I just Beat The GMAT!

Hi all,

I rarely post, but I have been to this site along with others during my past two years journey toward this score and I want to give back. My background, non native speaker although I completed undergrad in top ten US univ and top three graduate degree in England if this matter. Good resume with internship at Mckinsey among hedge fund and consulting job, but I never stayed at a job more than 2 years and I am working part time only current so my job background not that strong either.

Before this, my scores ranged from 580, 640, 620 with mediocre quant scores never higher than 35. My verbal started off with 70% before settling in the 90% in the previous two. Today my quant scored almost doubled in percentile from 35 to 48 (44% to 85%) and despite the fact that I have not looked at a single verbal problem in the past two months since I took the test in Feb to focus on quant, I scored 46v (99%). I was skeptical that I could improve my score. I couldn't sleep until 2am and I had to really hold it in in the past 30 minutes to use the restroom after the test was complete. I lacked sleep, I drank too much caffeine and red bull, yes I was crazy.

Basically, I did everything wrong, except for the pacing. I believe this is the single greatest element of the test as previously I had to guess on something like the last 8 -10 quant problems which I now realized lowered my score. I also used the restroom during the verbal section previously as well. Instead of focusing on hard problems, I focused on very simple concepts to prepare and I believe this combination made the most difference.

I kept everything to 2 mins, I only messed up at the last part of verbal when I thought I had 3 min for the last question and instead I had two remaining so I had to guess on the last one with 7 secs left. So, I would say that indeed it is ok to guess on some problems given from my experience. Previously, I hated guessing and it really ruined my timing. It took me four times to learn this lesson and although I improved my timing, I still made mistakes in lack of sleep, etc. During the quant section, my confidence was low because I noticed some really easy questions at the end which I thought indicated that I was doing poorly... Glad I was wrong. The thing about quant is the wording is very specific, and I had to change answers on several questions when I reread the question. My suggestion is to reread the question, after you have solve the problem as a check to yourself and do not trust your first instinct as the GMAT writers seem to be setting traps, unless I was just way paranoid...

As for verbal, I saw problem types which I have never seen before. Since I have not studied it at all since Feb, i don't know if the GMAT introduced new types or not. Some of them presented a statement and instead of asking to weaken or strengthen like standard, the question stem asked which of the following would be a good argument against the conclusion of the above statement? Perhaps it was similar to weaken/strenthen, but this was something I had not seen. I also saw man SC questions asking me to change more than two lines of text. Although they were long to read, they were not different in scope from smaller section. I had several very long passages RC types on biology and economics and I don't know if this is common for many, but I noticed the RC all had different lengths on my test and i don't know if this is on purpose or not. I also saw really weird question types and structure that I don't know how to categorize and my last 10 or so questions were incredibly long to read, with the CR offering me several unfamiliar question types... They may have been experimental so perhaps you should not worry.

Another key thing is pressure, I was very tense, and I was quite curt with the staff as I tried to focus on the test. In the test admit area, I barely acknolwedge them as I tried to block out everything and I must have seem rude. I even told someone before the test that I didn't think I would do well. Basically I lacked any confidence since I have never scored this high on the GMATprep, only the PowerPrep and I did not do verbal for those. Last night, I took the GMATprep and scored 41q despite redoing the quant section almost ten times already... I was obsessed and pressured. For one of the few times in my life, I actually prayed and I would credit this as much as anything I did, since I can't really explain this score.

The key thing, above all else, is pacing and dealing with pressure. I did the latter poorly and if I wasn't so desperate, I may have canceled my score since I had low confidence in quant.

I purposely avoided how I studied since it differs with each person. For example, I would not recommend not looking at verbal at all. I took time off from work to study the GMAT for a week and I took the last few days off from studying on day trips with my family. Although I still was stressed, I believe it would have been much worse if I had just continued to study to the final day. Only thing I have done different from others is that I also bought the GMAT quant focus bundle and I consistently scored in the 34-42 range which gave me many hard questions which was beneficial for preperation, but it also hurt my confidence a bit so use caution in inferring results I guess.

Another thing is DO NOT let the GMAT limit where you apply to. Even with 640, I was admitted into a top 20 program in the world according to some rankings. Granted I attended a top ten uni undergraduate and graduate studies, but my work history is poor as I changed jobs often. I was able to get interviews with a couple others that rejected me and I feel it was due to the GMAT, but again, I hope this shows that the GMAT is not everything and it really shouldn't be. This is what I want to stress the most to those who were in my boat and I hope my story shows that indeed it is possible to double your score in quant percentile and score high on the verbal without studying a verbal question for months after many tries. Lastly, do not let the GMAT dictate your life even though it may seem to have that much power. I hope this was helpful and encourage you on your journey.

congrats, man! you did great! i believe that's a very very HIGH score...the verbal score is incredible! how did you prep for verbal and math? what books did you use? did verbal come to you naturally? you said that you didn't really study for verbal....are you applying to schools now? good luck!

It's a lot of courage to fight and eventually getting such a great score !!!

Congratulations for your achievement.

Amit

Thanks Amit and Watan,

To answer your questions about books. I think most are worthless. The OG 11th questions are just very easy and do not reflect the real test. The GMATprep is a very good indicator. For quant, there's nothing better than seeing a real Gmat question as often as possible and in addition to focusing on concepts, focus on how the the test writers try to trick you.

As for those like me who scored high on verbal, but low on math initially, I think if you have an very high but unbalanced score, it means that you are capable of understanding complex concepts and it should be possible to study and improve the other side. Verbal does not test vocabulary, there's a definite structure to it based on grammatical rules just as quant is governed by rules of operation.

I used the MGMAT SC guide book after scoreing 70% and since then i never scored below 90%. To score high, I felt SC was the least time consuming by eliminating different stems that is wrong. It's like math with process of elimination with plug in numbers, except you plug in words and see if the sentence still make sense. CR was like this too, in that the logic is the same as quant in trying eliminating choices with testing ideas instead of numbers that will make an argument true or false.

Overall, I liked the MGMAT books but they're not enough since you need to do real gmat problems beyond the OG. Perhaps it works for most, but I found the OG to be just a very basic start compared to the GMATprep or other old tests available. Once I found these and the old PowerPrep, my score took off as I had no idea those paper tests were hard and I got over the shock of seeing really difficult questions on the real exam. Also RC should be a gimme, there's no thinking involved, all answers including inferences are from the text. Skim question and texts for key words and if they use the same words or contexts, then eliminate if if you find more than one. Many gmat books recommend you write down stems or whatever. To me, trying to do this in real time is impossible. If you have a long passage, just go to the question and read the passage and often, your choices will be eliminated for you by the question without making a tree or text or whatever.


To me, none of the books capture the test well. Oddly, I did very well on MGMAT quants that ppl said were hard and bombed on the real test before. Only way to learn is to do many many gmat problems. I did the GMATprep over and over until I saw every questions, then I categorized them by topic and how the traps worked. There were patterns especially in verbal since the answer choices are limited by grammatical rules that are to me even more restrictive than picking numbers and operations in quant questions.

Back on topic of books, I would highly recommend the PR math workbook to review the very basics and i wish I found this much sooner, I did the Kaplan workbook too, but the way it's organized was rather poor in my view. I ignored the GMAT 800 also, because it was nothing like the real test questions in my view. I recommend trying the GMAT focus bundle and learning not just the topics but understanding what the traps were. I think I was able to find answers without doing much calculations, and improve my time just by seeing the structure of the question and knowing what the traps were.

For example, if the question is about finding a median, it might give you info to find avg and you have to understand that it's testing you on whether you know the difference between the two and so you think ok, what is the info that can help me distinguish between the two and if they are in the answers, then it's sufficient, instead of trying to write out the formula they have gave you and trying to organize those info. Often, it turns out it's sufficient to find the avg but that's not what the question asked for! That's the real trick as it made you do the calculation and you forgot what you were really looking for. In fact, the info they give you in the harder problems could be purposely there to make you calculate and waste time so it would be pointless even if you the answer right from it since you just lost precious time for the next problems.

In summary, I would use PR math workbook, MGMAT SC, OG for start and tons of GMATprep and whatever real tests such as the PowerPrep that you can get your hands on are the way to go. I think the PowerPrep is very easy, but it helps familiarize you with how the traps are made and that is what I think the test is really about.

Hi marbus,
Congratulations for the great score!!!!
Thanks for the great posts and advice for both on V and Q..
My questions to u are as follows:

1.For RC you mentioned that skimming thr passages helped you in aswering questions (Kaplan also talks abt same statergy ) but,this is not working for me...I solved all the RCs in OG 11 and OG 10 and my accuracy lavel was 50-70% .Please advice me in detail on how to approch RC ...

2.Is RC level for real GMAT is same as OG 11 and Gperp ?

3. Where I can get "GMAT quant focus bundle" ?

Thanks,
Ajay