Beat The GMAT

ig83 · Sun Dec 10, 2006 8:09 am

MY STUDY STRATEGY

Started studying about three months ago. Went through practice problems in the Princeton Review, Kaplan 800, and the 10th edition for Verbal and Math from the GMAT service.

In November, I started to focus on sentence correction, which is my biggest weakness. I downloaded some guides from this website and made flash cards with common sentence correction mistakes and idioms. This helped my verbal score a lot.

Week before the exam, I redid all of the sentence correction questions from the GMAT verbal book and redid the hardest 100 problem solving and data sufficiency questions.

EXAM DAY

Very nervous going into the exam. Didn't sleep the night before, couldn't eat much in the morning. Arrived at the test center an hour early and they wouldn't let me go upstairs. Once I was upstairs I began to feel better.

Exam itself: Writing section was a big boost to my confidence. I had very straightforward questions and found many things to write about (I had never actually practiced this part of the exam). I am very interested in seeing what my scores are for this section but I won't receive them until later this month.

Took my entire ten minute break to compose myself.

Came back for math and was in for a big shock. Very very tough math questions. Math is usually my strength, but after I had answered the first ten or so correctly, the exam became very hard. I was forced to guess on at least three of the math questions (when I say guess, I mean a complete guess). For some of these questions I coudn't even narrow it down to a few answer choices. I tried to recompose myself and ended up finishing the section by answering a few of the really hard questions correctly. One thing that really pissed me off was a question about venn diagrams. I felt confident I knew how to do the quesiton, and kept getting an answer that didn't appear in the answer choices. I ended up picking the answer choice that was closest, but the question bugged me for the rest of the section.

Took a break. Told myself to forget about math. Now I have to have complete focus on Verbal, especially because it's so easy to pick a wrong answer with sentence correction.

Nailed the verbal section. Question after question I kept gaining confidence. My flashcards really helped on this section. I felt that it was almost too easy with sentence correction and reading comprehension. For reading, it was very short passages and I only had one or two tough questions. I didn't study for arguments at all because I had only missed one or two on any of the practice exams. However, on the actual exam I ran into a few tough ones that I could only narrow down to two answer choices.

Anyway, the exm was over. There was absolutely no way I was cancelling my exam. I clicked the mouse and out popped 710 (45 Quant, 42 Verbal). I am very happy with my score. My goal was 700 and I topped that. My only regret is that I did so much better on verbal than math.

PRACTICE EXAM SCORES/DATES

Princeton Review Software
exam 1: 650 August 19
exam 2: 720 Early october
exam 3: 720 Mid october
exam 4: 650 early november

GMAC CD
exam 1: 690 December 1
exam 2: 690 December 5

GMAT: 710 December 11 (45 Quant, 42 Verbal).

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gmat_enthus · Sun Dec 10, 2006 10:54 am

Congratulations. Awesome score.

Thanks for posting your preparation, its really helpful.

All the best for applications, Which year are you planning to apply for?

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ig83 · Mon Dec 11, 2006 10:43 am

Not sure about where to apply yet. I am not applying this year because I just graduated this past May. I'm looking at all of the top twenty programs, still researching them. Is 710 good enough for the best schools with a 3.7 GPA from a top twenty university?

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beatthegmat · Mon Dec 11, 2006 10:51 am

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aim-wsc · Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:02 am

first of all congrats for you GMAT/

you have really cleared your one of obstacle ( ouch!! i just read that dont treat GMAT as your obstacle but the opportunity )
oh no what i see
Eric has posted just before.

this has happened twice in a day Evil or Very Mad

OK as said Eric, Stacy is there/

but for more open discussion about b-schools in general
hit the http://www.beatthegmat.com/viewforum.php?f=22
thread.

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Beat The GMAT

Scored a 710

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