I just Beat The GMAT!

Happy this is over.

Wanted to give some tips that gave me an edge in improving my score.

Gave the first GMAT in February and when I saw the score 650 (Q-38 (55%) and V- 41 (93%) AWA 5.5) I was appalled. It meant setting back plans for Top 3 admission by a year.

I started to prepare in December with the Kaplan book, slowly realized it would not do and bought a Veritas on Demand package to get some more detailed lessons.

About a week before the February test I panicked and bought the GMAT Math Bible and 2 other workbooks from gmathacks.com.

It turns out that I never bothered with the AWA and the Verbal Part and only focused on math. Even though English is m third language I did not see a point in studying for RC or CR, while SC was a minor thing to digest.

After the test I went under the radar for a while and started by picking up again from the gmat bible in April.

What really made a huge difference was reading this Wired article about this Wozniak guy in Poland and a software he developed to sustain his learning called Supermemo First thing I did was to download Supermemo (which essentially is a flashcards software on steroids).

After that I found out about the forums and started to feed questions from Gmat Prep, gmathacks.com, and manhattanreview into the Supermemo.

Bringing them up at perfectly selected intervals as the Supermemo software does definitely helped to internalize a lot of the stuff.

Food supplements for test day: At this last testing day I added some 3 grams of carnitine, and 1.5g of glucosamine (as well as the good old Red Bulls) to my food supply so as to make the neurons zap faster.

AWA was easy. again, 15 minutes preparation here on how to construct a general template for args and issues and ready set go.

Quant part was weird. While at the first test I could clearly recognize which questions were the "trial" ones, on the second test it was all mixed smoothly. I did a big mistake in getting hooked in a couple of PS problems and wanting to solve them really bad. Repercussion on the last 10 questions was an added level of stress that definitely impaired my thinking even though I managed to finish all the questions. Strangely enough I did not encounter a single Probability or Combinatorics problem which got me really preoccupied by the end of quant.

Verbal again was a piece of cake. Almost no preparation whatsoever apart from the SC Flashcards from this forum. I noticed I was going well because CR questions were hammering me with complete the sentence questions.

Before getting the final score I was really worried about the Quant part because I realized that I had hurried through most of the final questions. In the end I was blessed with a 710 (Q-46 (77%) and V-41 (92%)).

I don't know if the claim that gmat reflects mathematical thinking is true, but in that case I should better stay away from jobs with that sort of skillset considering the hardship of getting the quant part done (which is funny given my background in Derivatives Salestrading).

Congrats Leovonp!!! Nice effort...

Would you share to us, how you beat the data sufficiency?

Regards,

Cornell

Thanks Cornell,

due to the time mismanagement issue I actually used DS questions as time savers. That meant no calculations whatsoever, just an understanding of where the two statements might take me and a selection based on this basic understanding.

I do not recommend this method as a clear understanding of all the nuances in the DS requires quite some preparation, but it is also true that you should avoid doing full calculations for DS.

My suggestion is to take an average of 55 seconds for DS and take more time for PS. But then again this is very subjective.