Hello friends,
I just received my official score which is 750 V45 Q48 6.0. I have been a lurker on the boards and I must give my thanks and appreciation to the countless kind strangers who have posted their problems and solutions. Before attending the actual exam I was a nervous wreck but I found comfort in the experiences that people have shared.
Materials Used
GMAT Official Guides
Background
I have an electrical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia (in Canada). I have been working in the manufacturing field for four years. With the engineering background I thought I would have a real easy time with the quant section, however I found this was not the case. The kind of quant skills that are required for success on the GMAT are actually very different from what I was accustomed to.
I found the Manhattan guides for Number Properties and Work Translations to be extremely helpful and would recommend them to anyone looking to catch up on relevant quant skills.
Quant Section
I had the toughest time with the quant section during the exam. I had a 95% rate of success with Quant in the OG and GMATPrep tests, which leads me to believe that I was either off of my game in the actual test, or that the actual test is harder than the questions I had encountered prior. My problem was that I was actually running out of time near the end of the test, and had to guess four of the last seven questions. I strategically guessed every other question in the last seven in order to lower the chance of being penalized further for consecutive wrong answers.
Verbal Section
I had a very easy time with Verbal, and I would attribute this to over-studying. I basically focused most of my preparation on verbal, and on sentence correction in particular. In hindsight this may not have been the wisest way to spend my time, because the scoring algorithm appears to give greater weight to mistakes in critical reasoning and reading comprehension than to sentence correction.
I found the Manhattan guides helpful. It is interesting to note however that I was never able to fully absorb the "system" that they teach in the guides. For example, in the Manhattan SC guide they teach you to try to characterize the problem sentences according to their categories. I went through the book twice but could not remember their system, so here is the system that I used for sentence correction:
If I sought to quickly eliminate answer choices based on the following errors:
For reading comprehension, the system of "active reading" that I frequently encounter online is quite useful, I used the method prescribed in the Manhattan RC guide for doing questions in the OG and had a near perfect success rate. However, I found that more often than not (around 80% of the time), the answer to the question does not require a very deep comprehension because the answer can be explicitly found in the body of the question. To guarantee success in these cases, it is very important to read fast enough to go through the text again to find the answer.
I had a success rate of around 97% with the critical reasoning questions in the OG guides, so I did not go through the Manhattan CR guide very much. I would be comfortable with recommending those who are finding success for CR in the OG guides to not worry about this section too much.
Writing the GMAT:
It is always possible to find a really hard question from the forums that feel as if they are impossible to do within two minutes. To avoid freaking myself out, I did not study or look at anything GMAT related for two days prior to writing. The test itself blew by very quickly but I found that it was very important to take the breaks. The break was especially important for me because I felt as if I had bombed the quant section. I had a shot of cold expresso which I had brought from home during each of my breaks which helped.
Good luck to all those who are laboring hard in preparation for their exams. I live in the Vancouver, B.C. If anyone is prepping in this area and would like advice/help/further correspondence please feel free to contact me.
-Brian
I just received my official score which is 750 V45 Q48 6.0. I have been a lurker on the boards and I must give my thanks and appreciation to the countless kind strangers who have posted their problems and solutions. Before attending the actual exam I was a nervous wreck but I found comfort in the experiences that people have shared.
Materials Used
GMAT Official Guides
- GMAT Review, 12th Edition
Quantitative Review, 2nd Edition
Verbal Review, 2nd Edition
- Number Properties
Word Translations
Geometry
Critical Reasoning
Reading comprehension
Sentence Correction
- Math Workbook
Verbal Workbook
(I did not feel that I needed these guides)
Background
I have an electrical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia (in Canada). I have been working in the manufacturing field for four years. With the engineering background I thought I would have a real easy time with the quant section, however I found this was not the case. The kind of quant skills that are required for success on the GMAT are actually very different from what I was accustomed to.
I found the Manhattan guides for Number Properties and Work Translations to be extremely helpful and would recommend them to anyone looking to catch up on relevant quant skills.
Quant Section
I had the toughest time with the quant section during the exam. I had a 95% rate of success with Quant in the OG and GMATPrep tests, which leads me to believe that I was either off of my game in the actual test, or that the actual test is harder than the questions I had encountered prior. My problem was that I was actually running out of time near the end of the test, and had to guess four of the last seven questions. I strategically guessed every other question in the last seven in order to lower the chance of being penalized further for consecutive wrong answers.
Verbal Section
I had a very easy time with Verbal, and I would attribute this to over-studying. I basically focused most of my preparation on verbal, and on sentence correction in particular. In hindsight this may not have been the wisest way to spend my time, because the scoring algorithm appears to give greater weight to mistakes in critical reasoning and reading comprehension than to sentence correction.
I found the Manhattan guides helpful. It is interesting to note however that I was never able to fully absorb the "system" that they teach in the guides. For example, in the Manhattan SC guide they teach you to try to characterize the problem sentences according to their categories. I went through the book twice but could not remember their system, so here is the system that I used for sentence correction:
If I sought to quickly eliminate answer choices based on the following errors:
- Subject Verb Agreement
Tenses
Comparisons
Parallelsm
For reading comprehension, the system of "active reading" that I frequently encounter online is quite useful, I used the method prescribed in the Manhattan RC guide for doing questions in the OG and had a near perfect success rate. However, I found that more often than not (around 80% of the time), the answer to the question does not require a very deep comprehension because the answer can be explicitly found in the body of the question. To guarantee success in these cases, it is very important to read fast enough to go through the text again to find the answer.
I had a success rate of around 97% with the critical reasoning questions in the OG guides, so I did not go through the Manhattan CR guide very much. I would be comfortable with recommending those who are finding success for CR in the OG guides to not worry about this section too much.
Writing the GMAT:
It is always possible to find a really hard question from the forums that feel as if they are impossible to do within two minutes. To avoid freaking myself out, I did not study or look at anything GMAT related for two days prior to writing. The test itself blew by very quickly but I found that it was very important to take the breaks. The break was especially important for me because I felt as if I had bombed the quant section. I had a shot of cold expresso which I had brought from home during each of my breaks which helped.
Good luck to all those who are laboring hard in preparation for their exams. I live in the Vancouver, B.C. If anyone is prepping in this area and would like advice/help/further correspondence please feel free to contact me.
-Brian
