I just Beat The GMAT!

Just took it today and WOW do I feel good. Q49, V42 I'm wondering, if I had gotten a 50 on the quant, would I have gotten a 760? Anybody know this? I know one point doesn't always trigger a score increase. I already know two easy ones I missed. Oh what could have been.

I took a Manhattan GMAT class and I can't say enough good things about it. I've always been a good/great test taker but I had forgotten a lot of stuff. MGMAT was recommended to me by a guy who was a Kaplan instructor so that was a great sign. I thought all the material was worthwhile for the most part. Especially the quant stuff. They cover all the bases and focus on content. I did learn a guessing strategy or two, but this was <3% of the class and none of it was gimmicky. Their material is thorough, often very advanced, and superbly organized and intuitive. You actually LEARN the material, which is the best preparation possible.

I read these types of posts and thought to myself 'ok, i know some people need a quant refresher but I went to UC Berkeley, got an A in calc and work at a hedge fund... not me.' However, given my timing, I knew I'd only have one crack at the test this year so I went the safe route and took the class. No matter how good you are, you need to learn this material and if you already know it, you probably don't know it well enough to get the score that you want.

I was telling my colleague this, which he dismissed, then asked him how many total factors 2000 has. He looked at me with a puzzled look and I told him to give me a round number, and when he did I told him the total number of factors after about 25 seconds of thought. We did a couple more brain teasers until he was convinced of the benefit.

Frankly, the explanations in the OG guide are helpful ~75% of the time, but the other 25% they don't teach you anything helpful toward solving problems like that in the future. The writers must forget that we don't have access to calculators.

I don't know a lot about the other prep courses, but a Kaplan guy recommended MGMAT and, anecdotally, I've been led to believe that MGMAT gives you the most exposure to advanced material. Also, from my experience today, I think a huge part of your performance is based on confidence, and the last thing I need is to take kaplan practice tests that lie to you about your score even if it is in the beginning. It's practically extortion in my opinion since it makes you so terrified that you almost have to fork over the cash for their class afterwards.

I actually didn't think I was scoring well halfway through the quant section. I was 3 minutes behind schedule, had outright guessed on two problems already (didn't guess at all on my way to my 740 on the practice) and I even remember thinking "ok, this could end up not being my day and I may have to wait a year to apply to schools." Talk about a distracting thought during the GMAT!! But I pulled it together and pulled it out! Interesting that I guessed more on this one and got the same quant score.

My study suggestions:
Quant:
I thought the most challenging problems were data sufficiency variable-in-answer-choice inequalities and word problems with language such as this "Mary bought at least 19 cookies, if the rest of the 5 people bought a different number of cookies, did John, who bought the second most, buy at least 5 cookies?" where you have to test extreme scenarios. Difficult versions of those two types of questions I needed more work on. I should have focused more on these two types of problems that gave me some trouble. In the beginning, combinatorics problems gave me the most trouble but I focused on them so heavily that I became very comfortable.

I did all the OG and official review problems, and studied the hell out of the ones I missed and redid them. Further, I redid the ones that took me longer than 2 minues and tried to solve them 2 different ways (algebra vs substituting #s for instance) in under 2 minutes to give myself extra ammo in the event I got tripped up on test day. Don't be satisfied just being barely able to solve hard problems in non-stressful conditions! Get your hands on as much hard material as possible and drill it into your brain, look at it 50 different ways and solve it in as many different ways as possible and you WILL start to see the light. If it's combinatorics you suck at, search these threads for "combinatorics", or "order" or whatever and see the 7 different ways that 7 different people solve the problem. These different viewpoints really clarified a lot for me on hard topics.

One more thing: the question stem asks you for unexpected answers so often (eg. what % of grass lawn was left UNmowed) that I started forcing myself to rereading the final part of the stem before confirming my answers. I probably caught 3-4 mistakes per test implimenting this strategy.

Verbal:
SC: do all the og problems and read the explanations of the stem construction and the analysis of the answer choices. Here, as in CR, you will learn as much or more from the analysis of the wrong answers as the right answers (on a related subject, it always pissed me off when the OG restated the answer choice with no extra insight other than "correct"...grrrr). SC is formulaic and after 50-100 problems and reading the answers you start to see that there are only 5-7 types of possible issues that the GMAT focuses on with wrong answer choices. SC might be the easiest thing to improve for this reason.

CR: read wrong answer choices... tirelessly.
RC: same. I actually couldn't really imagine what beneficial advice for RC might look like until I took MGMAT. They offer a lot of strategies for reading to maximize your comprehension. Check it out.

My practice exams looked like this:

MGMAT CAT Mid October: 600 (didn't answer the last quant question)
MGMAT CAT Early November: 650 (didn't answer the last quant question...again!)
MGMAT CAT Two weeks ago: 720
GMAT Prep I One week ago: 720
GMAT Prep II Two days ago: 740

I spent probably 10-12 hours a week studying beginning in mid-October and upped it to 15+ near the end.

Good luck to you all.

Gmatters1001,

Let me be the first in congratulating you on a wonderful score. Good luck with the rest of the process and thanks for the nice debrief.

Regards,
Cramya

Congrats on beating the 700 barrier handsomely.
You insights are very revealing!!..
many thanks and good luck in ur apps

congrats!

gr8 score!!!


congrats!!!

Hi GMATters1001,

Thanks for your insights.
If you are still on this forum could you suggest where you did your difficult quant problems. few sources I know are,

Kaplan 800
Resources section on BTG - has some difficult problems
OG

Any other resources ?

You have nailed it dude. Best wishes for the application process.

Congrats!

Good luck with your application.