Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

Hi Everyone,

Well, I did it! The GMAT beat me initially, but I bounced back and got my 700+ score. I feel I need to write how I did it since I really appreciated those who wrote similar reviews; I found your reviews quite insightful. I apologize a head of time, this post will not be well written or organized, sorry!

It's been a long journey. I started to study for the beast back in Februray 2009. I used the Kaplan Premier book and the Official Guide for about 6 weeks, wrote the two GMATPrep tests and got 610 and 640. As I'm aiming for a top 5 school, my goal was 700+. Since I wasn't close to a 700, I simply didn't feel confident that I could get my 700 and so I cancelled my test appointment that was scheduled for sometime in April. Work got busy and life moved on for a few months, but I always had the GMAT in the back of my mind. In September, I decided that it was time to get back on the GMAT-bandwagon and hit the books. In October I scheduled my date for mid-December 2009, giving me enough time to go through all the new material. After reading many posts in this forum, I decided to go with Manhattan GMAT this time. I ordered all of their books (the complete set). I actually followed their 9-week (8 week?) course curriculum as if I was taking their course. This way I had a schedule and targets to reach each week. I personally thought that the books were great (please keep reading, because that's not my final assessment of MGMAT) - especially the Math stuff. As geeky as it may sound, I actually enjoyed studying for the math... Looking back, I probably spent 60-70% of my time on the math and 40-30% on verbal. I was taking one MGMAT test per week, etc. and had a great routine. I studied like mad - 4/5 weekday evenings and every weekend. I was doing better and better each week on the MGMAT tests and felt great. By the end I was hitting mid-700s. However, I was never able to reach 700 on the GMATPrep software. But since I was doing so well with MGMAT, I was quite confident going into the test. On test day, I was more nervous than I had ever been before. I punched out the AWA and felt great so I just jumped right into the math. There were definitely some questions that I felt I should have been able to get, but I felt that way when I was doing the MGMAT tests and still did well, so I thought I was okay. Because the adrenalin was pumping, I still felt great after the math section - so I jumped into the verbals (mistake) and thought I was doing well (I wasn’t). Much to my dismay, out popped the 580 (Q42 V27). I was crushed. I was so crushed that I sought insight from this forum by posting my (short) story and plea for help here: http://www.beatthegmat.com/700s-in-practice-but-580-on-the-real-gmat-please-help-t49775.html

So, this is what happened since the 580.

I didn’t give up. I took one month off (January) and with the encouragement of some close friends, I determined that I was going to try again. Since I’m in management consulting and travel each week from home base to the client site (right now that’s NYC), I started to look at all the different test prep companies I could potentially use to help boost my score. After a lengthy evaluation process and I determined that private tutoring was the right fit for me. I called up Charles Biblios (yes, the GMAT Ninja) to see if he could meet me for lunch. I was impressed and convinced that he knew his stuff; we started two weeks later. I basically did everything and anything Charles told me to do. This time around, my study regime was completely different. I didn’t open an MGMAT book once. I did (re-did for the most part) all of the Official Guide questions for quants. For verbals (RC, CR), I was prescribed LSAT! Since verbal was obviously my weak point, I wanted to focus on my RC and CR skills (I thought I was good at SC). I’ll try to list out the things that I think made the difference this time around:

1. Charles Biblios. He was great. Super smart, a great teacher and an all around nice guy. Check out his website here: www.gmatninja.com. He was flexible even with my crazy work hours and travel schedule. I am 100% confident that I wouldn’t have been able to break 700 without his insight and homework regimen. All of his recommendations and prescribed homework was exactly what I needed. Thank you Charles!
2. LSAT Tests for my verbals. Charles had me write LSAT tests and we’d go over my results each week to try to find patterns or at least something that could point us in some better direction. Unfortunately I was rather random in my mistakes, but I definitely feel like going through the (harder) LSAT questions for both RC and CR was great for me. They challenged me. I think I eventually caught on to the nuances and traps for those types of questions. I also redid (or did for the first time) all of the SC question from the official guides, timed, etc. Charles helped tie up loose ends on the SC as well.
3. Test day routine. This was huge for me. I practiced with the GMATPrep exactly how I did it on test day - the breaks, the granola bar, the banana, the 5-hour energy drink and the jumping jacks (yes, I did jumping jacks at the test center!)
4. No MGMAT, no Kaplan, no Princeton Review (yes, I own all of these books, and they’re not all necessary bad, they’re just not for me apparently). The only resources I used were the official guides (the main one and the two smaller verbal/quant guides), LSAT Material (two books, both from the official LSAT people), Charles’ problem sets and Powerscore’s CR Bible
5. Math: Charles gave me some reeeally good insight on lots of different types of quant questions that helped me get my head around certain concepts. I could basically do most any question and get it right, but my way of doing it was usually the hard way. Charles’ methods changed that. He also gave me problem sets that he compiled/came up with - these were awesome. And having someone to explain my thought process to and then get their insight, or learn how they would do it, was invaluable. I was really happy with the 6 point quant jump.
6. Before I got 580, I thought that there was no value in redoing the GMATPrep tests after one try. I was wrong. Although your score is no longer a 100% true representation of your capabilities (it’s inflated), I still found those tests to be PERFECT for getting my test day routine down (TIMING) and for content. I was SHOCKED with how many new questions I kept seeing, it was great. I did both tests 3 times over a 6 week period. I ended up getting 720 and 730 on the 5th and 6th tests, evidently slightly inflated from my true score. But the types of questions were exactly the same as the real test. I find MGMAT’s math is good, but it focuses too much on stuff that’s not tested very much (again, just my experience).
7. I didn’t bother trying to memorize math rules or formulas this time. I only tried to understand how to do certain questions, without memorizing anything new. (you should have seen the number of flashcards I had memorized before my first attempt! I never looked at them before my second attempt)
8. I bought GMAT Focus this time, all 3 sets. I did one set per day on the three days before my tests. I thought these were amazing. They were tough(er) questions, but brand new (for the most part) and timed. I got 18/24, 22/24 and 20/24 on each of the tests, in that order. All of them giving me the 47-51 quant score interval with 99%+ likelihood (80% confidence internal). I thought they were perfect, for the days leading up to test day to keep me fresh on the quants.
9. I took 3 days off of work right before the test and wrote on a Saturday instead of a Friday this time. I think this was huge too. I wrote a GMAT Prep test and a GMAT Focus on both Wednesday and Thursday, a just a GMAT Focus on the Friday (no test). I was calm, relaxed and my brain wasn’t over-exhausted from work this time around.

So there it is. Hopefully some of this helps some of you. But, it’s finally done! If you have questions, I’ll try to answer. Now on to the apps!

Regards.