780 - Debrief and Takeaways

Find out how Beat The GMAT members tackled GMAT test prep with positive results. Get tips on GMAT test prep materials, online courses, study tips, and more.
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by MartyMurray » Tue Jul 07, 2015 6:29 am
rahulzlpr wrote:Hi Marty,

I want to score high to get into one of the top B schools. I will be starting my preparation in Jan-Feb 2016 and appear for GMAT in June. Now after going through a lot of these forums I am thinking of using Manhattan strategy guides (10 books pack) and the Official guide review for my preparation. I will be adopting a self study approach since I am more comfortable with that apart from the fact that it will be hard for me to enrol in a full time course given my professional commitments. Kindly give your feedback on the above (including the study material) and emphasise more on how to use this study material effectively to get the maximum results I.e. Targeting a score around 750.
Those materials sound good, with the one caveat being that I suggest buying all e versions, as the process of making paper is fairly destructive in both physical and karmic terms.

As far as using them goes, the most important thing to remember is that you have a goal in mind, and it's not to be able to recite all the rules in the Manhattan guides. The goal is to rock the test, which is like a big reasoning game. So what you are looking to do here is learn to play a game, and the OG and the Manhattan guides are just tools you have to help you in that process.

So the thing is not to just study those books to learn what's in them, but rather to use what's in the books to improve your game.

With that in mind, one thing to be sure to do is take practice tests regularly. That way you get practice playing the game and you get a sense of how good you are at the game and what you need to work on to get better at the game. Some people suggest taking a practice test right at the beginning of your preparation. I prefer preparing for a week or two, getting a general sense of the test and some of what's on it, and then taking your first practice test, all sections.

As you go along, much of what you do should be determined by what you see on the practice tests both in terms of questions and in terms of results.

The best practice tests are the GMAT Prep tests, as you have probably figured out by now. Another option that's pretty good is PowerPrep, available here. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/resources I find those tests pretty useful. The only thing is that there is a lot of crossover between the PowerPrep tests and the Official Guide. So if you are going to use them, you are better off using them early, so that you have not already seen many the questions that are on them. It's great to have those PowerPrep tests though. Also via buying the guides you would have access to the Manhattan tests. I mean there is something about playing the game repeatedly that is really helpful. You get used to the timing, the need to focus, the relentless parade of questions, and you get into it like a kid who plays the same video game over and over and just keeps scoring higher and higher.

So preparing is partly about playing the game, and with that in mind, if you are running out of questions, another type of resource you could use is online questions banks. There are various companies that have them, companies such as Grockit, Magoosh, Veritas and BellCurves. For quant, I particularly like the BellCurves question bank, which can be broken down into categories and contains thousands of questions. You just go to their GMAT section and set up a practice account. Veritas also has a free question bank, with decent and cool quant and verbal questions. Whichever online questions you use, you can get some great practice by doing them.

Here's one thing about practicing. People are concerned with timing and also they often use the timing as an excuse to finish working on a question. So they practice doing question after question, giving themselves only two to three minutes per question, and then if they don't get them, they go to the explanation. What's wrong with that? Often they never learn to get them right. You need to learn how to get right answers to rock this test, on which there won't be any explanations to go running to. So when you are practicing, often it makes sense to spend ten, twenty, or more, minutes on a question, to get used to DOING WHATEVER IT TAKES to get right answers. That's what you need to learn here, how to take what the GMAT gives you and use it to get right answers. That's the bottom line. That's what you use the guides for, the practice questions for, the tests for, getting better at getting to right answers. Nothing else matters.

By the way, the Official Guide is not that great a help as far as giving you the best ways to get answers. What you can do is come to the Beat The GMAT forums and look up OG questions or post them and see how the experts, the gamers, on this site answer the questions. That's a great way to learn some cool ways to play the game and to get a sense of how to approach things.

That should pretty well cover you for now. As you go along, you can post more questions related to specific challenges you are experiencing.

Also, for some more ideas, you could check out this post and article in which I further discussed my personal strategy for preparing for and rocking the test.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/rocked-the-g ... 82365.html

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2015/05/ ... rty-murray

Have fun playing the game.
Marty Murray
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by rahulzlpr » Tue Jul 07, 2015 8:43 pm
Kindly advise me if I should purchase all the manhattan guides despite the possibility that i would be comfortable with some of those topics tested. Also do i need to attempt each and every problem provided in those guides as well as the OG in order to be ready for the test? I will be supplementing this study material with GMAT prep tests and the already provided Manhattan tests as well the Beat the GMAT/GMAT Club forums

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by MartyMurray » Wed Jul 08, 2015 3:10 am
rahulzlpr wrote:Kindly advise me if I should purchase all the manhattan guides despite the possibility that i would be comfortable with some of those topics tested. Also do i need to attempt each and every problem provided in those guides as well as the OG in order to be ready for the test? I will be supplementing this study material with GMAT prep tests and the already provided Manhattan tests as well the Beat the GMAT/GMAT Club forums
First thing.

The GMAT would prefer your saying "Kindly advise me as to WHETHER I should purchase..."

Regarding your first question, I say purchase the guides as makes sense given what you discover about what you need to learn to get your score to the level you desire.

Regarding your second question, clearly the answer is that how many questions you need to do or what you need to do in general depends on what skills you already have and how close to your score target you are from the beginning. Just realize, that as I said above, this test is a game, and there is no assurance that just by doing the questions in the OG and a bunch of books you will be ready to hit your goal. You need to learn to play the game and that takes developing certain skills in areas such as seeing key details and using available resources to make decisions. It's possible that you could do 1000 questions without developing those skills if your approach were not geared to developing them. Meanwhile, there are not all that many questions in the Manhattan guides. The point of those guides is more to provide insight and approaches than it is to provide questions.

Preparing for the GMAT tends to be an iterative process, one in which a person learns some things and does some practice questions, then takes a practice test and sees how he does. His analysis of his practice test experience then dictates, at least to a degree, what he does going forward.

So you will have to make the call as you go along. If you want to learn about certain concepts or get some strategy ideas, get one or more the Manhattan guides, preferably in ebook form. If you want more questions with which to practice, there are other sources that might make more sense. You could get the OG first, in ebook form, and after familiarizing yourself with the test and practicing some using questions in the OG and elsewhere, maybe after a week or two of work, take the first GMAT Prep test. After you do all that everything will be much more real and you will have a better sense of what you need to do to hit your goal and some specifics to consider when discussing your preparation on this forum.
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by rahulzlpr » Fri Jul 10, 2015 8:47 pm
Hi Marty

Based on your feedback can you let me know how to use these guides and OG effectively.
Also do i need to work through all questions from the above study materials (quant/verbal guides plus OG). If yes then roughly how much time will it take to do so? Is the OG main book sufficient or do i need to purchase the verbal and quant OGs also apart from the Manhattan guides?

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by MartyMurray » Sun Jul 12, 2015 2:17 pm
rahulzlpr wrote:Based on your feedback can you let me know how to use these guides and OG effectively.
Also do i need to work through all questions from the above study materials (quant/verbal guides plus OG). If yes then roughly how much time will it take to do so? Is the OG main book sufficient or do i need to purchase the verbal and quant OGs also apart from the Manhattan guides?
The OG main book may be sufficient. You really need to get into preparing and see how you are doing before you will know whether you need the other guides or the Manhattan guides.

The same thing goes for how many question you need to work though. You may need more than what the OG has going on in terms of content and questions. The OG may be enough. There are people who score in the mid 700's after barely preparing at all.

So you need to see how your preparation is going in order to determine what resources to use and what you have to do.

Regarding how to use the materials effectively, the idea is to learn concepts, to learn how to apply those concepts to getting right answers to tricky GMAT questions, and to learn how to rock the test by getting many right answers in the time allotted for each section. So you can get some of the concepts from the Official Guide, and the Manhattan guides also provide insight into the basic concepts. Additionally, the OG provides questions but does not always provide great explanations or strategies. For good explanations and strategies you often need to either come up with them yourself or use other resources such as the Manhattan guides and the Beat the GMAT forums. So once you have learned the basic concepts, mostly what the OG is good for is providing practice questions that come with decent but not always great explanations.

As you go along and do questions and take practice CATs and see what kinds of challenges you are running into, you can decide to use things like the Manhattan guides as tools to help you in addressing those challenges and for developing ways to get to right answers.

That's my way anyway. Some people just go through the guides and seek to learn most of what is in them. I prefer to get a sense of what needs to be learned or changed and from that make determinations as to how to best go about preparing for the test.
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by rahulzlpr » Sun Jul 12, 2015 7:17 pm
However when I went through the forums it was recommended to buy books such as the number properties and word problems in quant and rest of the verbal books in any case despite your skill level as they are said to be highly rated. However I feel I am weaker in geometry so probably I need to buy that guide as well. Also it was recommended that one should not waste the OG questions by jumping to them straight away as they are a true reflection of the GMAT questions. Let's assume I buy the entire set of guides and OG go through each topic in the Manhattan guide, practice questions in the guide and simultaneously I pick up the OG and do the topic related questions then is it a good strategy or shall I attempt the OG after going through all the guides??

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by MartyMurray » Sun Jul 12, 2015 7:45 pm
rahulzlpr wrote:However when I went through the forums it was recommended to buy books such as the number properties and word problems in quant and rest of the verbal books in any case despite your skill level as they are said to be highly rated. However I feel I am weaker in geometry so probably I need to buy that guide as well. Also it was recommended that one should not waste the OG questions by jumping to them straight away as they are a true reflection of the GMAT questions. Let's assume I buy the entire set of guides and OG go through each topic in the Manhattan guide, practice questions in the guide and simultaneously I pick up the OG and do the topic related questions then is it a good strategy or shall I attempt the OG after going through all the guides??
While I still say that much of the answer depends on your style and skill level, I like the plan that involves going to the Official Guide as you go along. That way as you prepare you are consistently seeing questions that are a true reflection of GMAT questions.

Just remember, the GMAT is a game you are learning to play, the questions you see on the actual test will not be quite the same as those you see during your preparation, and some may be fairly different from any you see during your preparation. Also, there are challenges related to the test as a whole, such as handling the timing and maintaining concentration through the four sections. So to optimally prepare you have to develop skill in coming up with ways to handle questions that look different from ones you have seen before and to go beyond studying what's in the guides to actually playing the game regularly via use of CATs and possibly online question banks.
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by rahulzlpr » Sun Jul 12, 2015 8:02 pm
Hey, thanks for the advice. One more concern I have is that there are so many online courses floating around that promise to help you get that much coveted score of 760+. They offer you videos and customised study plans and what not. On the other hand I have the self study approach wherein we have the manhattan guides the OG and their respective CATs apart from the online forums. Will the self study approach using the guides effectively and sticking to a study plan lead to that high score or taking an online course would benefit??This becomes a bit confusing though i am planning to opt for the latter and see how it goes. There is also a concern of the amount of investment that one would make for the preparation. Kindly advice which approach will be better both in terms of quality as well as pricing?

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by MartyMurray » Sun Jul 12, 2015 10:32 pm
rahulzlpr wrote:Hey, thanks for the advice. One more concern I have is that there are so many online courses floating around that promise to help you get that much coveted score of 760+. They offer you videos and customised study plans and what not. On the other hand I have the self study approach wherein we have the manhattan guides the OG and their respective CATs apart from the online forums. Will the self study approach using the guides effectively and sticking to a study plan lead to that high score or taking an online course would benefit??This becomes a bit confusing though i am planning to opt for the latter and see how it goes. There is also a concern of the amount of investment that one would make for the preparation. Kindly advice which approach will be better both in terms of quality as well as pricing?
You're probably best off seeing how it's going in order to make any such determination. Your self study approach could work just fine. I can say this though. If your preparation is dragging or you feel stuck, then probably you should be fairly quick to assess and possibly somehow change what you are doing. That change could involve looking into new resources, hiring a coach or tutor to give you some insight, putting on this forum a post describing the situation and asking for advice, or doing something else to change the dynamics of the situation so that you start making better progress.
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by rahulzlpr » Tue Jul 14, 2015 7:30 pm
Hi Marty

Since I am planning to have all the Manhattan guides and the OG can you let me know an estimated time that one will take to go through all the guides properly along with the OG so that i can set a target time span for my preparation.

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by rahulzlpr » Thu Jul 16, 2015 7:44 pm
Hi Marty,

Is there a study plan available which includes preparing via Manhattan guides and OG apart from the mock tests?

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by MartyMurray » Tue Jul 21, 2015 7:02 am
rahulzlpr wrote:Hi Marty,

Is there a study plan available which includes preparing via Manhattan guides and OG apart from the mock tests?
Hi Rahul.

Here is a decent outline.

https://www.quora.com/I-have-bought-the- ... om-scratch

Also, maybe this article will help you develop your own plan.

https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... an-part-1/
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by rahulzlpr » Sun Jul 26, 2015 8:09 pm
Hi Marty,

Thanks for the feedback. As we were discussing about the study approach for GMAT viz a viz online course or books. I came across the Magoosh online course which as of now is only for $99 covering the entire gmat course however the same is much more expensive as offered by other test prep companies (anywhere between $800 to $1000). This will also be cheaper than the entire Manhattan study guide set in print which can cost around $250. Also GMATPREP is offering the online course for free. Now clearly magoosh and gmatprep online courses are the best deals out of all the other online programs. Since the Manhattan guides are well recommended all over what would you suggest would be the best approach to score high (750)?

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by MartyMurray » Mon Jul 27, 2015 5:15 am
rahulzlpr wrote:As we were discussing about the study approach for GMAT viz a viz online course or books. I came across the Magoosh online course which as of now is only for $99 covering the entire gmat course however the same is much more expensive as offered by other test prep companies (anywhere between $800 to $1000). This will also be cheaper than the entire Manhattan study guide set in print which can cost around $250. Also GMATPREP is offering the online course for free. Now clearly magoosh and gmatprep online courses are the best deals out of all the other online programs. Since the Manhattan guides are well recommended all over what would you suggest would be the best approach to score high (750)?
For starters I would suggest being careful about counting too much on having any book or course teach you how to rock the GMAT. I have seen people who have learned about all kinds of rules and strategies get low scores, because they didn't really get that the GMAT is a game and learning to find clever ways to play the game is the way to win.

The GMAT is not a math test that you can rock just by knowing a bunch of math facts or an English test that you can rock just by knowing a bunch of grammar rules. It's an entrance exam for business school, and if you think about it, knowing something like that x² is always positive or zero is not the key to doing well in business school or business itself. So naturally the test is not really testing your knowledge of things like that.

Scoring high on the GMAT is mostly about vision, the ability to apply resources to solving problems, and skill in using logic in making decisions, and all those books and courses you are looking at will not do much for you unless you develop these things.

Having said that, obviously some resources are better than others. With that in mind, while I am not super familiar with everything you have mentioned, I would be wary of relying to much on lower priced deal items. Quality is key.

Meanwhile, you can get the Manhattan guides in e book versions for $10 each, and you don't have to get all of them, only the ones you decide you need as you go along. So there's an option.

Here is my suggestion for you. You said that you are going to start preparing in about five months. As I said before, probably the way to go is to prepare some, using any resource really, maybe even just the review section of GMAT Prep. Familiarize yourself with the question types, learn some things about how to get them right and practice answering them until you are somewhat familiar with how to play the GMAT game. Then take the first GMAT Prep practice test and see how you do.

After that, you will be in a MUCH better position to assess what else you need to do and buy to rock this test. Maybe it would make sense to combine some of the products you are talking about, or to use them in conjunction with others, such as the PowerScore Critical Reasoning Bible or the BellCurves question bank.

Whatever the case may be, the bottom line here is about you and the test and how things go when you interact with the test, and until you have made an initial assessment of that, you don't really have much to go on.
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