I just Beat The GMAT!

Background, I am a native English speaker and I studied for about 2 months or so. I've always had a decent background in Math but I had not practiced it in a while. I graduated with my undergrad in MIS (business school).

Practice Tests:
Gmat Prep - 650
MGMAT1 - 650 44/35
MGMAT2 - 670 44/37
MGMAT3 - 670 46/35
MGMAT4 - 680 46/37
MGMAT5 - 710 47/40
GMAT Prep - 740 48/42
MGMAT - 710 45/41

I used the following books (all MGMAT except OG12):
Number Properties
Geometry
Equations, Inequalities, & VICs
Quantitative Review
Sentence Correction
OG12

I thought all of the books were really good. I didn't get much out of the VICs one. That was my worst subject but I still couldn't improve upon it much. My strategy was to take an official practice test first so I could baseline myself. I got a 650 which isn't too bad so I knew I only needed to study a few months to get my 700+ score. I then studied the math section of the OG and bought some MGMAT books. After 2 weeks, I took my first MGMAT test and used their subject breakdown to start refining my study habits. I immediately studied Geometry as that was one of my weakest subjects, but it soon became one of my strongest (great book!). I then moved on to number properties and VICs. The number properties book is top notch as well, I doubt I missed a geometry or number properties question on my test. The sentence correction book was pretty good. I really just improved by repetitions and the biggest key was to find out about the trick of using the answer choices to break down each sentence. If 3 of the answer have "have" as an option and the other 2 have "as", then it's obvious that that is being tested. For reading comprehension and critical reasoning, I would say the biggest thing you can do is read! Just read books and you'll develop all of those skills, including sentence correction.

Test Day:
Quantitative -
As you can see from my official score and my practice tests, I did not score as high in that area as I was hoping for. I scored a 43 which is lower than all of my practice scores. I started out the test with a VICs question, my worst subject, and probably botched it. Then, I got hit with 7 data sufficiency questions out of my next 9 questions. I really wish that I could have had a better split on my questions! I'm sure that this set my score a little lower than normal but I felt more and more confident in my answers as the test went on. I figured that I didn't do great on quantitative but I was able to take my break and shrug it off. I have the ability to forget about what just happened and to refocus on the task at hand.

Verbal -
44 on verbal! Ok so I guess I killed this section. I started out the test with 2 sentence correction questions and I thought to myself, here we go again. I answered them to the best of my ability and then moved on. I had a nice breakdown of every question type. None of my reading comprehension questions were too long or too difficult. I was able to pick out most of the tricks they were throwing at me. I'm guessing I only missed a few questions.

Getting my score:
So my heart was pounding, of course, as I was clicking through all of the demo information. I finally saw my score pop up as a total of 710 and a sense of relief came over me. Then, I saw my breakdown of 43/44, wait, the 2nd number is supposed to be smaller. I realized then that I had blown quantitative but I demolished verbal. Oh well, overall I'm happy with 710. It should be enough to get me in to the schools I want to go to (UT, Rice, etc). I don't think that Q43 is low enough to cause any concern for schools. I'll answer questions if anyone would like to ask something.

nice score! how did you prepare for Verbal?

Hi -- Thanks for the great debrief! Congratulations on your score.

Can you share with us when you took those practice tests? Did you practice a lot the week before or were the tests fairly spread out? Thanks and congrats!

nice score! how did you prepare for Verbal?

I did not do a lot of preparation for verbal when compared to quantitative honestly. I'd say that 95% of my time was spent on sentence correction. I went through all of the OG problems early on in the process so that when I redid those problems again near the end, I wouldn't necessarily remember the questions. The biggest part for me on sentence correction was just using the answer choices to determine what the question was attempting to test. It makes it super easy. For the shorter questions you have to know the specific rule but that tip improved my sentence correction right/wrong ratio by probably 25%. I went through the last 20 or 30 OG critical reasoning questions and that was it for those. It wasn't really an issue for me during my practice tests. For reading comprehension I did barely anything. I read the next to last passage in the OG this past week, got like 6 out of the 8 wrong, and then just stopped.

Hi -- Thanks for the great debrief! Congratulations on your score.

Can you share with us when you took those practice tests? Did you practice a lot the week before or were the tests fairly spread out? Thanks and congrats!

I took the 1st GMAT Prep exam in late June. The rest are as follows in their respective order: 7/5, 7/7, 7/11, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, and 8/8. As you can see, I mainly took 1 test a week, every Sunday. I also took the tests around noon, my test time. I would go over the previous 2 MGMAT tests to figure out what I needed to focus on for the following week. In the last 2 weeks I just did a lot of OG problems. This past week, I studied on Tuesday and Thursday I believe. Other than that, I tried to just keep my mind clear (impossible!). I had a few mini freak-outs about little things I couldn't remember and I had to go look up on Friday but otherwise I stayed away. Funnily enough, none of the stuff I freaked out about was tested!

nice job. what about Quant. how did you study for this?

skins81 wrote:nice job. what about Quant. how did you study for this?

The first thing that I studied was Geometry since I was terrible at it but I knew it was just from not remembering the rules. Once that was corrected, I went through the number properties book and that solidified me in that area. Really, I was very solid at a few things - Probability/Combinations, Geometry, Number Properties, Fractions, Decimals. The things that I wasn't very strong at were - Word Problems (converting word problems to equations) and very high level algebra. I tried to study these but I didn't have very good study materials for my weaknesses. I identified my weaknesses by taking 2 MGMAT practice exams fairly close together and early on. This way, I could get a decent sample of question types and focus my studying.

I have a tough time converting the word problems to equations in my head, not sure why. All I could do for that was attempt to plug in numbers and then move on. Of course, I got quite a few of these questions on my test. I went through the OG twice for problem solving. I didn't spend as much time as I could have on data sufficiency in the OG. I'm sure I could have used another 2 or 3 weeks to improve on those weaknesses. I'm pretty ok with my score still; I'm going to an MBA event tomorrow and I hope to gain some insight on how they think about it.

just curious - did you get a lot of geometry questions - if so what type? have read that geometry being tested less and number properties/algebra being tested more ... thoughts?

I would mainly agree with that assessment. I'd actually say that it goes Algebra > Number Properties > Geometry > Probability. I had several questions that were about circles and triangles, probably 4 to 5. I had many, many more in Algebra and probably a few more in number properties.

thanks....by algebra, im assumin this is "all encompassing" - meaning inequalities and word problems ? i noticed that you said word problem / algebraic translations were a weak point for you, so just curious how you conquered the test with algebra being such a huge part of it !

thanks for ur feedback

Based on your last few diagnostic scores, it looks like you were about to peak. Are you planning to retake the test, or are you happy with the 710? Great job, by the way.

I really felt like I was peaking or at my peak going in to the test. I just think I got a bad mix and bad order of questions on the quantitative section. Algebra/Word Translations were definitely my weak point and I definitely got a lot of questions on those topics. When I say weak, I was probably around 50% on the MGMAT compared to 75% or so on topics like Geometry. On most of those problems I could usually plug in answers and eventually get the correct one or I would just take an educated guess. Here were my breakdowns for the different sections on MGMAT exams. Looking at it, I thought my number properties was much better. I don't think that was an issue on my real GMAT exam; I just had several stupid mistakes on MGMAT and they were high level questions. You can see that it was my fastest subject and MGMAT likes to provide sneaky tricks on a lot of those types of questions.

Word Translations - 59% ~2:10min
Algebra - 45% ~1:55min
Geometry - 69% ~1:50
Number Properties - 44% ~1:40
FDPs - 70% ~2:10

I'm definitely not going to retake the GMAT. I talked to both of my schools that I plan on applying to (avg GMAT ~680-690) and they said that I don't have anything to worry about on the GMAT, even with the lopsided percentage breakdown between Q and V.