I just Beat The GMAT!

Thanks first to everyone who has posted here - this is a great forum. Appreciate everyone's comments about prep materials and strategy. I took the GMAT yesterday and was very pleased with the result - 49Q, 48V, 770.

Briefly, here was my prep strategy:

- Manhattan GMAT online review course. I took this from early Feb - early April. It was a great course, very well organized and very well instructed.

- I was fortunate enough to start with practice-test verbal scores pretty close to my target range, so I focused 80% of my study time on quant. I studied for ~2 hrs either 2x or 3x/week during the course. This was enough for me to keep up with the quant content in the course, but not verbal - I would have had to put in more time to really keep pace with the verbal as well. I paid attention to verbal during the review course and learned some good techniques, but I did not reinforce them with much studying. Had I started out farther behind my target on verbal, I would have definitely wanted to allocate more time to studying.

- I spent about the same study time during the 3 weeks between the end of the course and GMAT day, reviewing the content areas where I was weakest (probability, exponentiation, word problems).

- I wound up doing all the challenge sets in the MGMAT quant strategy guides (these point you to the harder questions in the OG). It was pretty useful to have a guide to the tougher problems.

- Two techniques from the MGMAT course that were most helpful to me:

1) I spent about 1/2 as much time doing practice problems as I did reviewing the answers to those problems and the underlying concepts. I had been spending a much greater fraction of time doing practice problems when I started studying, and I was retaining content poorly and repeating mistakes. Once I started to allocate my time in this way, I got better at retaining the content.

2) The MGMAT online labs I found to be a mixed bag, but the lab on timing strategy was EXCELLENT. It really improved my approach, especially in the quant section where timing had been a significant problem in my practice exams.

- Lastly - this may sound wacky, but it worked for me. I was very intentional about nutrition in the 72 hours before the test. No refined sugar, no alcohol, no caffeine except my morning coffee. I had to drive 90 mi to the test site for a 12 noon start, and I was careful to bring my lunch - turkey sandwich, yogurt, apple, raisins. The last thing I needed was to do my usual burger-n-fries-n-Coke-on-the-road and have a sugar crash in the middle of the quant section. It turned out that indeed, I was just about out of gas by the end of the exam, and I was really glad that I had put good fuel in the tank so I could work at my best level as long as I did. I honestly think my food choices were probably worth 20-30 points on my final score.

Good luck to everyone!
SC

Congrats! And thanks for the debrief. Goodluck in the application process.

Congrats and thanks for sharing! Great score!

I wanted to hear from someone who took the Manhattan GMAT Online Review Course.

Congratulations! That is a dream score... both quant and verbal!

Thanks guys! Yes, I was really pleased - 70 points above my goal. I did not think I had done that well when I clicked the "show scores" button.

@HG10 - I would definitely recommend the Manhattan GMAT online class (and I am not affiliated with them except as a former student). I have not taken any other GMAT review courses, so I have no points of comparison, but this one worked very well for me. The course brought structure to my studying, gave me a lot of useful tools and really reinforced timed practice. Timing discipline was key for me on the real GMAT and I thought the course was very effective in preparing me in that way.

I would say that you have to be prepared to put in significant study time over multiple weeks to get the most out of the course, but that's probably true for any study approach. I would also say that to use the online course effectively, you need to be the kind of person who can apply sustained attention to your computer for 3 hours at a stretch; of course, you have to do that for the real GMAT, too. But an online course doesn't give you the same kind of visual feedback or in-person interaction that a classroom course does, and your learning style has to be able to accommodate that. With that said - I think the MGMAT instructors had really studied the capabilities of the online delivery platform carefully and adapted their teaching approach to it very effectively. They combined the course slides, voice, chat, polls/quizzes and interactive whiteboarding exercises very well. They also used team-teaching very well (one instructor talks while the other chats). I found it as effective as a well-taught classroom course.

Good luck!

@scolebert:

Thanks for the very detailed and informative review of the MGMAT online course. Since there isn't any MGMAT classroom course offered where I'm currently based, the only MGMAT course option I have is the online course. I had a number of questions about it but you've very articulately answered all of them.

Once again, thanks for the feedback! Hope you get into the schools of your choice!