Hi all,
Over the last 7 months I have read numerous blogs on this site and taken encouragement and dispair from them in equal measure. Today I scored 730 (47 quant, 44 verbal) on the GMAT which I am delighted with and I wanted to pass on some advice.
I started working towards the exam in May, enrolling in a Kaplan classroom course. This was good, but a bit rushed. What with work, courses and sports matches on weekends, it was hard to keep up with the speed of topic coverage. I was lucky to have an extended 6 month access to their online info, though, so I had plenty of time to sit all their CATs and the official ones. My issue was that with cricket matches on the weekends, I was studying sporadically, and it was not until mid september that I could dedicate my full weekends to study. I sat the exam first time at the start of October and got 680 (47 verbal and 37 quant). This was obviously a disaster in that the overall score was good, but the relative poor performance in maths would likely exclude me from a lot of the top schools I was aiming for.
I therefore decided to have another crack at it asap, to keep the knowledge I had built up and focus heavily on the maths. What made all the difference was taking consecutive Friday's off work, therefore have 3 x 3day weekends in a row. I was able to completely immerse myself in the GMAT world, and go through the full OG again, the official extra Quant guide, and the Kaplan 800 book. I sat with a timer that would go off after every 2 minutes when doing quant practice as I tended to panic if stuck on Quant questions previously.
Today is the culmination of 7 months hard work and it is a great feeling. To summarise my advice I would say two things:
1) if you don't get the score you wanted first time round, don't give up. Work twice as hard and the reward will come.
2) if possible, try and study more intesively over a shorter period of time than let your study drag on making slow progress.
Thank you to everyone who has posted their success stories as they have provided great inspiration to me. I hope mine can do the same for those of you that are still studying. Put in the work and you will get the relative score that you want....
Good luck!
Over the last 7 months I have read numerous blogs on this site and taken encouragement and dispair from them in equal measure. Today I scored 730 (47 quant, 44 verbal) on the GMAT which I am delighted with and I wanted to pass on some advice.
I started working towards the exam in May, enrolling in a Kaplan classroom course. This was good, but a bit rushed. What with work, courses and sports matches on weekends, it was hard to keep up with the speed of topic coverage. I was lucky to have an extended 6 month access to their online info, though, so I had plenty of time to sit all their CATs and the official ones. My issue was that with cricket matches on the weekends, I was studying sporadically, and it was not until mid september that I could dedicate my full weekends to study. I sat the exam first time at the start of October and got 680 (47 verbal and 37 quant). This was obviously a disaster in that the overall score was good, but the relative poor performance in maths would likely exclude me from a lot of the top schools I was aiming for.
I therefore decided to have another crack at it asap, to keep the knowledge I had built up and focus heavily on the maths. What made all the difference was taking consecutive Friday's off work, therefore have 3 x 3day weekends in a row. I was able to completely immerse myself in the GMAT world, and go through the full OG again, the official extra Quant guide, and the Kaplan 800 book. I sat with a timer that would go off after every 2 minutes when doing quant practice as I tended to panic if stuck on Quant questions previously.
Today is the culmination of 7 months hard work and it is a great feeling. To summarise my advice I would say two things:
1) if you don't get the score you wanted first time round, don't give up. Work twice as hard and the reward will come.
2) if possible, try and study more intesively over a shorter period of time than let your study drag on making slow progress.
Thank you to everyone who has posted their success stories as they have provided great inspiration to me. I hope mine can do the same for those of you that are still studying. Put in the work and you will get the relative score that you want....
Good luck!
