I can honestly say that I did not even bother to hope for anything above 750 - my conservative goal was 700, and I would have been very happy with 720. While I knew I had the potential to achieve something higher, I also counted on external factors that would negatively influence my score - a possible backache due to sitting in a unfamiliar chair, for example. I wanted to have realistic expectations so that I would not be too disappointed if I didn't meet a certain challenging goal.
My background and experience likely will not apply to the large majority of GMAT takers, but even if just one person will benefit slightly from anything I'm about to say, then it'll be worth it to share my experience.
My Background
I have a double specialist (that's a double major except more rigorous, to the rest of the world outside University of Toronto) undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics, so I never had any trouble with any of the quant concepts. I bought my official guides (OG and verbal) two years ago, did some of the questions (timed), but had been putting off taking the exam forever. In April this year, I started working flexible part time hours, and decided to finally pursue the GMAT (and consequently the MBA - applications are under way).
For the record, when I did the diagnostic test from the OG 2 years ago, I got "above average" for reading comprehension and sentence correction, and "excellent" for the other sections.
How I Started
After I decided to take the GMAT for real, I spent quite some time deciding on the approach that I should take, while simultaneously doing timed questions from the official guides. I attended free workshops offered by different prep companies, trial classes, etc. Looked up books and reviews on amazon. And of course, browsed beatthegmat for ideas! In the end, I decided not to pay and take a class, because I had a fairly good grasp on the content as a whole, and half the time I would just be sitting in the class waiting for other people to understand. Having said that, I did want more preparation materials than just the OG, and eventually decided on the set of Manhattan GMAT books.
I also downloaded the MGMAT syllabus and loosely followed it, so that I was alternating between different verbal and quant topics, not doing too much of anything at once and getting sick of it.
AWA
I said I had procrastinated for two years, why? Because of the essays. I could not for the life of me write an essay in half an hour - let alone two essays in two half-hours. I searched online and got a grasp of what the structure of the essays should look like (intro, 2-3 points, conclusion, each point in a paragraph - there are many other posts that talk about this in particular). Also, luckily, we're given the topics beforehand, and I knew that the only way for me to beat the essays was to go through every single topic. There are about 300 topics, so I figured that if I went through 10 topics in details every day, I would need a month to go through them all, and that seemed like an attainable goal.
I started this mission of familiarizing myself with all essay topics right around when I started reading the MGMAT materials. For each topic, I would think of at least 2 to 3 points that I could talk about, together with examples. As I've mentioned before, I worked flexible part time hours (and mostly from home), so it was very convenient that I had pretty much all the time I wanted to spend on studying. At the beginning, I would get lazy on some days and do less than 10 topics a day (or skip a day if I had a lot of other stuff to do), but I knew that I didn't want my 30-day schedule to be significantly delayed, and quickly got better at sticking to what I had planned. If I was fairly busy on any day in particular, I would consider doing less studying on other topics, but stuck to the 10-per-day self-imposed essay quota. As time went by, I also became faster at thinking of points to make, as well as more familiar with some of the topics that were foreign to me (issues regarding the arts, etc), and I saw that as an improvement.
I finished outlining all 300 topics in little over a month, and then concentrated on quickly finishing off the rest of the MGMAT syllabus within the next few days.
Study Materials
The only books I used were the MGMAT series (all 8 books) and the official guides. By the time I started the MGMAT series, I had already done over half of the official guide problems, in sequence. Here's a brief note on how helpful I found each book, keeping in mind that it only applied to my background:
OG: get all 3 books, and do each question at least once. Doing REAL questions are very helpful. Two years ago I never bothered to get the quant book because with my very advanced math background, I didn't think I would need it. Then I figured that no matter how well I think I can grasp the concepts, it always helps to go through all official questions. And I was right.
MGMAT:
Sentence correction: yes, this is a must-have for anyone hoping to improve their sentence correction skills. I did the suggested exercises in the OG/VG after each chapter (including the ones that I had done before), and saw that most of my mistakes were about topics that I had not yet covered. It was also because of this that I decided to hold off doing the majority of my practice exams until after I was completely done with the reviews.
Critical reasoning: personally this was not much help to me. I'm fairly logical to start with, and I found that the best way to improve my CR was to do lots of practice and study each individual question that I did wrong, on a case-by-case basis. This way, I eventually learned to identify some of the things that were more subtle to me at the beginning. My revision of CR was more about doing the problem sets grouped by the type of reasoning (ie, strengthening, weakening, inference, etc) - this grouping may or may not have helped me, but I imagine that it would be more useful to someone who's weaker in CR.
Reading comprehension: since I sucked the most in sentence correction and reading comprehension, and I made an improvement in sentence correction, reading comprehension became my suckiest area. The guide wasn't completely helpful to me either - I would have no time to "actively" read by outlining the passage as I go along, and I didn't find this particularly useful either. But, I liked some of the points they have summarized at the end, one of them being making sure that you can account for EVERY word in your answer choice.
I knew every single concept in the quant books, but some of these books were still helpful:
Word translation: I really liked this because it gave some neat time-saving strategies that would be very useful for the more difficult problem, and it also had a good supply of extra practice problems. In general, their strategies can apply to all levels of questions, easy to difficult.
Number properties: again, I knew all the concepts, but it was very nice to see them systematically written out. I also was not familiar enough with this type of GMAT questions in general, so this provided just the extra review and exercises that I needed.
The other 3 quant books: not particularly useful to me - I've known all of these by heart since grade 3, no kidding. But they do look like good review material if you need help in any of these areas.
Practice Tests
Undoubtedly, this was one of the most important components of my preparation, and anyone taking any standardized test should invest a significant amount of effort in practice tests. I took a couple of tests when I first started studying, and then realized that I would be making less mistakes if I took these tests after reviewing all study materials. Hence, I stopped doing full tests and concentrated on getting through the essays and the MGMAT books/problem sets.
After I was through with reviewing everything, I booked the real test for three weeks down the road, and started doing one full 4-hour test each weekday for the next 3 weeks. It's very important to do the 4 hours, including essays - while you don't have to do it for 3 weeks (I was getting very annoyed by the final week and wished I booked the thing for earlier so I could get it over with already :p), I think it's a good idea to do this everyday for at least a week, so it becomes part of your daily routine (like eating and sleeping), and you get used to having to sit through the 4 hours. When I took the first couple of practices before the majority of my revision, I realized that I had a problem with the verbal component, simply because I was getting very tired towards the end and just could not absorb anything I read. Making the test part of my daily routine helped a lot with building the stamina I needed on test day.
The other thing about doing practice tests is that you should take into consideration the time of the day of your real test appointment. My test was at 12:15pm (did not want to do 8am or 6pm, this was the only other option), and I was to arrived 30 minutes prior. I saw a potential problem with the scheduling of my lunch - I needed to either take it at maybe 10:30, or postpone it until after the test. I decided to go with the latter, so for three weeks, I would get up and have a gigantic breakfast. I would then start my 4-hour test at around 12, and have a light meal after that. During my breaks, I would have a sip of water, a 2-minute snack, and use the washroom, just as what I would do on the real test. This is something else that's important to note - you should always try to duplicate real test conditions. Unplug your phones. Come back to the computer a couple of minutes earlier to make sure that you're not late.
A note about AWA: after a couple of practice tests, I stopped writing essays from Kaplan/Princeton Review/Manhattan GMAT/etc. The reason is simple: they're prohibited from using actual GMAT essay topics so they had to make up their own, but we have the real topics. I used a random number generator to randomly pick my topics from the list of real topics, and those would be my essay questions for whatever test I'm taking. I had the PDF file of topics on the top part of my screen, notepad at the bottom, and an online countdown clock on the side. This was a modest duplication of the real split screen for essay questions.
Here's a brief review of the tests that I've taken:
GMATPrep: of course this is a must-have. I took one at the beginning of my preparations and another one three days before the real test. There was a 40-point increase in scores, which gave me a boost of confidence. I would recommend using this software this way, so that you can see how much you've improved, and you have the most accurate estimate of your real score close to the test date.
GMAT past paper exams: these are probably neglected by most test takers, but they're an excellent source of real past GMAT questions. Some of the questions are duplicated in OG, but most are not (or I couldn't tell). They are from a decade ago and tend to be easier than current questions, but I used them mostly for the purpose of practicing more real questions, and building the stamina needed for the 4 hours. The format is also different, so I rearranged the sections so that it was 75 minutes of each of quant and verbal, instead of 6 little sections. I didn't pay much attention to the score, since the questions were easy and scoring mechanism was different (they deduct points for wrong answers, so you're not encouraged to guess).
Princeton Review: I really needed that boost of confidence from GMATPrep, because of other tests that had been giving me really low scores, including some from PR. Their quant sections seemed way too easy (I would finish 20+ minutes before time was up), and some of their verbal answers just didn't feel right, even after I read their explanations (this is where I lost most of my points).
Kaplan: unstable and unpredictable scoring. The quant and verbal questions were okay, with the exception of extremely hard-to-understand RC passages on one of my tests. They also had the weirdest essay topics - I even had trouble identifying whether one was an argument or an issue. (This was when I decided I wouldn't put up with these topics anymore.)
Manhattan GMAT: definitely has the best questions. I agree with most that the quant questions were MUCH more difficult than those on the real test. Nevertheless, they were very good practice. I also liked the verbal sections, and even the essay questions were very similar to real GMAT topics. If you do these tests within the time limit, you will get a fairly good prediction of your score. However, for me this required a slightly different strategy for the quant section. I never had issues with timing for any other practice test, and MGMAT were the only tests in which I had to hurry and guess answers at times when I knew I could do them if I had more time. I would recommend top scorers to go through all MGMAT tests - with time constraints if you want a more accurate score, and untimed (for quant) if you want to focus on the contents, which I think is worth doing.
Test Day
Overall I had a good test experience. There were two very nice ladies at the testing centre, and it was a much better experience than when I sat for the TOEFL donkey's years back in England. (The lady at the TOEFL centre snapped at me for no reason!)
I did my homework and anticipated the potentially intimidating aspects. I knew that I was going to have my fingerprint taken every time I went in and out of the room. I knew I was also going to have my picture taken. And I knew that my watch wasn't even allowed inside. I had read somewhere that once someone had a cold and was not allowed to bring napkins into the room, so she had to go all the way out of the building every time she needed to blow her nose and lost a lot of time. This was not the case - while you can't bring in your own napkins, I was offered their napkins at the centre.
However, I was still understandably more or less nervous. More than ten minutes into the first essay, I was just beginning the second paragraph and felt stuck. My heart was beating so rapidly I had to hold on to my chest, at one point it felt like I was going to flunk this thing. Then I took a couple of minutes to tell myself that I had written these essays many times, and they all worked out okay without exception, even if I felt stuck at the beginning. Basically, I managed to collect myself and focus, and finished the first essay. The second essay went fairly smoothly.
Since my biggest roadblock was always the essays, I felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders by the first break - this had been exactly what I would feel during all of my practice tests. After the essays, I proceeded through the exam normally as I would any other practice. Yes, I wanted to take extra time to make sure that my answers were correct, but I also knew that I probably didn't have time to double check everything, and that with my extensive practice the past 3 weeks, I was very rarely making stupid mistakes anymore. I think the most important thing is to practice as if you're taking the real test, and go to the real thing as if you're just doing a practice.
I felt that the questions on the test were on par with GMATPrep, regarding content and difficulty. No odd or weird things that I sometimes encountered in Kaplan/PR. I finished the quant section about 6 minutes early and the verbal section about 8 minutes early, which was basically consistent with the timing of my practice tests. Occasionally there would be the odd question that I wasn't 100% sure about, but I also kept in mind that a lot of the questions (>10 in each section) were going to be trial questions that would not count towards my score, so I never sweat over any one single question, and nothing in particular influenced my performance.
By the end of it, I was pretty sure that I would get 700+. Although, being conservative, I also anticipated the possibility that I might get 680. I never dreamed of reaching 99th percentile, but I got lucky! I think it helps to have lower expectations, so that you're calm during the test and don't freak yourself out with any question in particular. Because really, there's likely not a marked difference between 730 and 780, as far as even the best schools are concerned. I've always had the opinion that it's unrealistic to aim for anything over 740, because in addition to the fact that it doesn't make much difference percentile-wise, your performance above 750 is largely defined by chance. 750 is probably 3 less questions correct than 780, and given 3 different questions of the same difficulty, it's very possible that you might get them right.
In addition, if you have never (or only rarely) exceeded a certain score for your practice tests, it's probably unrealistic to expect that score on the real test. My dad always told me to expect to score 30 points lower in the actual test, because there are also other factors that you may or may not have thought of that could influence your performance. 30 points is probably exaggerating it, but as a general rule, results on any kind of real test tend to be lower than mock tests. Your chair or monitor might not be comfortable, the bathroom may be far away and take up more of your break, the testing room may be too hot or too cold, etc. While I'm very happy with the Toronto centre since I didn't experience any of these, I was certainly mentally prepared if anything like this were to occur.
Summary
In total it took about 3 months of significant preparation, including trying to decide on materials at the beginning. Much of this preparation was for the essays - my time would probably be much shorter if I wasn't so neurotic about AWA.
Preparing for essays, reading through MGMAT books, and doing corresponding problem sets (from OG, dictated by MGMAT) happened concurrently and took a little over a month. For the final three weeks, I only did practice tests with the main goal of building stamina.
I think I've made all major and minor points that might help, and I should stop here and go work on my application essays instead.
Hopefully this GMAT score would help make up for my horrible GPA! (I was such a kid back then, what did I know... my goal was to pass all courses and graduate on time, haha.)Thanks to everyone who contribute to the forum, and good luck to those still to take the test!
Anyway.
