underwhelming. It made me realize the current GMAT-prep ecosystem wasn't meeting my needs. Thus, I decided to study the official GMAT scorecard as the source of truth and map the quant questions against that the second time around.

The goal was to become capable of understand the underlying logic governing the question so I could identify the sub-category a question was testing and apply the most pragmatic approach.

This meant buying all the available questions and mock exams from GMAC. I spent the time needed to attempt solving each question using reasoning instead of mechanical solutions, and when I lacked the required tools (e.g. 'n choose k' in combinatorics), I logged those questions with a note on how I reasoned for each one.

Towards the end, I set up a tutoring session with my cousin who is a Cambridge Mathematics graduate. The session was highly effective, but what I found most remarkable was his ability to spot "shortcuts" in each single question simply from intuition. As you will see in later sections, it really illustrates how much time and mental effort can be saved from this approach.

It set me up perfectly for some intense days of doing mock exams. Day after day, I could see that the system was working as I progressed from 80 to 89 on the quant section. [See Image].

On test day, I got 84 points on the quant section with three mistakes and scored 675 overall. I felt incredibly relieved and proud that I managed to improve by 10 points within 2 weeks while getting the most bank for my buck.

This closed my GMAT journey. 4 months of inconsistently studying ineffective material from expensive prep-providers led me to 74 points, whereas 1-2 weeks of dedicated study of the foundational elements led me to 84 points with the help from someone who excels at the underlying principles.

GMATICO is what has emerged from this. I have since then shared my story online, and started noticing how many people are in the exact same situation. Therefore, together with my cousin from Cambridge, we have set out to build the tutoring platform I wish I had.