Ok sorry if this comes in disjointed but I'm at work so I'm going to give you guys the nitty gritty of my GMAT experience as quick as I can.
I'm a research scientist currently working for the US Army Explosives and Warheads Division. I have come to realize management is an important part of almost any industry, including science, so I decided to roll to an MBA and the first step of course is the GMAT.
I said I only studied 3 weeks, however, this is not 100% accurate. I actually began the process 5 weeks before my exam, and took two weeks off between.
As you know, I'm a beat the gmat scholarship winner, and I live close to NY, so I attended the gmat manhattan courses in person. I was fairly skeptical at first but extremely surprised at how helpful the courses were. My instructor, Patrick Siewe, was extremely helpful. One weakness, at least for me, was the class went a little bit too slow, but I guess in retrospect I did ok in the GMAT so it didn't hurt me.
To begin my testing procedure, I began with a practice test from GMAT Manhattan. My first score was a 600, however I did not finish the exam and I also got almost none of the SC questions correct. I looked over my mistakes and took another exam from GMAT Manhattan. This time I got a 670.
I used their assessment tool and went over my mistakes. I noticed my biggest deficit was originally SC and Geometry. So I focused on them by working the SC question bank and Geometry question bank provided by GMAT Manhattan. I then took two weeks off because work was very demanding, however, I managed to still attend my classes.
During my fourth (second if you're only counting weeks I really studied) week, I went on bus trips to nearby army bases, during that time, I have about 1-2 hours a day on a bus. Because of all this free time, I managed to knock out all of the workbooks provided by manhattan GMAT. I only found the SC, geometry, and word translation notebooks to be useful. I also took on two more practice tests that week.
I took another practice and got a 680. I noticed that when you get to the 700 level some of the word translation problems became so difficult you might know how to do them, but still won't be able to finish them in time. The reason for my 680 was extremely bad timing with quant. I took another exam that week after a few days, and with better pacing, got a 730.
I was quickly realizing my initial study plan of studying for 4 months might be a bit on the overkill side, and decided to make an aggressive decision. July 4th weekend was coming up, which meant I got wednesday off, so I decided that I would take the GMAT the monday after July 4th weekend. I used 1 vacation day and worked overtime that pay period so I wouldn't have to use two more. This in effect gave me 5 days off before my GMAT. This gave me plenty of time to study. At worst, I would get a "practice" test with the real gmat, at best, I'd get a good score and not have to worry about it.
I went over my mistakes from practice tests 3 and 4 (still from Manhattan GMAT.) I realized I was extremely good with reading comprehension (only getting two wrong on each exam) and even better with Critical Reasoning (1 wrong). This was very gratifying to me as I feel these are more important skills than SC, however, the GMAT doesn't care. For SC, despite the work I did with it, was only 40%. For math, I saw most of my mistakes were from DS, but overall I did about the same in every section, with no GLARING weakness.
I used this time to knock out the harder problems from the OG and the OG Quant books. This means that I only did the the last 1/4 from the DS and word problem section. I found those were the only ones which were still challenging for math. I then decided to do EVERY SC problem which was available to me, which included the ones from the OG Verbal workbook and the OG regular book.
Again, I went over my mistakes and I learned from them. Too many little things to go over, just mainly details of problems that I didn't think of, or better approaches than I used previously.
I still had 2.5 free days left to study. I decided it was time do practice exams so that I would master pacing and the feel of the real GMAT.
I took two exams from GMAT Prep, the Gmat software provided by mba.com.
On those exams I got 760 and 770. I was happy, but thought that I was bit careless on the quant sections, and thought I could do better with more practice. I was tired and waited until the next day.
On the saturday before the gmat, I decided to take test 5 from GMAT manhattan. I decided to actually write out the essays, because I wanted to do well on them and get a little practice. On this test, For some reason, there was no quant section. I think somebody forgot or something lol. I got a 51 so I was happy, and rolled onto exam 6.
On exam 6, I did the essay, and I absolutely crushed the GMAT with a 790. I wasn't satisfied with this amount of studying because I still had some more time.
GMAT Manhattan offers 6 practice tests, however, you allowed to retake the exams with the same question bank. And since I wasn't getting 700 level questions the entire time, my 7th exam barring 2 quant q's and one verbal still seemed very new.
On the 7th exam is when I completely killed the exam and got an 800. I only got 3 or 4 wrong on either section and honestly, you can argue a lot of the questions which you see in the verbal section of the GMAT (imho this is a weakness of the exam, there are questions where a very reasonable argument can be made for two answers).
After I got through the 7th exam I realized I was ridiculously tired and I had class that day. I went to class, learned a few tricks which were cool and would have been helpful, sadly I didn't see questions like that on my real GMAT.
I didn't study after my class or before my GMAT exam on that monday.
I went to take the exam, and of course, took my pregame dump/piss. This might sound ridiculous but I really didn't want to have to go during the exam.
Essays:
I think I did reasonably well on the essays barring one detail. I was in the middle of trying to fix a small grammar mistake and ended having a half word in one of the essays because I ran out of time.
Quant:
The questions were a bit trickier than I expected and they didn't ask the ones some of the ones I was expecting. Also, I didn't really see any like the ones from the OG. (They were of similar TYPE, but not the same q's with different numbers). One HUGE mistake was for one very easy question I solved it properly on the board, however I misclicked and ended up selecting the wrong answer without realizing it. I even clicked confirm and I only saw I had the wrong answer as I was switching to the next question. This pissed me off and cost me a very easy question but I managed to let it go and continue with the exam.
Verbal:
Overall much simpler than I had thought it would be for me. I have to say this was much closer to my practice tests than Quant was.
Before I got my score I was thinking to myself that even if I did bad, I could just chalk this up as another practice test and move on.
When I got my score back I was disappointed because I scored lower than I thought I would but after looking into the scoring, I found my score was basically like 2-3 right questions away from a MUCH higher score, especially considering my huge quant mistake.
I got a 48 in quant and 47 in Verbal. 760 total.
Overall I say the best practice is practice exams. I found that everything else was just far too easy to provide good experience for the real gmat unless you have a glaring weakness like me.
I found CR and RC to be the easiest questions but IMHO they're also the most relevant to real life. If you can't think critically or read something and understand it you're going to have issues in life than just the GMAT.
Big props to GMAT Manhattan, I think they have it down really good. I can only imagine what I could have score if I waited until the end of their curriculum. They really have a great system, if you can afford it its probably the best prep. Also big props to Patrick Siewe.
I'm sorry if this is really crappy or haphazard but I tried to get down everything I could because I'm crunched for time, I will try my best to come back and make it more readable and answer questions.
Thanks again to GMAT Manhattan (I believe so strongly in their program I'm actually going to apply to be a tutor there, they really have a great system.)
