GMAT Strategy

Hello all,

I thought I would do a quick presentation and ask a couple of questions as I am preparing to dive into the world of GMAT preparation. No promises that I will keep this as a regular update thread as I am notoriously bad at these things.

For quick presentation I am a 28 years old French guy, currently working in a management position in Germany for an FMCG as a Swiss expat. Before that I graduated from one of the top French business school, so already have some business school background. Overall, I have two main reasons for wanting to pass the GMAT:
1. First one, I usually try to have something mildly challenging going on outside of work, I think it's healthy not too spend all of my thinking time on work related topic. My last endeavor was very interesting MOOC from Harvard on computer Science (CS50 - highly recommended), and I figured that doing GMAT for the next 6 months would be an interesting new challenge.
2. I am potentially interested in the notion of getting an MBA from a top ranking university, and I am even more interested in knowing if I could get accepted. The logical first step to this is finding out if I can get a high enough GMAT for it to even be an option. That leaves me some time to figure out if I really want to pursue it as an option.

Now for the question part!
I have been looking around the various sources available to determine what would be the best approach for me to study for the test. Overall I would say that I can spend around 10H per week on this. I could ideally do more, but I am not yet sure I will have the willpower to commit to more as that would require shutting down a lot of my other activities, which also why I have booked 6 months for this instead of the 3 people usually go for, if needed I will be able to use the 3 extra months (though I'll try not to).

After a bit of frenetic Amazon shopping, I ended up with the following books: Kaplan Premier, Princeton Review, MGMAT (8 books) and OG (3 books). Obviously it is a bit too much, I should have researched the forums before going on a shopping spree.... But after a bit of research I have narrowed down my study plan to:
1st month - General GMAT research and Kaplan premier work, almost 100% on Quantitative
2nd & 3rd Months - MGMAT + OG roughly one book a week

What would be your perspective on this? Any other suggestions?
I did take my first Kaplan CAT yesterday, and got 660 with something like 94th percentile in Verbal and 60th percentile in Quantitative. I won't go in a detail breakdown, as this poste is already way too long, but it did bring out some very interesting learning I think. Main point is that it seems a lot higher than what I was expecting considering I haven't done math's in quite a while now. So was wondering if it would make sense for me to switch to MGMAT from the get go as the books really seem well constructed, what are your thoughs?

Target score for D day: 720+
Thanks!!

My first thought is that having scored 660 pretty much cold, you are not all that far from scoring 720, 740 or higher.

For one thing, in verbal there are some basic things that one can do to quickly add points. For instance, when a critical reasoning question asks what can be inferred, if you don't know that the inference you choose has to be definitely true if what is said in the prompt is true, you can waste time and get the wrong answer. As soon as you know that one little thing, you are already closer to a higher speed and a higher hit rate.

One more thing you should probably do is use some official practice CATs to really see what the test is like and gauge your skill level. Test prep company tests are similar to the real thing and yet are not exactly the same. This can lead to two issues. One of them is that in taking them you may not get an accurate sense of how high you can score. The other, possibly even more dangerous, is that you may prepare for test prep company tests rather than preparing for the actual GMAT. Then when you get to the actual test you are like "What on earth is this??" LOL

GMAC makes software called GMAT Prep, which you can download for free from mba.com. Among other things, that software contains two practice CATs that look the same as the real test and tend to generate scores almost exactly the same as those the actual test does. There are also two official practice CATs on a previously released GMAC software package called PowerPrep. Those two PowerPrep tests contain some questions that are in the Official Guide, and don't include an integrated reasoning section. Still they can be useful, maybe especially before you go through the Official Guide. There is a link for downloading PowerPrep here. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/resources

So you can use those official practice CATs, along with test prep company CATs, to see what the test really looks like and how well prepared you are, among other things. It might be a good idea to take one after you have prepared for another week or two. That way you will be somewhat familiar with the material and the question types and kinda ready to hit a CAT with some skill.

By the way, I tend to say make your preparation test and performance driven rather that curriculum driven. In other words I have seen people learn all kinds of concepts and rules and memorize so much stuff, and somehow end up overwhelmed or not that well prepared for the test. Why? Because unlike some tests, the GMAT is not really a test of how much you know. It's more a test of how skilled you are in figuring things out. So use the curricula as a way to increase performance and skill rather than just learning everything they throw at you just because they did.

In other words, prepare some, get more familiar, make sure you know some basic math concepts and grammar rules and then take a CAT. From the results you can to some degree assess where you are strong and weak, what you don't know at all, what it takes to rock this test, and other things like that. Then you can better use the curricula as tools for turning yourself into a GMAT rocking machine.

As far as which books to use first, I am not really sure, your call. I can say this though. You might want to supplement the books with a source of online questions such as one of the various question banks. There's something unique about doing questions on a screen. Even if you were to just do this a little, likely it would add a useful dimension to your preparation.

You're off to a great start!! A 660 is a really strong starting point. My one suggestion would be to do the OG guide questions after going through the MGMAT strategy guides. Get a handle on the strategy and content you will need from MGMAT, then use the OG guide for practice questions.

Since you are aiming for a top score, I would also recomend that you look into Kaplan 800 and the MGMAT advanced quant guide. These will give you practice with the most difficult material. Finally, the last (and one of the most important) parts of GMAT studying is building your mental endurance, so you aren't exhausted by the time you get to the verbal section. In order to do this, take 7-10 full length practice tests under test conditions.

Hope this helps!

I don't want to sound negative but in earlier times Kaplan used to really under estimate your score.. now they seem to have over-compensated for that defect (so the score might be a little inflated).

I would recommend an official test just to get a clearer understanding of your situation.

All things said, GMAT is a wonderful experience I hope you enjoy it!

Hi,

Many thanks for the replies, helped in providing some perspective in some areas.
Overall after looking though the books had to agree that my program seemed a bit too book heavy, with a high risk of repetition. I also reminded myself that as a college student that was at some point doing pretty high level math (all lost deep in the land of forgotten memories) I was always best at learning by practicing. So decided to go with the MGMAT book for (re)learning concepts and the like, hopefully not spending too much time for things that just need to be refreshed, and concentrating heavily on exercises.

Regarding the practice CAT from the GMAC, I did't use it for my first one as I also wanted to use it as a benchmark of how my studying is progressing, on top of 'current status' benchmark. Idea would be to take in 1-2 weeks and see how I am doing in topics I have reviewed in the mean time as well as overall standing. I felt that for a complete first time with no prior training, another test would do just fine in telling me roughly what I need at this point.

So,succint learning from my practice GMAT as I had promised I would do:
1) I suck at timing in Quantitative, had to rush the last 12 questions, not good. I actually spent 8 minutes on one question early on, giving up is not my strong point. On the plus side, this is a fairly easy point to spot and to improve upon with practice.
2) Lots of things I forgot in Quantitative in terms of rules/formula/basics, that's rather good as these can probably be re-learned - strong focus on Algebra needed apparently, geometry is probably in there, and while I still seem to have some good intuition on probabilities do need to review the formulas.
3) Verbal seems suprisingly high. Now I work in english, read in english, watch movies in english, etc. and pretty much use it more than my native language these days (a bit scary if you think about it), but none the less I am still a bit surprised at the result. Though clearly I need to work on SC (30%) rest was more than OK. So at this point I think I won't put too much of an emphasis on this and wait for the next couple of practice test to see how it turns out. If it maintains, perfect I can focus less on this, otherwise I'll incorporate back into the studies.
4) I need more stamina for these things, by the time I was halfway through the verbal I was counting down the questions to the end and wondering how fast I could complete it (20 minutes remaining in the end). Not a problem in Quantitative as time flew by really quickly, but still could feel the fatigue towards the end. Again, not completely negative as this is fairly easy to improve on with practice - I use to do 6h philosophy exams...that was brutal, so I'm pretty sure I can get back to at least acceptable level in that department.

So conclusion big focus on re-learning the basics and doing practice questions, I'll try to do another practice CAT on Friday or Saturday and we'll see how it goes

Thanks again for the words of advice.

Cheers,

Hello,

Though I would post an update - this is a good place as any to keep track of my progress and hopefully help on staying motivated!
By now I've mostly gone through two of the MGMAT books and still need to do some of the practice questions associated in the OG. Also took two additional CATs which is actually what took up most of my time, review included:

second one I took was from the MGMAT, end result 660 (80%) with 42 quant (51%) and 38 Verbal (85%). I was a bit disappointed with the score, but not completely surprised either while I was taking the test I did have the feeling that the Quant section was very tough. Reviewing it confirmed that opinion, while some of the wrong answers were just down to me not having gotten around to reviewing that specific skill set, I did get the feeling that some of the questions were really really tough to solve in two hours. Also had a strange feeling that most answer were taking the 'brut' force approach which obviously doesn't help on time. I did better than the first time on time management as I was a bit more aware of the constraint and the challenge it poses to me, so had less trouble 'letting go' of questions. Verbal I haven't gone through yet to review as it is not my priority.

Third one I took is from the GMAT Prep from GMAC, so first "representative test" of what I should expect - to get a good feeling I also did the whole thing including essay and IR. Result 730 (96%) with Q45(68%) and V46(99%). Obviously very happy with the score, and I will be satisfied if I get that on the real thing. Seems like a good confirmation that I can skip working on verbal for now, will keep practicing through the CATs I take and maybe review the MGMAT book 1 week or so before the real thing. Quantitative is improving a bit which hopefully is a reflexion of the 3 weeks of work so far. Interesting effect that happened though, I got challenged on time once again with about 18 minutes left for the last 15 questions, and no surprise more than half of my wrong answers are in there. I think this is due to the fact that after having practiced a bit already I have reached a point where I understand the questions and the type of solution needed, so I want to do it and there are less 'obvious' questions for me to skip. But I am still lacking the practice to apply the problem solving naturally on seeing the question and keeping the time in check.

Any advice on timing is welcomed, apart from practice that is