How I Scored 790 on the GMAT & Reached the 100th Percentile

As the old version of the GMAT was being sunsetted in 2024, I took the official GMAT to get a sense of how the test had evolved over the years. Was it still up to its old standards? What might the test hint about the new GMAT Focus edition, which today is the only version offered?

I am happy to report that I earned a 790 GMAT score, a comfortable spot at the top of the score charts.

The Secret Behind 790

To achieve the top percentile on the GMAT exam, I practiced what I preach, which is to say, quite simply, I approached the GMAT in exactly the way that I teach my students to approach it. While I cannot realistically reproduce my entire approach in a short blog post, I will summarize it at a 10,000-foot level.

Central to excelling on the GMAT is a framework called ASK that I have developed over the years. What, you might ask, is ASK? ASK is an acronym capturing the three legs that constitute the foundation for acing the test: Awareness, Strategy, and Knowledge.

In terms of relative importance, Awareness ranks at the top of ASK. A well-designed exam puts a premium on a test taker’s reasoning skills rather than simple memorization abilities, so Awareness means understanding the GMAT question’s primary topic and its purpose.

After you read the question through, the most important thing to decipher – BEFORE taking concrete action to solve it – is the purpose behind the question. For example, what at first seems to be a Probability problem may actually be testing your knowledge of Venn Diagrams rather than Probability formulas. You might easily mis-diagnosis said question because its language includes the word “Probability” but not the words “Venn Diagram.” For a question literally asking you to compute Probability, how then do you correctly decipher that it is mainly about Venn Diagrams? That level of awareness comes from understanding the totality of the information provided in the problem.

Over almost two decades of coaching for the GMAT, the most useful thing I have taught my students is that they should NOT start solving a problem until they have read it thoroughly and figured out the Awareness piece.

Once at that point, it is still premature for you to jump into action. The next phase is figuring out the Strategy, i.e., the roadmap (sequence of steps) for solving the problem. In math, Strategy is driven by whether we are dealing with a pure math problem or a word problem – the latter requires applying on appropriate tools to translate (set up) the problem before embarking on math.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is in the very last phase of problem-solving that we invoke and apply Knowledge.

It is true that retaining knowledge (for example, memorizing certain formulas) is important, but if memorizing formulas has been the main thrust of your preparation, you won’t get very far on this exam. Knowledge, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient. Unfortunately, many GMAT courses are overly focused on Knowledge while being largely oblivious to the Awareness and Strategy components. Knowledge is certainly important, but it’s also the easiest thing to obtain, and it makes little sense to spend money on a GMAT course to obtain knowledge that’s readily available elsewhere, for example, in plenty of middle-school and high-school level textbooks. The secret of an exceptional GMAT score (740 or higher) lies in the other two pieces – Awareness and Strategy.

The ASK Framework Applies to All Sections of the GMAT

While the examples I cite above come from GMAT math problems, the ASK framework applies to the other sections of the exam as well.

• That ASK applies to Data Insights should be no surprise because nearly 75% of the DI questions require quantitative reasoning skills.

• For the Verbal section, Awareness and Strategy play an even greater role.

• Reading Comprehension requires very little knowledge – it’s almost entirely a matter of approach.
• Likewise, Critical Reasoning comes down to recognizing the exact question category and applying the appropriate strategy, although given the large number of question categories, memorization of the strategies is likely to be helpful.

Is 100th Percentile a Real Thing?

According to the GMAT score tables published on the official site, mba.com, 790 falls in the top 100th percentile. This may be perplexing at first, because strictly speaking, the 100th percentile is a statistical impossibility. How could I score higher than all (100%) of test takers, because that 100% set of test takers, in fact, includes me – clearly, my score cannot be higher than my own score!

It turns out that GMAT rounds the percentiles to the nearest 0.05. A score in the 100th percentile, therefore, means that the score is higher than 99.95% of all test takers. Those of you who studied for the exam’s Sentence Correction section might object to my statement that “the score is higher than 99.95% of all test takers” and point out that the correct way to state the idea is “the score is higher than the scores of 99.95% of test takers.” And I would agree with that correction while reminding you that Sentence Correction has, unfortunately, been dropped from the GMAT as of February 2024 … so we’ll just have to let this one slip.

Advice for Test Takers Seeking Exceptional GMAT Scores

‍‍Before you undertake serious GMAT study, brush up on basics (the Knowledge piece). If you are rusty on the basics of arithmetic and algebra, here is an excellent resource from Western Texas A&M that is free:

Virtual Math Lab

It will be enough for you to review just the Beginning Algebra section of this site; you don’t need the Intermediate Algebra and College Algebra. (Students enrolled in an Austin GMAT Review course should also listen to our recorded Math Foundations class.)

Once you are ready to tackle actual GMAT problems, I recommend using the GMAT Official Guides over any third-party books. My students at Austin GMAT Review work exclusively with official GMAT materials.

When solving problems from the Official Guides, don’t constrain yourself with a strict time limit per question – time limits are an obstacle to building Awareness. If the time budget on the actual exam is ~2 minutes per question, it’s okay to give yourself twice as much time at this stage. Your primary objectives at this stage are to (a) decipher the purpose, i.e., the question behind the question, and (b) map out the steps needed to solve. Once you have mastered the Awareness and Strategy pieces, speed will improve automatically. Paradoxically, prioritizing speed at first will actually make you slower and/or less accurate.

To excel on the exam, you should solve every question in the Official Guides (and yes, I mean every question) and understand the purpose and strategy behind each.

While the official books are the best source of real GMAT questions, unfortunately, my students consistently tell me that they don’t find the book’s explanations particularly helpful. The explanations are often too complex or hide behind unnecessary jargon that impedes deep understanding. My own students apply the ASK framework and topic-specific strategies that I teach to master the GMAT.

If you have limited financial resources, purchase just the GMAT Official Guides and solve every question therein. Your goal is to solve every question in a way that makes logical sense to you, relying upon the ASK concept rather than the books’ overly complex explanations. It is my hope that the above advice, based entirely on the approach that has helped our students excel, is of value to you as you pursue your own GMAT score in the top percentiles.  

If you can afford to pay for a class, enroll in my in-person GMAT classes if you live in Austin or even within 100 miles of Austin. If you reside in another city or state, you can attend the same classes online via live streaming. Either way, you will be in an environment focused exclusively on the core concepts and strategies for excelling on the GMAT.

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