Its ironic that, I decided to create a blog around the 2nd anniversary of my GMAT test. I wanted to give people more confidence in taking the GMAT. Anyone who knows me, will easily admit, I am not Albert Einstein. Getting a 730 for GMAT, may not be extraordinary. But to me, it was, especially considering the fact that I had no intention to write GMAT, till a month and a half before I actually booked the test. To me, it was all about strategy and time management. If I could get a 730, someone who has a lot more time and is more dedicated, can and should get 750+. I decided to write GMAT, when I was in the middle of an internship at GE Energy. Now don't get me wrong, GE is a wonderful place, just that they don't trust interns enough to make them do any important projects. Also what is the use in giving someone a major project if they are going to leave in 6 months. Alright enough digression and back to GMAT. In the below post, wherever I use 'OG' it means "The offical guide to GMAT, 11th edition". The post below, may appear to be discontinuous. I apologize for that. Its mainly because its copy pasted from various posts.
My scores
Quant 49(90 percentile)
Verbal 41(93 percentile)
Final score 730(97 percentile)
First let me start with the exam.
Analysis of an argument went well.......but analysis of an issue.... I am sure the person evaluating it...will come back and reduce my score by say 100 if he could.
Quant - the first 5 questions took 15 mins straight. They were getting real tough as i moved on. Especially the 5th, i didnt even understand the question so i just picked one out of the two which looked logical. I think the data sufficiency questions were easier than the problem solving ones. I did not get a chance to read properly the last 3 questions as i had just 1 min left. I normally used to finish quant well before the stipulated time in all the practice tests. But when it came to the real thing, i guess i didn't do that much of a good job. I dont regret spending much time on the first questions though.
I normally suck at permutation and combination as well as probability. Fortunately for me there was not even a single question from these sections.....or maybe there was 1...dont remember. I normally used to get around 50 for verbal...but got only 49 in the real test...but i am not complaining...i am more than happy about my score!
Verbal section......all credit to OG. I haD done the whole verbal section esp sentence correction atleast twice....and that helped to a great deal. I also made good use of the SC tips thread and the spidey notes. Please make sure u do read the OG thoroughly,u wont regret it. The whole verbal section went decently except maybe the RC part. There was one passage where I felt like I wanted to meet the person who wrote it so that i can ask him or her what was actually meant. I cud make no sense from it and there were 4 questions from it......
I had never even seen a score above 32 in verbal on any of my mock tests. So it came as a pleasant shock to me seeing 41. I guess luck has a major role too. There were 4 questions which i had seen before somewhere and I knew the answer. This helped me save time and dedicate more time to the other questions. Verbal section was finished comfortably with almost 2 mins to spare.
My preparation
I started studying in the earlier part of March, actually after I had booked my GMAT date. My mock test scores are
Powerprep 660(no preparation)
Powerprep 650(2 weeks ago)
Powerprep 700(4 days before the exam)
Kaplan 1 - 550
Kaplan 2 - 550
as you can see my highest was my GMAT real test. My normal accuracy rate was 80%. I had made an excel sheet to calculate my accuracy. It kinda peaked at the middle and then went down for some wierd reason.
I have read through in detail, the OG atleast twice. The verbal section atleast thrice. One thing I cant stress enough. Its more important to go through the analysis of the tests than actually doing it. If you dont know where you made the mistake, how will you not 'fix' it the next time a similar question comes. I used to dedicate around 2 hours writing down all my mistakes in a small note book. The next time I took a test, I followed the same process and used to compare whether I was repeating mistakes. Fortunately by the end of March, I realized that I was not repeating mistakes.
I dont like Kaplan. Infact when I wrote GRE, I blame Kaplan for my bad performance. I am not saying Kaplan is bad.........but it confuses you. The method of explanation rather approach sometimes contradicts what OG would tell you. An example is following the rules....normally I had studied that in a sentence correction question, if there is a choice that contains 'Whether' and another choice that contains 'If', 'whether' can be chosen over 'IF' and you would get the answer correct. But in Kaplan test 2, I got an answer wrong with whether and the right choice was shown to be the one containing IF... these things confuse u..so i never even bothered to see the answer explanation. Kaplan is good, just to motivate u..it demoralizes one so much that u start studying..hoping not to waste the 250$ paid for the test.
I cant stress more the importance of following one set of reasoning for everything.Please do stick to one approach for dealing with CR. I did face a situation in the test where I started supporting one argument and 2 paragraphs later, I was contradicting myself. I had to go back and correct whatever I wrote. So its always a good idea to take a side before you start writing 'Analysis of an argument'.
On the advice of my roomate, I stopped studying 3 days before the exam, and that kinda kept me fresh when i finally wrote it. I hope this is detailed enough. if anyone needs any more info...please do ask...i will try to answer them if i can....
I hope this helps
This is a useful link
http://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-sentence-correction/35481-sc-tips.html
My critical reasoning went so bad that if I were to go back and grade it myself, I would have given it a 3, but fortunately the folks who graded it, thought it was worth more and gave it a 5/6.
Without these 2 books, I would have never made it.
These are really useful links
http://daveformba.blogspot.com/
http://www.beatthegmat.com/
http://www.urch.com/forums/
My strategy
This may look redundant but still. Like I mentioned earlier, I did not have much time to study and so I devised a plan. Study OG 11 in detail for the verbal and quant sections. Do not waste time on Analysis of an issue and argument until the last week. I was planning on looking into Princeton into helping me with this.
I used to go to my office at 6 in the morning and study until 8.30. There was noone around to bother me so it went real smooth. Also for some weird reason, I felt that studying in a place thats not my home, gave me a better opportunity to understand how I would perform in an alien environment like the GMAT test place. Also being in the office did not provide me with easy access to my refrigerator. I knew I was going to be depressed by the end of my prep, I did not want to be fat and depressed.
I would do 30 questions from Verbal and 30 from quant in a timed fashion. I would then spend an hour correcting my so called test. I would also occasionally visit the GMAT forums and look at certain questions people posted and try to answer them. There is a danger involved in doing this. Some people have this tendency to post really tough questions that will never be asked for GMAT. This ends up making you really tense. I fell prey to this a couple of times but later on took a resolution to have a 'To hell with it' attitude towards such posts and if such a question does come, I would call it tough luck and just pick an answer at random and proceed to the next question. No sense in wasting precious time over such questions.
I spent more time on analysis sometimes, than I ever did on a test. By the end of the month, I started recognizing patterns with the reasoning. To identify such patterns, it is really important to focus on just 1 book and not many. Each major publisher follows a particular strategy and you definitely do not want to get confused reading a myriad of logic. The little notebook that I used to write down my mistakes, even though it was painful initially, helped a lot towards the end. The toughest part for folks who have not sat in a classroom or taken a test in years, is sitting through it. I did not realize that I had lost my patience over the years to sit in a chair doing the same thing for more than 1 hour. It was absolute torture when I started taking mock tests to sit through the whole thing. So my advice to folks who think like, is to take every possible break. There are breaks between each section. Take a restroom break, wash your face and then only return. No one is going to give you an admit to Stanford just coz you finished the exam in record time. I took no breaks for my GRE and I failed. I took every possible break for GMAT and I was more successful. Eventually I never did finish the Princeton section for AWA as I had a green belt certification exam in the first week of April and so I never did spend a week. I just went through the whole thing in a day and wrote AWA. My undergrad IE degree provided me with enough 'hot air' skills to write through AWA. The more tests you take the better.
I hope this was detailed enough. If you do have further questions, please do ask
Best of luck to all GMAT aspirants
My scores
Quant 49(90 percentile)
Verbal 41(93 percentile)
Final score 730(97 percentile)
First let me start with the exam.
Analysis of an argument went well.......but analysis of an issue.... I am sure the person evaluating it...will come back and reduce my score by say 100 if he could.
Quant - the first 5 questions took 15 mins straight. They were getting real tough as i moved on. Especially the 5th, i didnt even understand the question so i just picked one out of the two which looked logical. I think the data sufficiency questions were easier than the problem solving ones. I did not get a chance to read properly the last 3 questions as i had just 1 min left. I normally used to finish quant well before the stipulated time in all the practice tests. But when it came to the real thing, i guess i didn't do that much of a good job. I dont regret spending much time on the first questions though.
I normally suck at permutation and combination as well as probability. Fortunately for me there was not even a single question from these sections.....or maybe there was 1...dont remember. I normally used to get around 50 for verbal...but got only 49 in the real test...but i am not complaining...i am more than happy about my score!
Verbal section......all credit to OG. I haD done the whole verbal section esp sentence correction atleast twice....and that helped to a great deal. I also made good use of the SC tips thread and the spidey notes. Please make sure u do read the OG thoroughly,u wont regret it. The whole verbal section went decently except maybe the RC part. There was one passage where I felt like I wanted to meet the person who wrote it so that i can ask him or her what was actually meant. I cud make no sense from it and there were 4 questions from it......
I had never even seen a score above 32 in verbal on any of my mock tests. So it came as a pleasant shock to me seeing 41. I guess luck has a major role too. There were 4 questions which i had seen before somewhere and I knew the answer. This helped me save time and dedicate more time to the other questions. Verbal section was finished comfortably with almost 2 mins to spare.
My preparation
I started studying in the earlier part of March, actually after I had booked my GMAT date. My mock test scores are
Powerprep 660(no preparation)
Powerprep 650(2 weeks ago)
Powerprep 700(4 days before the exam)
Kaplan 1 - 550
Kaplan 2 - 550
as you can see my highest was my GMAT real test. My normal accuracy rate was 80%. I had made an excel sheet to calculate my accuracy. It kinda peaked at the middle and then went down for some wierd reason.
I have read through in detail, the OG atleast twice. The verbal section atleast thrice. One thing I cant stress enough. Its more important to go through the analysis of the tests than actually doing it. If you dont know where you made the mistake, how will you not 'fix' it the next time a similar question comes. I used to dedicate around 2 hours writing down all my mistakes in a small note book. The next time I took a test, I followed the same process and used to compare whether I was repeating mistakes. Fortunately by the end of March, I realized that I was not repeating mistakes.
I dont like Kaplan. Infact when I wrote GRE, I blame Kaplan for my bad performance. I am not saying Kaplan is bad.........but it confuses you. The method of explanation rather approach sometimes contradicts what OG would tell you. An example is following the rules....normally I had studied that in a sentence correction question, if there is a choice that contains 'Whether' and another choice that contains 'If', 'whether' can be chosen over 'IF' and you would get the answer correct. But in Kaplan test 2, I got an answer wrong with whether and the right choice was shown to be the one containing IF... these things confuse u..so i never even bothered to see the answer explanation. Kaplan is good, just to motivate u..it demoralizes one so much that u start studying..hoping not to waste the 250$ paid for the test.
I cant stress more the importance of following one set of reasoning for everything.Please do stick to one approach for dealing with CR. I did face a situation in the test where I started supporting one argument and 2 paragraphs later, I was contradicting myself. I had to go back and correct whatever I wrote. So its always a good idea to take a side before you start writing 'Analysis of an argument'.
On the advice of my roomate, I stopped studying 3 days before the exam, and that kinda kept me fresh when i finally wrote it. I hope this is detailed enough. if anyone needs any more info...please do ask...i will try to answer them if i can....
I hope this helps
This is a useful link
http://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-sentence-correction/35481-sc-tips.html
My critical reasoning went so bad that if I were to go back and grade it myself, I would have given it a 3, but fortunately the folks who graded it, thought it was worth more and gave it a 5/6.
Without these 2 books, I would have never made it.
| I definitely felt that the quant section was tougher for the real test than anything I ever did. But then there are other factors also that might have made me feel like it was more tougher..like pressure....tension...etc. The first five questions..... i really thought they were tough... no actually its more than that....the first 10 questions were real tough......the rest were all OG standard. Then again u have to remember that..its not the method that is tough. My inexperience mite be the factor that made me take almost 2-3 mins to just understand the question. I was real lucky in the fact that there was no permutation and C or Probability questions asked. Never get tense seeing a question that u initially think u dont know. I was confident that i wud take GMAT again and again until i get a good score. Therefore i never cared whether i thought a question was too tough...once u read it thoroughly...its easy to understand. U can approach GMAT in 2 ways... (1) read lots and lots of stuff (2) concentrate on some stuff...but learn that in depth. I barely studied for a month..so i cud afford only approach 2. There I am sorry i really dont know other good sources for math. |
These are really useful links
http://daveformba.blogspot.com/
http://www.beatthegmat.com/
http://www.urch.com/forums/
My strategy
This may look redundant but still. Like I mentioned earlier, I did not have much time to study and so I devised a plan. Study OG 11 in detail for the verbal and quant sections. Do not waste time on Analysis of an issue and argument until the last week. I was planning on looking into Princeton into helping me with this.
I used to go to my office at 6 in the morning and study until 8.30. There was noone around to bother me so it went real smooth. Also for some weird reason, I felt that studying in a place thats not my home, gave me a better opportunity to understand how I would perform in an alien environment like the GMAT test place. Also being in the office did not provide me with easy access to my refrigerator. I knew I was going to be depressed by the end of my prep, I did not want to be fat and depressed.
I would do 30 questions from Verbal and 30 from quant in a timed fashion. I would then spend an hour correcting my so called test. I would also occasionally visit the GMAT forums and look at certain questions people posted and try to answer them. There is a danger involved in doing this. Some people have this tendency to post really tough questions that will never be asked for GMAT. This ends up making you really tense. I fell prey to this a couple of times but later on took a resolution to have a 'To hell with it' attitude towards such posts and if such a question does come, I would call it tough luck and just pick an answer at random and proceed to the next question. No sense in wasting precious time over such questions.
I spent more time on analysis sometimes, than I ever did on a test. By the end of the month, I started recognizing patterns with the reasoning. To identify such patterns, it is really important to focus on just 1 book and not many. Each major publisher follows a particular strategy and you definitely do not want to get confused reading a myriad of logic. The little notebook that I used to write down my mistakes, even though it was painful initially, helped a lot towards the end. The toughest part for folks who have not sat in a classroom or taken a test in years, is sitting through it. I did not realize that I had lost my patience over the years to sit in a chair doing the same thing for more than 1 hour. It was absolute torture when I started taking mock tests to sit through the whole thing. So my advice to folks who think like, is to take every possible break. There are breaks between each section. Take a restroom break, wash your face and then only return. No one is going to give you an admit to Stanford just coz you finished the exam in record time. I took no breaks for my GRE and I failed. I took every possible break for GMAT and I was more successful. Eventually I never did finish the Princeton section for AWA as I had a green belt certification exam in the first week of April and so I never did spend a week. I just went through the whole thing in a day and wrote AWA. My undergrad IE degree provided me with enough 'hot air' skills to write through AWA. The more tests you take the better.
I hope this was detailed enough. If you do have further questions, please do ask
Best of luck to all GMAT aspirants
