I just Beat The GMAT!

Dear friends,

I took my gmat on saturday and scored a 720--- am very happy.
big thanx to all people who have contributed on this forum and ofcourse to beatthegmat for creating such a forum!

Here's a customary de-brief from my end-- i hope it helps someone...

1. ACTUAL GMAT-
Quant- easier than i had thought it would be. In fact i thought that i had really done poor on my quant to have rcvd such easy questions... turned out later i was wrong! i told myself in the break after quant that verbal was my salvage point and i should be extra careful... bad strategy.. i ended up cross checking answers on first 10 questions and was left wih 11 minutes to complete 11 questions in the end..Overall there was a lot of similarity to OG questions on BOTH QUANT AND VERBAL.

SC on actual GMAT is more difficult than what is on other tests...actual difficulty level resembles last 50 questions on OG.

CR is more diificult than OG i thought.

2. PREPARATION
about 2 months--- with a clear focus to identify and improve weak points. I started with perm com and prob and mastered it from class X cBSE guides!!! yeah that stuff is very good. doing this helped me since i could be very confident of perm com and prob... in actual gmat i ahd about 4 questions on these topics so it helped.

Verbal - i did M SC but it doesnt sufficiently cover topics like tense and modifier and i think they are very imp for actual gmat... i dont knwo whether SC bible deals with thsi any better. besides these two topics, i foud MSC very good.. yu will need to supplement it with other stuff though...

3. TESTS & SCORES
i took almost 23 tests and it nt make sense to mention all scores here...
On kaplan i scored between 550 to 630
On Manhattan i scored 710-760
On Princeton - scores varoed a lot 730, 710, 610, 630.... was weird.
Focus - 46-50 always.
GMAt 800(Q)- 48

I feel that verbal on manhattan is best! (although SC is easier than ctual gmat)

Kaplan is great for stamina building!!!! although manhattan and kaplan both have higher difficulty questions than required.. i felt doing manhattan tests 1-3 for quant was useless... they were way off the mark..kaplan was better and helped build stamina.... tests 4-5-6 quant sections on manhattan are more realistic.

Princeton was terrible.. math was so easy- you hardly learned anything.

GMAT Focus was the best...for quant.

4. PREP TIPS/ BEST PRACTICES

1. Inspired by use of flashcards, i had mainatined a little notebook in which i wrote all questions i was getting wrong on tests plus all OG quetsions i thought were good/ tricky... THIS HELPED ME TREMENDOUSLY.

Last day, i just glanced through my notebook and refreshed everythingin les than 03 hrs... it helped a lot since a lot of quetsion were similar to OG..

although i did the same for verbal, it was much less effective for me.

2. i suggest that all prep shoudl be focussed on constantly identifying weak areas and putting in additional work on those areas.... this really helps... when you start taking tests, you pick teh top three or top two areas for re-work and just work exclusively on them for a weekend-- this helps confidence building and shows remarkable improvement.

With a week left for gmat, i noticed my CR wasnt upto teh mark sometimes 60% sometimes 80%.. so i decided to put in the work and did quetsions off the 1000 CR... it really helped... could improve my performance on BOLD FACE questions to 100% by doing a set of 15 bold face questions off someone's blog.

In short, this strategy of eliminating weaknesses really worked for me.

FINAL WORDS-- Someone said this to me when i started prepping and i believe in it now--- what one man can, the other can.

Thanx again to everyone for all the help....

Regards
Meenu

Congrats!!! Meenu and best of luck for your application process.

I am also giving GMAT next week (Tuesday). Any tips like to share?

Though I have noted down to do last 50 OG questions of SC, to do CR questions (bold face ones).

As usual my verbal is weak as compare to quant. So need some tips on it.

Good Luck!!!

if you havent yet done the lsat cr bible, i recommend you give it some time to do teh part on formal logic.... identify your other weak areas and do teh 1000** set for that particular topic..

also, customise all advise to your particular case!
Good Luck!

Thanks but I think now I don;t have time to that. Starting new books in last week, guess won't work for me.

But anyway thanks for your response.

Congratulations, mkaushik!

Would you be able to share those CBSE notes for combinations and probability?

Thanks in advance if you can post them!