GMAT Strategy

lemonhead wrote:Hi I am going to grad school at my university where i just completed my undergrad. I graduated with a 3.31 GPA with BS in Bus Admin majoring in CIS. I came across this site and thought id post just to see what everyone has to say. Basically I talked to admissions and was told considering my previous coursework and GPA I should really just need a 425 on the GMATs to be accepted. Is this going to be hard to get? Im very nervous because I have a lot riding on just getting into grad school. Thats the whole reason I am moving out by school and have a job already set in that area starting in June. Thanks

what is 'cis'?

also note that scores on the gmat are always multiples of 10, so that '425' is actually an impossible score. is that some sort of average for accepted students in the department where you want to do graduate study?

in any case, as the above poster has noted, you should take at least one of the free practice tests from mba.com, and use it to calibrate your initial ability. 420-430 is not an overly ambitious score goal, so you may find that you can already score at this level without any preparation.

if that's your score goal, then, among other things, you should definitely learn proper time management for the gmat. if your knowledge of the quantitative and verbal fundamentals is decent, then the only thing that will really prevent you from achieving the score you want is running out of time at the end of the test (which will KILL your score). as long as you stick to proper time constraints - about 2 minutes per math question, about 1:30 max for sentence correction, 2:30 max for critical reasoning, and about 1:15 or so per reading comp question (after reading the passage - 3 min for short passage, 4 min for long passage) - you should be able to achieve that goal score. only if you spend many minutes on each problem, thus missing a large number of questions at the end of the test, will your score likely drop below your stated threshold.