i received a private message about this thread.
angie99 wrote:I have been studying the GMAT for over a year and I took the real exam once and I got 540 (44 on math and 28 on verbal I think).
you may want to check that; those scores don't match up. if you had q44 v28, that would be 600.
maybe plus/minus 10 points, but that's about it.
Should I cut everything out in my life? I mean friends, family, and everything so that I will be more focused on GMAT.
i hope this is not actually a serious question. if it is, then the answer is, of course, no.
I know most experts said we shouldn't be studying for more than 6 hours per day. Is this method really working? I tried to study 6 hours then go out with my friends later in the day.
6 hours in one day is way, way too much.
for adult humans, the upper threshold for
learning, and/or
acquiring skills, is about 4 hours in a day -- and that's only if there is a decently long break in the middle of that time.
(this is not to be confused with
executing skills that one already has; that can pretty much go on indefinitely. for instance, if they really have to, people could take a 12-hour-long test. or investment bankers could make powerpoints for 24 hours in a row. but these are not
learning tasks, and that's a fundamental difference.)
plus, the good news about this test is that it's
not a "hard work" test.
in fact, that's the way this exam is by design: it's specifically made
not to require a great deal of preparation.
yes, you'll need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the way that the test items work -- how the questions are asked, how they
generally work, and so on -- so that the task becomes fairly routine.
and, if you forget your junior-high and early high school math (up through algebra 1 and geometry), and/or the fundamentals of written english sentence structure, then you'll have to refresh those. but, once you have those basic skill sets in place, the point of this exam is to be a fairly "quick study".
in other words, it's good that you're industrious, but this exam is definitely one of those "work smarter, not harder" things.
i.e., the proper response to long periods of work with few results is not to work even longer or harder! the proper response is to change the way you're working.
Then the next day, I find it is even harder to study because I keep thinking about all the fun I have with my friends and how unlucky I am that I have to study GMAT.
don't take this the wrong way, but reading this just gives me the sense that you're not ready for, and/or serious about, the prospect of b-school.
once you decide that this is Something You Really Want To Commit To... well, these kinds of thoughts shouldn't be there anymore.
