I just Beat The GMAT!

Cola- thanks for the good wishes. 2008 entry planned.

parore26 - thanks. percentile before was 98, now it's 99

debrief a bit later, need a break first!

Great achievement!
Congratulations

cpfirth wrote:Quick update then more later.

760 (Q48, V47)

MATURE STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE GMAT

Rather than repeat some of the good advice already on Beat The GMAT Forum here is a perspective from the point of view of someone who graduated over twenty years ago. It’s probably most useful to a fellow “geezer”, but there could be one or two tips for the typical GMAT taker.

I used Eric’s debrief https://www.beatthegmat.com/720-96th-per ... t-t13.html as the template for this review (thanks to Eric, and to all BTG Forumers).

Background
I am a non-recent science graduate from a UK university and have worked mostly full-time for the last twenty years. I attended MIT Sloan in 1992-3, so did the GMAT in 1991 and scored 710 98th percentile. (Postscript: I found my old GMAT score report. In 1991 my score was V45 (98%) and Q44 (93%), my guess is those scaled scores are not directly comparable with scores of today.) Because I’m interested to do a part-time PhD in Economics or Finance, I signed up for the GMAT in November, 2007 giving myself about 2 months preparation time.

What I initially thought was important
I focused efforts on three areas
1. get familiar with the mechanics and “culture” of GMAT taking, such as question types, CAT format, AWA essays (the latter two items were new to me)
2. boost my very rusty quant skills
3. practice, practice, practice

The issue of Q v. V was key. It may be obvious, but unless your job involves engineering you gradually forget the principles of even basic maths. Examples that you may laugh at: how to do a long division (really!), how to manipulate |x|, how to factor a quadratic equation. I use Excel every day at work so am about as rusty as it is possible to be on simple arithmetic manipulation. You never entirely forget the concepts though, so all is not lost.

Study sequence
I registered for the test first because I need a deadline to motivate myself. My next step was to visit a bookshop and buy the best GMAT guide they had in store. The choice wasn’t very wide and I ended up with Barron’s guide. It turns out this guide doesn’t have a great reputation but it was a useful primer, albeit at a relatively easy level.

Pretty soon I realised that I needed to plug a few gaps in my quant knowledge, and also I thought it would be useful to have something to help with CR.

After searching online I found GMAT Hacks website quite useful and bought its maths “bible”/review. This was a good purchase for me because it was very specific to the maths needed for the GMAT. Around about the same time I bought Official Guide for GMAT Review, 11th Edition and the two supplementary guides. Although I did about half of the questions from these I didn’t find them especially useful as a way to learn how to do questions. For example, absolute inequalities had me baffled for a long time and OG has just a brief sentence to define what an absolute number is, but virtually nothing on how to use them. Also, the pool of tough questions is very limited.

I then discovered Beat The GMAT Forum, which is one of the best GMAT-related sites. The evidence for this is that most times I searched on a GMAT question the solution would be on this forum.

As I got into my prep, I added the following, thanks to this forum and a good posting about/from someone who scored 790:

Sentence Correction Manhattan GMAT Preparation Guide
Good, concise summary. It didn't really have any startling test insights or test tips. Useful as a handy guide, to save time surfing grammar guides if nothing else. Best part of the purchase is the online access to the 6 MGMAT tests. MGMAT's website also has some good tips if you surf around it. I think a definite buy.

Kaplan GMAT 800
A bit of a disappointment. Seems to be just a series of examples, admittedly some good ones. Quite a few irritating (and useless) mini-homilies on what "an 800 test taker" should do. Their advocacy of backsolving was quite good but I probably didn’t use it as much as I should.

The PowerScore GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible
Can't remember where I saw this recommended but it turned out to be the best of the books. What distinguishes this is that it presents methods/tools (rather than just examples) to help you solve CR problems. If you can get through its 300 rather dry pages you actually have general techniques that apply to virtually all CR questions.

GMAT Hacks quant questions
Quite a good set but relatively narrow focus. A few answers were clearly wrong (“5040 + 11 = 5055. 5055 is a multiple of 5, so none of the numbers in the range given are prime, choice (A).” Although I emailed the author on these I did not get a reply.

MGMAT Challenge problems
Bought these towards the end of my study period (remembered to use the 10% discount for BTG members). Tough problems but lots to learn from. In hindsight it was probably a mistake to get these as, despite being online, they didn’t have a timing mechanism, nor could you sort them by category. Didn't have time to do many either.

CATs
I used GMATPrep and MGMAT CATs. The former I ran several times just to get to the hard questions, but I eventually abandoned that idea once I had access to the MGMAT CATs. The last few days of preparation I just did the Q part of MGMAT CATs (I set a timeout of 0 secs for the V questions). The post-test analysis is the best part of these. I used their Excel download so i could show my cumulative running time, time plus or minus my time benchmark, and for each wrong or slow question I inserted a comment, such as “forgot xy was the question” and “With only two sides of the triangle, it is impossible to determine whether a2 + b2 = c2.”. Using these tools I was able to see where my time was going. Timing was a constant battle for me on the Q.

Question type summaries
For the Q section I produced around 20 x 1-2 page summaries of the major question types, such as: probability, work, geometry. Each summary would have the main principles, equations and sometimes typical question examples. It is the act of making these summaries that is more valuable than having the summaries themselves.

Test Day
As mentioned before, I re-scheduled my test day. Mainly because I decided a morning time would not be best for me. But also because I wanted to take the test sooner as I felt I wasn’t improving very much - the gains from studying longer were shrinking. I work full-time and I felt the GMAT had to drop down the priority list soon!

On the day itself I didn’t do anything remarkable. Ran GMATPrep in the morning and did around 10 questions as a warm up. I didn’t take any breaks except for about 30 seconds to get a mouthful of water. I didn't eat any special food or take high-energy bars/cookies with me to boost my concentration levels (I suspect this might be a GMAT urban myth).

My first AWA essay was very easy to do but the second one was such a bland topic I was not flowing with ideas. I had done one practice AWA essay of each type before the test. This page has some good advice on AWA: https://www.manhattangmat.com/strategy-s ... -score.cfm.

The only complaint I had on the test day was the logistics. The writing pad was way too small for me (seemed only 8 pages but may have been longer). During my practice tests at home I was used to a fresh page for every question. The test coordinator refused to give me extra pages at the start, saying I should raise my hand. I had to do this twice, once for a pen that dried up. Moreover, the writing paper had a grid of lines on it, which I just found distracting. I could have done better with 37 sheets of blank paper and a normal pen! Calling for spares probably cost me 60 seconds of test time and a loss in concentration. These things matter when you only have 75 mins! I did like the noise cancelling headphones, though.

As it happened I finished all sections ahead of time but this pacing was deliberate and sometimes I was brutal to cut losses – each section was finished with only around 20-90 secs left. On the V at one point I had about 15 mins to finish 5-6 questions.

Final Advice
By the time of the exam I had achieved a good grasp of the concepts required for the Q section. I don’t recall any question I didn’t know how to do on the test day but there were at least three questions that I abandoned due to time pressure. I was just too slow at arithmetic calculations or finding shortcuts to simplify expressions. In retrospect I believe my consistently slow Q times were due to two things: (i) rusty concepts/techniques and (ii) slow algebraic and arithmetic manipulation. I think I eventually fixed (i) but didn’t beat (ii). In fact, I hadn’t really identified (ii) as a problem until after the test, so I only have myself to blame for losing 1-2 "easy" marks on the Q. An example: one test question asked me to find a price, which was 24/23 of another value. I couldn’t think of any shortcut for calculating this so was faced with a “lengthy” and dreaded long division calculation. 16 years ago I think I could have rattled this off very quickly, but not this time.

In compensation, 20 years of work experience (and mainly in English) means the V section is a doddle. I did very little preparation for this and found the only resource that added anything was the PowerScore GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible.

A final reflection on 1991 v. 2008. I worked a lot harder to get 99% in 2008 then I did to get 98% in 1991. I think the standard has gone up for one thing (in forums I notice many clever Indians scoring 50-51 on Q), and secondly, the Web means competition is even more intense. Top candiates can be much better prepared these days. The CAT also means you cannot trade off time (Q v. V) or re-visit questions. I had at least 5 spare mins on the V that I could have used to work more on Q questions.

Anyway, geezers – take heart. You may be a bit slower on the Q, but you more than make up for it on the V.

Just wondering: don't most post-graduate Economics programs accept the GRE as well? If so, is there a particular reason you chose the GMAT?

No good reason. Mainly because I had no idea what GRE is, and I'd done the GMAT before.

That makes sense. I'd taken the GRE and although the quant is a bit easier, it has a lot of unnecessary memorization (definitions for analogies). Congrats on the score and best of Luck.

A brief article about GMAT v. GRE is in this week's Economist.
https://www.economist.com/business/globa ... d=10555722

For the GMAT historians among you:

I found my old GMAT score report.

In 1991 my score was V45 (98%) and Q44 (93%) - overall 710 98%
In 2008 my score was V47 (99%) and Q48 (85%) - overall 760 99%

Looks like I was better prepared in 2008 than I was in 1991 but it seems the test standard has gone up if raw scores are roughly comparable over time.

I'm so glad to know that there is someone out there who mirrors my experience. I'm also looking into a PhD. program for business so retaking the GMAT is a huge fear of mine since it is a CAT program. To know that you did it, gives me the motivation to go for it.

I left school before completing high school but (luckily) found my way into IT. In 1991 and at 30 years of age, I took the GMAT.

It was my first serious "exam" experience and I went in cold, without any preparation at all. Somehow I managed to score 693, which back then was 95th or 97th percentile that particular year.

Now I'm ready to go again, curious as to whether anybody else has traveled a similar path?

Cheers,
Gary

cpfirth wrote:I have an unusual situation. Don't know if there are many "mature" GMAT takers like me around, but I will try to share my experience.

I took the GMAT in 1991 and scored 710/98% (700s were rarer in those days I guess 8) ), then went on to Sloan. I used only the OG for the first test.

Now in my mid-40s I have decided to do a PhD in Economics. The school expects me to re-take the GMAT.

I am in the middle of preparing for my 2nd test (next month). What a shock for me when I first saw that the GMAT was adaptive, not to mention those new fangled essays. And all the questions seemed harder than I remember from 1991!

In this post I wanted to ask if anyone else is taking or re-taking the GMAT after such a long gap, and what advice they may have for unclogging ancient synapses.

After I have taken the test I will post my strategy (successful or not!).

Cheers
Chris

Awesome post and congrats! I am studying from mostly the same materials and hope to achieve similarly!

What were your pacing and timing strategies when you took the exams? I find that to be my biggest obstacle.