First off, my profile : non-native speaker with IELTS 8,5. Social sciences student for the last 6 years. But I had a fairly good knowledge on GMAt type of Quant questions thanks to Turkish university admissions exam.
Preparation : I am still a student at university and I was also working part time until 2 weeks before the GMAT. So, only had 2 full weeks to study.
First thing I did was to buy the Kaplan prepbook with cd. I spent first week exhausting Kaplan cover-to-cover. And to be honest, I really liked their approach to different types of questions.
After finishing Verbal part of Kaplan, I took my first GmatPrep CAT and got 610.
Then I continued with Quantitative and moved onto Kaplan CATs on CD. The only problem was that on CATs the same questions came up over and over again. I only solved 3 CATs and from the first one I got something around 620. On the 3rd one, I saw approx. 15 questions that I've seen before, so I got 700.
On my second week, I started working on the Official Guide. I decided to do 50-100 hardest questions on every section. But at that point I understood that I was more weak on Verbal so on my last 3-4 days I concentrated on Verbal and especially Sentence Correction. I did the hardest 50 questions in every section of the Official Guide Verbal.
2 days before the exam, I read Princeton Review Crash Course for the GMAT (but didn't solve any questions). Their AWA strategy was very useful in the exam. On that day, I also took my last GmatPrep and got 680.
The day before the exam: I briefly reviewed Kaplan strategies, 5-6 hardest OG questions that had taken me a lot of time and Princeton AWA strategies.
Exam day: The night before, I only slept about 5 hours (I normally sleep at least 9 hours a night) and my exam was at 9 am (and I am definitely not a morning person). I couldn't eat much and smoked 2 cigarettes before the exam (really bad decision - don't try it at home) .
It started well with AWA, hence 6.0. (But I am a debater and I am very much used to coming up with at least 3 arguments for/against any given position)
I didn't know we had 10 minutes break (I thought it was 5 mins and would only be enough to go to the ladies room) so I didn't bring any snacks. I was literally starving and drank a lot of water (second bad decision). Of course, when I reached the final 10 questions of quant I had an intolerable urge to go to the ladies room again (I don't think that will be the case for guys, but girls, don't drink too much water on breaks!!) So I just guessed 5-6 questions at the end because I couldn't concentrate anymore and I only had about 4 minutes. (I had spent lots of time on first 10 questions)
After another break of 6 minutes (I was stressed out that I would be late, so I got in early) I started Verbal. Again, I spent more time on first questions and when I reached the last 10 questions I had only 8 minutes. Moreover, this time I was literally starving. So I started guessing again, finished the exam and decided to see my score that I believed would be slightly over 500. You can imagine how happy I was when I saw 670 on the screen. No need to say, I rushed out to eat something.
Lessons learned:
- Kaplan is very good for strategies for different types of questions in both V and Q. And especially, explanations for questions are excellent.
-Official Guide is good for being exposed to different and already used questions but no need to spend time on easy ones. Explanations to questions are really really bad. They always use the longest way to solve a problem.
-Princeton Review's AWA strategy is very good, take your time to read their essays and understand intoduction-conclusion styles and maybe even memorize some sentences they use in intro and conc.
- Don't schedule your GMAT for the morning if you are not a morning person.
-Sleep and eat well before the exam. Who knows? Maybe I could've got +700 if I wasn't so unprofessional
- Don't smoke... in general it's a bad thing 'B-)'
-Don't drink too much water if you have a 9 year old girl's bladder like I do. ':oops:'
- and don't take it too seriously than it should be taken. At the end of the day, you'll realize that GMAT is a test that only tests your ability to adapt to a certain type of test (that is not a good sentence is it? ':lol:' ). It doesn't measure your IQ or creativity or anything else. You only need to take a pre-decided amount of time to spend only on studying Gmat, study 2-3 books cover-to-cover, do 2 Gmatprep tests and than sit the real exam and in the end, rush out for toilets! ':twisted:'
