Hi everyone,
I took my GMAT today and got a 720 (Q49, V38). Percentage-wise this is 94% overall, 86% in Quant and 83% in Verbal. I'm really happy since my goal was primarily to score at or above 700. This forum has been a great help in preparing for the test, so I hope my debriefing may be a help to some of you.
Background
I'm a non-native speaker from Western Europe, been in consulting for two years, and then switched to consumer goods one and half years ago. I'm 30 years old and hold an undergraduate degree in business.
Insights & Thoughts
I want to share with you what I believe are crucial success factors for beating the GMAT. Here they are, in descending order of importance:
1. Practice A LOT
2. Work on your weaknesses
3. Pace yourself constantly
4. Control your emotions
5. Have fun
6. Keep record of what you do
7. Keep it simple & stick to the original
1. Practice A LOT
I believe that the GMAT measures two things: Your intellectual ability and your determination. Both features are appreciated by business schools, so the concept of the GMAT is maybe not that bad. That means it's definitely not sufficient to be smart (unlike an IQ test). And since you can not alter your intellectual ability, the one and only way to improve your score is practicing! Try to work on as many sample questions as possible, and if you get them wrong, try to understand why and repeat them over and over again.
2. Work on your weaknesses
When I took my first GMAT Prep Test three weeks before the real test, I scored a 750 (Q48, V46). Although it felt good to see such a high score on the screen, I didn't take it for granted that I would be able to reproduce this on test day, since a) I didn't write the essays b) I took a 20 minute break instead of 8 minutes and c) I recognized some questions from the OG. Still it told me one thing: My verbal skills were way above my quant skills at that moment. I read about 80/80 splits, and since INSEAD, one of the schools that I want to apply to, states explicitly on its website that it wants a balanced split, I decided to concentrate entirely on Quant. This proved to be the right strategy, and I managed to score 86% in quant, but that came at the cost of loosing eight scaled points in Verbal.
3. Pace yourself constantly
Something I did from the beginning. Whenever I worked on OG questions, I used the TestGrid4GMAT practice grid, which I downloaded from this forum. By doing so, you get a good feeling of the pace you have to keep. Some friends told me their biggest problem on the actual test was that they had to rush at some point - I think I avoided that by using the grid from the beginning.
4. Control your emotions
This applies to both studying and test taking. When you prepare for the GMAT, there will be highs and lows for sure. There are the days when the official software tells you you're going to score in the 98th percentile, and then there are the days when you get up at six in the morning to study and get two out of three questions wrong. In both cases, try to stay calm and focussed! It is tempting to believe that you're a genius in the first case and an idiot that will never get anywhere no matter how much he studies in the second case. Both will distract you from your mission.
5. Have fun
Seems to be a contradiction to the last paragraph, but I really don't think it is. Many have written about this before, and it helped me a lot. There are indeed quite a few things that are nice about the GMAT: You can use your brain, which is not always true in the business world. You can reactivate long forgotten knowledge. For me as a non-native speaker it was nice to review English grammar. I learned some new words. And I liked many of the RC passages. Many describe them as boring, but I found some really interesting. And they seem to present actual facts (Does anyone know for sure?). If all that doesn't help keep telling you that you are doing the whole thing for yourself, not for your boss or anyone else. It is your ticket to the b-school you always dreamed of!
6. Keep record of what you do
I used a simple Excel sheet to note the start and end times of my study sessions, the number of questions I did, which question type it was and what percentage I got right. I used one line for every day, so I always had an overview of how many days there were left, how much time I spend on what and where my weaknesses were. By the way: I studied a total of 185 hours, thereof about 35 hours for concepts (primarily Princeton Review) and the diagnostic test, the rest of time for practice. As mentioned before I used to get up early every day and study for two hours before going to work, since my mental abilities are better in morning than in the evening. Together with the weekends, I totalled between 10 and 20 hours a week. I took off the last week before the exam to concentrate entirely on the GMAT.
7. Keep it simple & stick to the original
I found it surprising how few materials you really need to master the test, given the fact that a lot of people try to defeat the GMAT by throwing money at it. A minimalist approach would be to only use the OG for the questions and Princeton Review for the concepts. I really think these two books contain everything you need! It is by far more important to understand what is written in these two books than to go through five other books. I did have way more books and questions, mainly because friends who did the test before me gave them to me, but even within my 185 hours I didn't have the time to work through all of them. If you combine OG, Quant Review and Verbal Review you get 1400 questions, which is more than enough in my opinion. With repetition, I was able to work on 1600 question, but that includes some questions that I repeated several times. Stick to the original questions, because they are the best proxy for the real test. The book I like best next to the original guides and Princeton was GMAT800, primarily because of the authors' weird humour (e.g. suggesting you should get one of their overviews tattooed on your inner forearm. I wonder how many people actually did this).
What remains is to thank you, the moderators and contributors of this wonderful forum. It helped me a lot to see how many others are out there, sharing the same fate... Good luck to all of you!
Cheers, volante
I apologize for the spelling errors. I'm really tired and still pumped with adrenaline, strange state. Hope it goes away tomorrow
I took my GMAT today and got a 720 (Q49, V38). Percentage-wise this is 94% overall, 86% in Quant and 83% in Verbal. I'm really happy since my goal was primarily to score at or above 700. This forum has been a great help in preparing for the test, so I hope my debriefing may be a help to some of you.
Background
I'm a non-native speaker from Western Europe, been in consulting for two years, and then switched to consumer goods one and half years ago. I'm 30 years old and hold an undergraduate degree in business.
Insights & Thoughts
I want to share with you what I believe are crucial success factors for beating the GMAT. Here they are, in descending order of importance:
1. Practice A LOT
2. Work on your weaknesses
3. Pace yourself constantly
4. Control your emotions
5. Have fun
6. Keep record of what you do
7. Keep it simple & stick to the original
1. Practice A LOT
I believe that the GMAT measures two things: Your intellectual ability and your determination. Both features are appreciated by business schools, so the concept of the GMAT is maybe not that bad. That means it's definitely not sufficient to be smart (unlike an IQ test). And since you can not alter your intellectual ability, the one and only way to improve your score is practicing! Try to work on as many sample questions as possible, and if you get them wrong, try to understand why and repeat them over and over again.
2. Work on your weaknesses
When I took my first GMAT Prep Test three weeks before the real test, I scored a 750 (Q48, V46). Although it felt good to see such a high score on the screen, I didn't take it for granted that I would be able to reproduce this on test day, since a) I didn't write the essays b) I took a 20 minute break instead of 8 minutes and c) I recognized some questions from the OG. Still it told me one thing: My verbal skills were way above my quant skills at that moment. I read about 80/80 splits, and since INSEAD, one of the schools that I want to apply to, states explicitly on its website that it wants a balanced split, I decided to concentrate entirely on Quant. This proved to be the right strategy, and I managed to score 86% in quant, but that came at the cost of loosing eight scaled points in Verbal.
3. Pace yourself constantly
Something I did from the beginning. Whenever I worked on OG questions, I used the TestGrid4GMAT practice grid, which I downloaded from this forum. By doing so, you get a good feeling of the pace you have to keep. Some friends told me their biggest problem on the actual test was that they had to rush at some point - I think I avoided that by using the grid from the beginning.
4. Control your emotions
This applies to both studying and test taking. When you prepare for the GMAT, there will be highs and lows for sure. There are the days when the official software tells you you're going to score in the 98th percentile, and then there are the days when you get up at six in the morning to study and get two out of three questions wrong. In both cases, try to stay calm and focussed! It is tempting to believe that you're a genius in the first case and an idiot that will never get anywhere no matter how much he studies in the second case. Both will distract you from your mission.
5. Have fun
Seems to be a contradiction to the last paragraph, but I really don't think it is. Many have written about this before, and it helped me a lot. There are indeed quite a few things that are nice about the GMAT: You can use your brain, which is not always true in the business world. You can reactivate long forgotten knowledge. For me as a non-native speaker it was nice to review English grammar. I learned some new words. And I liked many of the RC passages. Many describe them as boring, but I found some really interesting. And they seem to present actual facts (Does anyone know for sure?). If all that doesn't help keep telling you that you are doing the whole thing for yourself, not for your boss or anyone else. It is your ticket to the b-school you always dreamed of!
6. Keep record of what you do
I used a simple Excel sheet to note the start and end times of my study sessions, the number of questions I did, which question type it was and what percentage I got right. I used one line for every day, so I always had an overview of how many days there were left, how much time I spend on what and where my weaknesses were. By the way: I studied a total of 185 hours, thereof about 35 hours for concepts (primarily Princeton Review) and the diagnostic test, the rest of time for practice. As mentioned before I used to get up early every day and study for two hours before going to work, since my mental abilities are better in morning than in the evening. Together with the weekends, I totalled between 10 and 20 hours a week. I took off the last week before the exam to concentrate entirely on the GMAT.
7. Keep it simple & stick to the original
I found it surprising how few materials you really need to master the test, given the fact that a lot of people try to defeat the GMAT by throwing money at it. A minimalist approach would be to only use the OG for the questions and Princeton Review for the concepts. I really think these two books contain everything you need! It is by far more important to understand what is written in these two books than to go through five other books. I did have way more books and questions, mainly because friends who did the test before me gave them to me, but even within my 185 hours I didn't have the time to work through all of them. If you combine OG, Quant Review and Verbal Review you get 1400 questions, which is more than enough in my opinion. With repetition, I was able to work on 1600 question, but that includes some questions that I repeated several times. Stick to the original questions, because they are the best proxy for the real test. The book I like best next to the original guides and Princeton was GMAT800, primarily because of the authors' weird humour (e.g. suggesting you should get one of their overviews tattooed on your inner forearm. I wonder how many people actually did this).
What remains is to thank you, the moderators and contributors of this wonderful forum. It helped me a lot to see how many others are out there, sharing the same fate... Good luck to all of you!
Cheers, volante
I apologize for the spelling errors. I'm really tired and still pumped with adrenaline, strange state. Hope it goes away tomorrow
