I just Beat The GMAT!

Hello everyone. I have posted this debrief on the Manhattan forums as well, I hope it's okay to post it here again.

I wrote my GMAT exam this evening and got a score that I'm extremely happy with. My GMAT journey is a rather peculiar one - my preparation was only 3 weeks long. Because I needed to meet a deadline to submit my score to a B-school and wasn't able to find a suitable date that would provide me sufficient time to practice, I was forced to choose a date only 4 weeks away, and began studying seriously only 3 weeks before the test. I thought I'd share my experience with others who're also having to do such last-minute prep.

I should mention that I'm 19 years old, currently pursuing an under-graduate degree in Economics from New Delhi, India. For my course, my first year in college really stressed on intermediate level Math, so that might have given me a slight edge in Quant on GMAT.

I'm a procrastinator by nature and cannot work until I'm under pressure; with three weeks to go, I certainly was.

I started with the OG 12th edition, completed all questions within one week and a half weeks, and was then left with another week and a half and no more prep material. That's when a friend told me to check out Manhattan and Kaplan. After surveying both websites as well as several forums, I chose Manhattan, and that was ALL I needed.

I bought the 6 CATs and the set of question banks, and that's all I really had the time for (I'm a college student currently doing an internship as well). But I made sure that after every CAT exam, I spent twice the amount of time reviewing each and every question, both the right and the wrong, and tried to figure out how to speed up, how to solve questions using the easiest approach possible etc.

I'd strongly advise everyone else to do the same - you may be able to answer a question correctly, but reviewing your answer and trying to solve the question again without the examination pressure can really help you uncover many secrets. In quant, you discover whole new properties of numbers you were never aware of, you suddenly discover a new property of circles that high school never taught you; and in verbal, you might just come to realize that you've been saying a certain sentence wrong all your life! The Manhattan explanations provide a lot of extra information and tips that are really useful for the real GMAT.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance one should place on reviewing each CAT exam on MGMAT. Because, honestly, I've learned more from these review sessions than I ever learnt from the OG. OG questions tend to be rather easy, except for the ones at the very end of the section, and they mislead you into thinking that the real test would be just as easy. Manhattan has MUCH tougher questions, but after getting accustomed to such questions, I found the quant on the real GMAT a cakewalk.

Also, due to very little time, I couldn't practice Integrated Reasoning at all; in fact, the only practice I really got was from the CATs. I guess that's a mistake I made - in the CATs, my IR score never crossed 4 and I think it would be around the same in the real GMAT too. However, one thing I observed is that the IR section on MGMAT and the GMAT Prep were much, much harder than the IR on the real thing. I don't know if this happened by coincidence in my exam alone or is a general feature.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that you CAN prepare well enough for the GMAT even if you're hard pressed for time. The key is to focus on quality rather than quantity. Solving an extra two hundred questions from OG Quant wouldn't have helped me at all, because most of the questions in OG are quite easy. But doing a relatively small number of tough questions from the MGMAT CATs and question banks did wonders for me. And as it turns out, that is all I really needed; nothing more, nothing less.

2 other minor points. First, when I wrote my first CAT on MGMAT, I noticed I was completely out of stamina by the time I reached the Verbal section. I looked up what to do to improve stamina - the predominant suggestion was to exercise - and I began to go jogging everyday. It helped. By my 3rd CAT (all 6 were taken over the course of one week - the last week) I noticed a visible improvement in my resilience. A combination of exercise, getting used to 3.5 hour long tests, and also healthy eating habits helped. I even carried a bottle of glucose (sold in India under the brand name Glucon-D - it's glucose powder you can mix in water) to the test center and drank half the bottle during the first break and the rest during the second.

Second, I did panic like crazy during quant. I had asked for earplugs, so that shut out all outside noise, and I found myself sitting in front of my computer and hearing only the super-fast thump of my heart, over and over again, unceasing. I tried my best to ignore it and get a grip over myself, I did all the things I had read about on MGMAT articles - I smiled, I stretched my muscles a bit, I did the breathing exercises; but nothing helped at first. What ultimately helped me was to change my way of thinking completely, remind myself that I would score what I deserve on this test, and nothing more and nothing less. So I should just give it my best, but if I get a bad score, that's okay, because I have so many other things to be thankful for in life, and there would definitely be some other path for me. After an interval of 10 questions, the panic subsided. During the break between quant and verbal, I gave myself a further pep talk, and was able to do verbal quite confidently. (It is kind of ironic that my quant score is higher than verbal. I don't know how that happened. Maybe freaking out does help a bit - it gives a push in the right direction.)

I hope someone will find my debrief useful. To summarize, quality is more important than quantity in studying, Manhattan is full of quality (as well as quantity), and Manhattan is the BEST prep tool there is. It prepares you to face the worst, and it makes you feel quite pleasantly surprised when you write the real GMAT.

Good luck to all of you!

Congrats for getting such a good score!! Can you tell us what kind of quant questions did u face in the exam and mainly from which topics? Also,do u think the difficulty level of questions was a notch higher than that seen in OG/GMATPREP?
Uve mentioned u referred to the Manhattan guides;can u tell us which topics from Manhattan quant are very imp?

Thanks,
Shreeraj

Shreeraj,

Thank you very much! The GMAT Quant covered questions on simple algebra, properties of numbers (even, odd, prime numbers, factors etc etc), geometry, word problems, simple statistics...Agh, I'm really not able to remember enough to answer your questions! But broadly, the topics tested were the same as those covered in the OG (difficulty level is a new question altogether)

The quant questions were much, much harder than those found in OG! But don't get misled into thinking they were very tough and time-consuming, they are tough only by comparison. Otherwise they were quite moderate in difficulty level. But the GMAT Prep difficulty level was more or less the same as the difficulty level of the actual GMAT.

I think what happens is that OG gives you a whole bunch of ridiculously easy questions followed by only a smaller number of difficult questions (since the questions are arranged in the order of difficulty). However, if you're in the 650+ range of GMAT score, the easy questions that occupy MOST space on the OG just won't show up on your real exam at all! What you need to focus on would be the tougher questions that OG has very few of. GMAT Prep, on the other hand, being a computer adaptive test, gives you an accurate indication of the average difficulty of the questions you'll be seeing on the real exam. I think the OG is only good to review the topics being tested and start your prep with.

I didn't use any Manhattan guides, but I purchased their test series (6 Computer Adaptive Tests - average difficulty level a bit higher than that of the real GMAT, and the scoring also seems to be quite accurate - I scored between 700 to 740 on my practice tests) and also a series of 9 question banks, with approximately 25 questions each, on the following topics (one question bank for each topic)
Algebra
Fractions, Decimals, Percents
Geometry
Number Properties
Word Problems
Critical Reasoning
Sentence Correction
Reading Comprehension
Integrated Reasoning.

I think that broadly covers the topics tested on the GMAT. In addition to the question banks and tests, under the same package, you gain access to over 400 "challenge" problems - basically real tough problems that help you further hone your Quant skills, although questions of such a high difficulty level rarely occur on the real GMAT.

You probably think that 25 questions per topic may not be sufficient, but the quality of the questions is so great that it is much more than OG will ever teach you.

Many congratulations to you and best wishes for the next phase

Am impressed with the attitude that you have exhibited. I won't like to tweak it and would quote it directly from your debrief- "So I should just give it my best, but if I get a bad score, that's okay, because I have so many other things to be thankful for in life, and there would definitely be some other path for me"

Cheers !

Many congratulations to you and best wishes for the next phase

Am impressed with the attitude that you have exhibited. I won't like to tweak it and would quote it directly from your debrief- "So I should just give it my best, but if I get a bad score, that's okay, because I have so many other things to be thankful for in life, and there would definitely be some other path for me"

Cheers !