I just Beat The GMAT!

Just beat the gmat!!! here is my experience:

started studying around the 2nd week of DEC (so total about 6 weeks)

books:
og11
manhattan sc
princeton review cracking the gmat

practice exams
gmatprep 660
manhattan free cat 680
princeton cat1 630
princeton cat2 670
powerprep1 660
powerprep2 680
gmatprep2 690

main thing that helped me was all the practice cats I took. Pacing was my biggest problem and all these timed test helped me develop a good rhythm.

I did not find og11 as help as many people have said. About 4/5 the questions were too easy and I felt I was wasting time doing them. I ended up only doing the last 30 questions from each section.

Most important thing that I have learned from this experience is make an educated guess and move on when you do not have the exact answer. The worst thing to do is waste valuable time AND THEN get the answer wrong. I may have gotten lucky on a couple of guesses today, because honestly I was not expecting anything higher than a 710.

jacksonlong wrote:
practice exams
gmatprep 660
manhattan free cat 680
princeton cat1 630
princeton cat2 670
powerprep1 660
powerprep2 680
gmatprep2 690

congrats on your great score !

which out of the above was the best representative of the real exam ?

you were saying that one develop a skill for quickly guessing ... can you highlight more on that ? how did you develop that ?

I think the Gmatprep software was a very good representation of the exam. HOWEVER, if you have been practicing with the OG book, you will see many overlapping questions, and thus inflates your score. The powerprep also has these overlaps. I liked the manhattan test as well, best of all it is FREE.

As for the guessing...

It's hard to explain, but I was in this zone where I could almost sense which answer choices that GMAT wanted me to pick for the incorrect answer (the joe blogs answer). Some answer choices just seemed to obvious to be correct. I guess it is important to understand if you are being thrown medium or hard questions. From the practice exams I knew I would be getting harder quant questions, and therefore the obvious answers can't be correct. For the quant section I only guessed only maybe 2-3 questions. I had built up a good 5 minute buffer during the first 10 or so questions. I actually did end up spending about 3-4 minutes on a single question, luckily I think I got it right. After I lost my buffer, the next couple of questions were hard and I knew I would have to spend lots of time on them. I decided to narrow the choices down and make educated guesses. This helped be build about a 2minute buffer which helped me cruise through the rest of the quant section.

how did you plan your mock tests? did you stick to some schedule over the span of 6 weeks of ur prep ...or u randomly took the test? wht is the best way to plan the mock tests in ur view...?

drizzle wrote:how did you plan your mock tests? did you stick to some schedule over the span of 6 weeks of ur prep ...or u randomly took the test? wht is the best way to plan the mock tests in ur view...?

My suggestion is to do the exams by provider. The reason for this is quite simple - using the same provider for consecutive tests provides a baseline from which you can compare your next cat scores. For example, if you start with PR's cat and continue doing them for the next 3 or 4 weeks you can compare your scores and rest assured that you are comparing apples to apples. A change from 550 to 600 in two PR exams is a change that you can rely on (same algorithm for scoring and same difficulty progression); on the other hand, comparing a 550 in Kaplan to a 600 in PR is not the same at all.

Now, the order for the providers are generally not as important although it's a good idea to increase in difficulty. For example, PowerPrep is generally considered one of the easier cats and PR as well whereas MGMAT and GMATPrep are harder (in my opinion).