I'm easily the happiest person on earth right now!
I actually envisioned the day that I would write this post, and I'm so excited that I can now write it! My GMAT journey started in June. After my 5-year college reunion, I had an epiphany and that epiphany is that I wanted to get an MBA. The only thing standing in my way was getting a great score on this test. I got a practice book from McGraw-Hill and started trying some of the questions. On my first ManhattanGMAT practice test, I scored a whopping 590. My math raw score was a 39.I was doing extremely well in verbal, but back in June, the quant questions might as well have been gibberish. I was an English major, a former copy writer, and currently work at a publishing company so the verbal came easy to me. I, however, had not been in a proper math course since high school.
Instead of going it alone, I figured I should let the experts help me so I enrolled myself in a ManhattanGMAT 9 week course. I have been eating canned beans for the last few months to make up for the money I lost in paying for it (it's tough out here on a publishing salary. Lol), but it was worth every dollar. Having a formal structure and standard strategy for answering the various question types helped tremendously, and the day I adopted the AD-BCE strategy for answering Data Sufficiency questions was a pivotal moment...
I pretty much followed the ManhattanGMAT curriculum to a T and I also took the two fundamentals of math courses they offer free of charge to students in their 9-week courses. ManhattanGMAT gave me a strategy for virtually every question type and my quant skills improved after developing a solid understanding of the content. My verbal scores also improved. I was already pretty good at Verbal, but taking the class just put me over the top. Recognizing patterns in the SC answer choices is crucial as is developing a strategy for answering each type of CR question. I also used the BTG forums to practice working on my CR skills while I was at work lol.
Fast forward to today....
The essays were pretty straight forward. I didn't spend much time preparing for these so who knows what kind of score I'll get. Here I am just banking on my ability to string together a sentence.
I managed to finish the Analysis of an Argument essay with some time to spare, so I prepared my yellow board before taking my break. I divided each page into four quadrants so I had a dedicated space to work on each question. I also wrote down my time checks on the appropriate pages. When it came time for quant, I had my game face on and I was ready or so I thought. I felt like I was BOMBING quant and started trying to guess the difficulty of some of the questions. Then I said to hell with it -- some of these are experimental and don't count so I shouldn't stress myself out trying to gauge it. I just told myself that if I don't hit my target, I can take it again in a month. About 2/3 into the test, I wound up getting stuck on a question and spent more time than I should have, but I was in a good place because I had managed to bank some time. I think I only ran into one question that I had absolutely NO CLUE how to solve.
Verbal is my strong point, so I figured that this section would give me some breathing room. Boy was I wrong. I don't know if I started losing stamina and focus or if the questions were genuinely just harder than what I had practiced with, but the verbal felt like a pressure cooker. I got an extremely long scientific passage that just did not sink in. On one question, I went through all of the answer choices to do a process of elimination and wound up finding reasons to eliminate all of them. It was a mess. Lol. That passage totally demoralized me and I resigned myself to getting a low score. I wound up spending more time than I should have on that passage so I had to pick up the pace if I were going to finish with any dignity. I remember breezing through the next CR and SC questions and wound up with one last technical passage. I managed to read it and take notes on it at the speed of light because I finished the entire verbal section with 5 minutes to spare.
Feeling dejected, demoralized, and beaten up by the GMAT, I hit the report score option, clicked next, and then BAM! 47 Quant, 42 Verbal, 730 total. WOOT! Now I'm walking on air. I went from a 590 (in practice) to a 730. Yes!
So here's a chart of my progress
MGMAT CAT #1 ---- 590 (39 Quant, 32 Verbal)
MGMAT CAT #2 ---- 630 (39 Quant, 37 Verbal)
MGMAT CAT #3 ----- 680 (47 Quant, 36 Verbal)
MGMAT CAT #4 ---- 710 ( 44 Quant, 42 Verbal)
GMAT Prep # 1- --- Accidentally deleted
GMAT Prep # 2 -- - 710 (44 Quant, 42 Verbal)
GMAT Prep # 3 ---- 680 (41 Quant, 42 Verbal)
GMAT Prep #4 --- 650 (42 Quant, 38 Verbal) - I took that one at 9 PM. By the time I got to the end of verbal I just guessed so I could go to sleep)
Taking practice tests made all the difference for me. It's important to get the content down and practice questions in the OG, but synthesizing all of your strategies and knowledge by taking practice tests really prepared me for the real thing. The experts on the forums always stress that reviewing the problems you do is probably more important than doing them in the first place and I agree. There were a few questions that I got on the real test that were almost identical to some that I had seen in practice. Only the values had changed. Because I had reviewed them backwards and forward, I knew how to answer them quickly and without fear.
Also, changing my frame of thinking helped a lot. When I first started studying, I kept harping on the fact that I wasn't strong in Quant, but when I started telling myself that I was in fact strong, just rusty, I started improving. My score isn't anything like the 50Qs I've seen on here, but relative to my pre-study score, my 47 will do just fine.
Now it's time for a dance party:
