Hello everyone,
Another success story here. Last Thursday was my first and last shot at the GMAT: 710! It was a long battle, but I put in a *lot* of effort and had some great assistance along the way.
Background: I moved to the US several years ago and attended a top-20 school where I studied engineering. I decided in April that I wanted a career change, and so signed up for Manhattan GMAT's online course. I found the course helpful, especially in Quant. I believe my intuitions with the Quant were always good, but Manhattan GMAT helped me to make sure that I had the correct approach toward all the questions the test throws at you. After the class, I took a few practice tests from mba.com and scored around 620 on all of them. Quant was around 48 and Verbal was around 28. Obviously I needed to improve on my Verbal! I read through Manhattan GMAT's sentence correction guide, but I still felt lost in a lot of situations. For some reason, REading comprehension wasn't too much of an issue, but Critical Reasoning was a bit tough. The worst part, without doubt, was sentence correction, though. I bought the PowerScore Sentence correction bible, read through it very carefully, but I still had a lot of issues on timing. I felt that I just didn't know where to start on most sentence correction questions. Obviously, you learn about splits and subject-verb and all those rules, but, i found it very difficult to figure out what rules to pay attention to and to understand what they wanted you to see.
So, I took the plunge and hired a tutor. I looked around a few places and ultimately settled on GMAT Compass (www.gmattutornyc.com). If you're not familiar with GMAT Compass, it's a one-man tutoring company run by Erfun Geula, a guy whose grasp of grammar is incredible. We did our sessions over Skype, which was actually really effective. For each lesson, he would upload questions from SC 1000 or from mba.com, and we'd basically dissect the sentences. I learned a lot of really helpful tips for eliminating choices quickly and, really important for my situation, identifying what they were testing on each section. We also looked over Critical Reasoning and how to identify wrong answer choices and how to look at the more common question types. I think that the GMAT score ultimately comes down to the person taking it, but I found Erfun's advice to be really helpful on test day, and I recommend him to anyone that needs intensive help on the Verbal.
After about 10 hours of tutoring, I felt ready to tackle an mba.com practice test again. This time, my score was much better to work with: Quant 49, Verbal 35. I felt that this wes very near my goal, and after I took a few more mba.com tests and finally broke that magic 700, I signed up for the exam.
Test day: I didn't spend much time preparing for the essays and made sure to use that time to keep my mind at ease before the "real" test.
Quant: Basically, what I expected. A decent bit of NP, Inequalities, Algebraic Translations, and statistics. I didn't see any Combo/Perm. questions, but I did get several coordinate geometry questions, which I found surprising. I finished with about 30 seconds left in the section.
Verbal: I got one really tough RC passage at the very beginning, but I didn't want to waste too much time on it, and so guessed on an inference question. I had two science passages, which I didn't find too difficult. Nothing really out of the ordinary on Critical Reasoning, either -- a lot of assumption, strengthen, and weaken questions, a few "explain the discrepancy." No "analyze the argument", thankfully. Sentence Correction didn't have as many idioms as I thought, but there was a lot of parallelism and a few questions that were more about logic and meaning.
Final score: 710, Quant 49, Verbal 37.
Next up: applications!
I'm applying to Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, NYU, and Columbia.
Wish me luck!
Another success story here. Last Thursday was my first and last shot at the GMAT: 710! It was a long battle, but I put in a *lot* of effort and had some great assistance along the way.
Background: I moved to the US several years ago and attended a top-20 school where I studied engineering. I decided in April that I wanted a career change, and so signed up for Manhattan GMAT's online course. I found the course helpful, especially in Quant. I believe my intuitions with the Quant were always good, but Manhattan GMAT helped me to make sure that I had the correct approach toward all the questions the test throws at you. After the class, I took a few practice tests from mba.com and scored around 620 on all of them. Quant was around 48 and Verbal was around 28. Obviously I needed to improve on my Verbal! I read through Manhattan GMAT's sentence correction guide, but I still felt lost in a lot of situations. For some reason, REading comprehension wasn't too much of an issue, but Critical Reasoning was a bit tough. The worst part, without doubt, was sentence correction, though. I bought the PowerScore Sentence correction bible, read through it very carefully, but I still had a lot of issues on timing. I felt that I just didn't know where to start on most sentence correction questions. Obviously, you learn about splits and subject-verb and all those rules, but, i found it very difficult to figure out what rules to pay attention to and to understand what they wanted you to see.
So, I took the plunge and hired a tutor. I looked around a few places and ultimately settled on GMAT Compass (www.gmattutornyc.com). If you're not familiar with GMAT Compass, it's a one-man tutoring company run by Erfun Geula, a guy whose grasp of grammar is incredible. We did our sessions over Skype, which was actually really effective. For each lesson, he would upload questions from SC 1000 or from mba.com, and we'd basically dissect the sentences. I learned a lot of really helpful tips for eliminating choices quickly and, really important for my situation, identifying what they were testing on each section. We also looked over Critical Reasoning and how to identify wrong answer choices and how to look at the more common question types. I think that the GMAT score ultimately comes down to the person taking it, but I found Erfun's advice to be really helpful on test day, and I recommend him to anyone that needs intensive help on the Verbal.
After about 10 hours of tutoring, I felt ready to tackle an mba.com practice test again. This time, my score was much better to work with: Quant 49, Verbal 35. I felt that this wes very near my goal, and after I took a few more mba.com tests and finally broke that magic 700, I signed up for the exam.
Test day: I didn't spend much time preparing for the essays and made sure to use that time to keep my mind at ease before the "real" test.
Quant: Basically, what I expected. A decent bit of NP, Inequalities, Algebraic Translations, and statistics. I didn't see any Combo/Perm. questions, but I did get several coordinate geometry questions, which I found surprising. I finished with about 30 seconds left in the section.
Verbal: I got one really tough RC passage at the very beginning, but I didn't want to waste too much time on it, and so guessed on an inference question. I had two science passages, which I didn't find too difficult. Nothing really out of the ordinary on Critical Reasoning, either -- a lot of assumption, strengthen, and weaken questions, a few "explain the discrepancy." No "analyze the argument", thankfully. Sentence Correction didn't have as many idioms as I thought, but there was a lot of parallelism and a few questions that were more about logic and meaning.
Final score: 710, Quant 49, Verbal 37.
Next up: applications!
I'm applying to Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, NYU, and Columbia.
Wish me luck!
Last edited by fzerojones on Tue Sep 07, 2010 8:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
