Hello, I wanted to share my thoughts about the GMAT to all of you since the beat the gmat community was very helpful during my studying. My goal was to "get a 700 or above" and I accomplished that goal fortunately. Here are some of my suggestions / reflections after studying for 2 months. Note that none of this is in any particular order. But, since everyone cares about prep scores so much, here they are:
MGMAT #1 680 (47Q (untimed), 35V (timed)
MGMAT #2 640 (45Q (untimed), 34V (timed)
GMAT Paper Test #1: 660 (40Q, 39V)
GMAT Paper Test #2: 740 (48Q, 45V)
GMAT Focus #1: 39Q to 47Q
GMAT Focus #2: 39Q to 47Q
GMAT Prep #1: 690 (46Q, 39V)
GMAT Focus #3: 46Q to 48Q
GMAT Prep #2: 720 (47Q, 44V)
GMAT Focus #4: 45Q to 49Q
Real GMAT: 700 (48Q, 38V)
Background: I am a native-speaking 30 year old candidate who was a business major in undergrad at a top 20 school (3.7 GPA) Like many people on this website, I have not done algebra since college and was very nervous once I realized that I would have to re-learn all of this stuff. My verbal skills are pretty strong, so I was not as concerned with that section, although ironically I did better in math on the exam (more to come)
Studying: I started off reviewing the OG guide as well as the Princeton Review Math and Verbal Study Guides. Many people have commented that Princeton Review is not good for people who want to score above 700. I disagree. It is an excellent warm-up (especially for people who are rusty) and has a lot of good information about shortcuts, tricks, etc. I took about a week to do Princeton Review.
I also used Kaplan 800. It is a nice resource. I don’t think it is mandatory, but it’s good practice for high scorers.
OG 11/ Verbal / Quant Guides: Then, I started doing all of the OG problems. I took the diagnostic test and got about 80% of the verbal problems and 60% of the math problems correct. My strongest area was Reading Comprehension and my weakest area was Data Sufficiency.
The OG has been referred to as “the bible” and everything you need. Unfortunately, I think the OG is over-rated. It’s helpful and necessary, but does not do a sufficient job to prepare someone for the CAT test which is a completely different animal.
In math, there are not enough hard problems. Most of the problems (except for some in the last 50) are at a level under 650. Also, the OG does not teach you how to be efficient in terms of knowing when to guess, solving problems quickly, etc. The explanations are also not helpful IMHO. On problem solving, they frequently usually tell you some arcane way to solve a problem with tons of useless algebra. The data sufficiency is a little better.
The verbal is better practice. For some reason, I thought the difficulty of reading comprehension problems was very spotty. The questions are supposed to be grouped from easiest to hardest, but I found the difficulty of the questions dependant on the topic (either it resonated or it didn’t) more than anything else. Nevertheless, all reading comprehension questions are good practice.
In critical reading, only the last 50 questions are indicative of what you will see as a high scorer. These are good practice. For sentence correction (which was my weakest area) the last 50% of the problems are good practice.
I also did the Verbal (purple) and Math (green) books. I found them to be much easier than the OG 11, GMAT Prep, or the Real GMAT. That being said, they are still worth doing as opposed to not doing them.
MGMAT: I think the MGMAT is a very good resource, but it must be used appropriately or else it could end up being detrimental. First the good parts: the Sentence Correction book is terrific. It is far and away the best resource on SC that exists anywhere. If you don’t get it, you are doing yourself a big disservice. Also, I think the math books are underrated. They actually helped my score a lot and did a good job explaining number properties and word problems (which are the two most common parts of the tests)
The CAT tests are an interesting animal. I think they are good practice. I would definitely recommend taking them IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR STUDY PERIOD. They are too hard at first for most people, so it is a good idea to warm up with OG before. The math is very difficult and is almost impossible to finish on time. The problems are long and require too many steps. That being said, there are few math resources for high scorers, so MGMAT math is better than nothing I guess. Also, the math also has too many probability / factorial problems. On the real test and on GMATPrep, you will only see a couple of these problems.
More than anything, however, MGMAT math wears your brain out and by the time you hit verbal, you are exhausted mentally. On MGMAT, there are no experimental questions either, which again deprives high scorers of a chance to relax and take a mental break during the test. That being said, the math (untimed) actually ended up being a decent indicator of my score. The verbal section is far worse. I think the reading comprehension questions are okay but the SC and CR are confusing and use different logic from the GMAT as many people have indicated.
Basically, don’t use MGMAT at the end of your preparation. It will hurt your confidence and at worst, focus your studying on concepts not as important to your success.
GMAT Paper Tests: Many people believe these tests are not a good indicator of your score and are not helpful. I disagree. I think they are excellent practice because they use original GMAT questions. The scoring definitely different from the CAT, but the actual results end up being fairly similar to the CAT. The math is definitely the most different because on the real GMAT, you can get a high score missing 13 of 37 questions but on the paper tests, you need 90% accuracy. There’s not enough difficult math questions for a high scorer. On the verbal, the accuracy requirements seem to be pretty consistent with GMAT Prep. The GMAT Paper tests also get you in the practice of doing math and verbal together. I purchased a pack of 3. If I were to do it over again, I would have done all 9 of these tests throughout my study period. I took these after MGMAT as a warm-up to GMAT Prep.
GMAT Focus / GMAT Prep / Real GMAT
GMAT Focus is expensive ($25 per test) but is a wonderful resource because the problems are very difficult and geared towards high scorers, not to mention the fact that and they contain full explanations and are completely new questions not in OG. If you are spending $100,000 on business school, you can afford these problems. GMAT Focus has excellent number properties questions (I saw many of the same exact questions on the real GMAT) I took all 4 tests and it was money well spent. The scores were fairly accurate as well. I highly recommend taking these at the end of your studying.
CAT: One of the things people underestimate is how hard it is to take a test on a computer. Trust me: it is much easier with all of the answers A, B, C, D, E, right next to the question with all of this room to write (like on the LSAT, SAT, etc) On the computer, the screen gets blurry after starring at it for 3 hours. Also, you have to figure out a system to keep track of answers. Many people have suggested their own. I just did it in my head for math, for verbal though, I wrote A, B, C, D, E, down for EVERY SINGLE QUESTION.
Most importantly, I highly recommend 2 weeks before the test eliminating all use of paper tests / questions for study material. You don’t want to get used to test conditions that are unrealistic.
Math: I found the GMAT Prep Math EXACTLY similar to the real GMAT. A lot of the problems seemed very similar to what I saw but with different numbers. One of the most important things is to guess and move on when a problem is challenging. Try to use common sense and eliminate the obvious answers.
And a few tips: try not to miss many problems in a row—it kills your score and the penalty increases exponentially the more questions you miss. This makes it even more important to swallow your pride and move on when you can’t figure something out in 2 minutes. Second, there is a lot of controversy about how much time to spend on initial 10 problems. I think you should spend more time on the first 6. For me, questions 4 through 6 were always the hardest problems I saw on the GMAT and GMAT Prep.
The one benefit of being a high scorer is the experimental questions. You get 13 out of 37 questions as experimental. Fortunately, most of these experimental problems are relatively easy and can be solved in 1 minute or less. They are nice little bonus and give you time to mentally refresh. If you get easy problems, don’t think you are doing poorly.
In terms of questions, I saw only one factorial problem. Most of the hard questions were number properties / word problems. I would focus on those when studying.
On the real GMAT, I got my best math score. I attribute that to the GMAT Focus preparation more than anything else.
Verbal: I thought I was very strong in verbal. Even before I did anything, I did excellent on critical reasoning and reading comp. My GMAT Prep scores were solid. I was consistently getting 90%+ of the questions right in the OG books and the purple subject book. I rarely missed any RC questions. Except for the bold questions, I got almost every CR right also. SC was hit or miss.
I found the real GMAT to be MUCH HARDER than GMAT Prep. The reading comp passages were long and even though the topics were somewhat familiar, I found them to be much more time-consuming than anything I had seen before. 3 out of 4 questions were multi-page passages, The sentence correction problems frequently tested concepts / idioms that I had never seen before either. The SC problems were much more difficult than anything in OG or GMAT Prep and I thought that maybe I got half of them right. The CR problems were also more challenging. There seemed to be lots of moderately hard / tiring problems, very few easy problems but also very few impossible problems.
Maybe I was just tired from AWA and Math, but I was very concerned when I finished verbal. I did not think that I did well at all and was pleasantly surprised with a 38.
AWA: I wrote one essay for each topic before taking the real GMAT. I recommend getting a template from this site or one of the books and just practicing. Half of the battle is just being creative and coming up with good examples to use. Don’t choose anything controversial. Be succinct. Use numbers, dates, titles, etc. For the argument question, always argue that the statement is flawed. But be nice and sympathetic and show how the arguer can improve. Use the first 5-10 minutes to take notes and come up with an outline—don’t start writing immediately. Use what you learned in SC to make sure the grammar is solid.
On the real GMAT, the argument question was a huge pain. It focused on an obscure topic: it took me 10 minutes to come up with an outline. I ended up barely finishing.
The issue essay was a little easier. The writing depletes energy for Math and Verbal. I did not write any essays before taking GMAT Prep because I was too lazy. I probably should have though.
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