I just Beat The GMAT!

Alright everyone here it goes, the ole debrief:

After browsing around this forum for quite some time and commenting here and there I thought I would have to post my experience when I was "done" with the gmat. First of all, thanks so much to Brian, Tommy, Cecilia, and Ron for providing basically free advice to the general public, without some of their explanations I would have never been able to increase my score as much as I did. Secondly, please do not scrutinize my grammar on here - I am exhausted from just taking that lovely test. While I know my score isn't magnificent, I am pretty happy at the current moment as it does open doors to a lot of great schools, even if they don't have the Harvard brand name.Who knows though, I have a friend who got in with a 600 GMAT.

Anyways, things I did that helped:
1) I stuck to Manhattan, GMATPREP, and the OG.
2) I was willing to throw a question away if I thought it was ridiculous. If you have studied for a good amount of time you should know the difference between a 700 level question you can answer and a 700 level question that looks pretty impossible to you. You have to be willing to make as much of an educated guess as you can on questions you aren't going to be able to figure out in the 2 to 3 minutes.
3) I printed off all of GMATPREPS SC questions and reviewed those, writing down rules that may be applicable to the test. These were very beneficial for increasing my verbal and very similar to the actual test.
4) I continuously went over previous tests that I had taken to review.
5) I would categorically seperate the OG question types. This helps you actually grasp the different types of questions rather than doing one and not seeing it for a month. This is very very important.

My experience with the test:
-I took a 5 hour energy advanced strength- I recommend it as it definitely helps make you last all the way through verbal. It could be a placebo; however, give it a shot and see how it works for you during a practice test. I also brought a Pb&J and Gatorade.
1) I thought the IR part and AWA were easy. I threw away 2 of the longer questions for IR and so I zoomed through it. I felt I got at least 7 of these questions correct. The IR was definitely easier than the GMATPREP IR. I feel like my non caring attitude to this section is something that is worth noting, as if you just throw away two of the questions you can still score an 8. It is better to focus and get the entire question right on these and be willing to throw some of them away.
2) My quant was weird. It was mostly number properties, Fractions,Data Sufficiency, and Geometry questions. I got one very difficult number properties question, harder than 230 in OG. It felt a lot like the OG. I think I received one average rate question, one probability question, no combinations or permutations, and not very many set questions (surprisingly). I am not happy with my Quant score as I had a 49 in quant on GMATPREP last week. Although, I felt I made some careless mistakes and my 49 was probably on the luckier side where as the 43 was on the unlucky side. I would probably put my quant at a 45.
3) I was defiantly starting to fade during Verbal. When they say take your practice tests with the IR and AWA you should listen and not be an ignoramus such as myself. I thought the sentence correction was really tough comparably. The CR and Reading passages were very comparable and there was only one real question that stumped me. In fact, I thought the Reading Comp was relatively easy.
4) I think that Manhattan's tests are tougher than the actual GMAT and that the GMATPREP software is spot on.



- If you have any questions I am more than happy to answer and thanks so much for everyone who contributes to this great forum.

-BP

Congrats,thats a good score improvement!
Incidentally,i scored 630(Q39,V37).To what would u attribute ur increase in quant score?
I have been giving Manhattan tests(finished all 6) and score has ranged from 640-660 with Quant at 44-45 whereas the verbal score has fluctuated.
Can u suggest how to push my quant score further;i am retaking the exam in 2 weeks time.

Thanks,
Shreeraj

Congrats! I've seen some of your posts. You definitely put in a lot of hard work and were rewarded.

How would you rate the overall verbal difficulty and language as compared to those in the gmat prep?

Shreerajp99- I would say the biggest thing with Quant is go over the content and study from Manhattan's books. I personally outlined Manhattans books and then decided how to allocate it on the test and what strategies I liked and which I didn't. For example, they used matrixes for rate questions; yet, for me personally, I just logically thought them through and knew I could figure them out; however, I knew Matrix's as a backup strategy.Ron talked about this: having multiple strategies for the same question that you are confident work is beneficial. If I were you, I would then categorically separate each type of problem and then go through them and see what ways are they asking those questions. This will help you recognize the patterns that you need to intuitively know. It isn't enough to just know what the GMAT REVIEW book says. You need to know how the GMAT manipulates questions. For example if you see something such as this 4^17-4^16 you should immediately think that it should be manipulated like this 4^16(4-1) = 4^16(3). Another example is to know that anything asking for an arithmetic mean might throw in consecutive or consecutive even integers. I would also suggest knowing what to weight correctly as you aren't going to see 20 permutation questions but you might see 15 number property questions. For DS, I would recommend that if they give you an equation at the start you should try to manipualte it. For example: X^2+ 6x+8, you know you should probably write this as (X+2)(X+4) before solving the DS. In addition, I would use the -2 -1 -.5 0 1 2 as a rule of thumb for plugging in for DS. If you work at it long enough you eventually pick up on some of these patterns and it is better if you pick up on it than Ron telling you, because you will have an AHA moment. Write that down.

Ice_rush- I thought Verbal was roughly similar to GMATPREP. RC and CR have always been relatively easy for me as long as I think it through. The key to verbal is to stay acute and not tire out, in my opinion. You have to read yourself the question. For CR I always took notes, would plug in the answer and ask does that strengthen the argument? and play the cross off game. Usually you will get two answers that are both tempting. That is when it is tough. I didn't score an 800 so maybe Ron or one of the experts would be able to better distinguish those . I thought the SC was actually rather difficult compared to anything I saw and at some points, I was scratching my head. I had a lot of answers that included :. For me, again, I always mark off the ones I can say aren't correct. Does it have an ambiguous pronoun, is the word the modifier is intended to modify correct, do you understand that the subject of Brian's Hat is Hat and that a modifier before that would be modifying hat, not Brian? Ron's videos are good, apply those to GMATPREP's SC. In my opinion, to get a stellar score on SC, you may have to consider paying a tutor as I outlined the entire SC book and I still felt that a comprehensive knowledge of all the GMAT asks on SC was missing. Maybe it was just me. I wish I would have got a tutor as I feel I could have easily, and could still easily, break the 700 mark with someone like Ron or Brian Lange sitting next to me for the next month telling me what to do.

This test is hard work, and they make it so you can't just half-a$$ it and go in there and ace the thing. If it was that easy, everyone would have an MBA and the value of everyone's MBA would be worthless. Also consider that each time they let someone in, if they already have their mba that is decreasing the value of their degree, as people generally use it to distinguish themselves. AKA they have to like you to let you in and you have to work hard. I may still re-take the GMAT, as I wanted to study under Bruce Greenwald at Columbia because I have done value investing stuff before and done really well at it. So I may be back. But for now, I need to work on other parts of my application. I sincerely hope that helps and if you have additional questions feel free to ask away.

Also, My GMATPREP Scores going into the test were as follows:
October 14th, 2012 590 Q39 V31
FEB 2nd, 2013: 600 Q42 V31
March 20th: 680 Q44 V39 (retake but from October 14th when I was considering taking the exam and took it just for fun before I even started studying)
March 23rd: 720 Q49 V40 Retake

Actual:650 Q43 V37 March 29th

I think the 720 had some question recognition; however, if I took the GMAT next weekend I feel I would score somewhere closer to a 680 than a 650 as my Quant I expected to be just a little bit higher and I felt I made some silly errors on the test and was pushed for time.

I read the title wrong and I thought you only scored a 570. And I knew you wanted to beat the GMAT badly just from this forum and was surprised... but then I saw 650, so congrats. That's a good score, and I might confess too that I want to score in that range. I can understand your sentiment about the bitter- sweet feeling. Maybe if I worked harder in this, took more time in that, studied this, studied that, ect.. I think when you look back though you will be pleased with the work you put in. And if that reasoning doesn't make you feel better you can always re-take the exam to challenge yourself... just kidding...maybe...

Yeah, I mean everyone's goal is to get above a 700; however, if everyone scored that then it wouldn't be the top 10% and it would just be everyone, which would defeat the purpose of the test. So while I may not have scored the magical 700 I think that complaining about a top 21 or 22% score would be kind of silly especially considering where I started out at. With all that being said, I may give it another go sometime in the future as I feel good about the test but not great. I am only 25 so there is really no rush and there are a lot of other parts of my application I need to focus on. I also think taking it from a perspective where you already got a 650 may take some of the pressure off because it is kind of like well, if I do better I do better if not I still have the 650. To conclude, I am happy with it, but not content . Like you said, you never want that feeling of leaving something on the table. Thanks again guys for the support and positive words and best of luck with your exam, it is a tough one. Again, if anyone else has any questions I am always willing to answer them to the best of my ability.

Congratulations!
How much time did you spend studying in between the two tests?

Roughly 3-4 months 2 hours a day 4 hours on the weekend with a random few days off here or there whenever I felt burnt out. That is utterly important and what I consider imperative for your score to go up: taking time off.

Thanks for your debrief. I'm using the same materials as you, primarily sticking with MGMAT, OG, and GMATPrep. However, I've heard that the real test is very different from the OG/GMATPrep. Did you feel that way going into the exam? I'm particularly worried about this as unfortunately, I'm one of those test-takers that has a more linear-style of thinking.

HMGP22- this was a big worry I had, and a general skepticism I had after taking it the first time. However, if it was completely different you would have people, with great memories who could remember the specific questions, suing for fraud. Trust me, this isn't the case. I would say, as the majority of other people on here have said, that the gmat is the most similar to the gmatprep software. One thing that really helped me was writing down all the questions from the software that I missed or guessed and looking up the answers and keeping a general rules sheet where I would add new rules too. I am planning on taking the test again in a month for fun, as I feel I really understand the way it works now. If you do the entire OG, Gmatprep software, and Manhattan's books and really study the rules behind how to do the questions, not just the specific questions you are going to improve your score. This test takes a lot of careful thinking and careful analysis.

congrats !!

can you please suggest how to work on RCs, I am making lots of mistake on RC questions and that is bringing down my verbal score drastically..

regds
sachin

Sachin- Reading comp is something I didn't really have to study. It is very natural for me. In fact, I didn't even really do any practice reading comp questions except on the practice tests. However, I will say this: you really have to pay attention to what they are asking you and be very careful when reading the passage. You should be able to the read the passage and have a thorough understanding conceptually of what is going on. Once you do that, look at the question and answer that exact question. I think where people trip up in reading comp is 1) they haven't spoken English their entire life 2) they think they are crunched on time so rather than mentally relaxing and understanding the passage they hastily pick an answer that they aren't confident in or 3) they are mentally exhausted. Really think it through. I almost was talking to myself in the exam trying to discern the correct answer haha.

I sincerely hope that helps .

Thanks for the prompt response..will try the tricks suggested by you..

hey bpolley:

i've been a quiet lurker-er since early this year but have enjoyed your posts and just wanted to briefly drop in and congratulate you on your accomplishments thus far. i also appreciate the de-brief, particularly because I've drawn several similarities with my prep/background and yours. it's nice to see that you receive some much deserved success. please keep it up, and best of luck to you on your second test; for what it's worth, i say slay that test in a big way. GET IT DONE.