I just Beat The GMAT!

I would like to share my experience on how I went about preparing for Gmat. I hope my experience will help at least a few fellow GMAT takers and they do not commit the same mistakes that I did.

Let me give you all a little background about myself. I am your typical Indian IT Male
Education: B.E(Computer Science), 2007 - Aggregate 72%
Job: Arcot Systems (Till now) 4+ Years of experience.

This year In March -April I figured that I should try for an MBA. My two options were either I start studying for CAT again (I had given it some time back in 2006 and had got a decent score 97 percentile which involved a lot of hardwork) or study for Gmat. As studying for CAT is much more time consuming(specially after being out of touch from Quant for so long) than Gmat and the scores for Gmat are valid for 5 years I came to the conclusion of studying for Gmat. As any noobie planning to study for Gmat I went and searched all the Forums (Pagal guy, Beat the Gmat and others) to get ideas on what needs to be done.

I came across the user name Psychodementia. He used to be my colleague. I took this opportunity to give him a call and ask for his advice. Even though we had not spoken for quite a few years he asked me to take an official Gmat prep test without preparation to find out where I stand. This helped me to understand which all areas I need to work on.

I took the Gmat prep test and got 650 (Q49, V30). I wanted a score more than 700. As I had already read about crackverbal and the high percentage of crackverbal student who scored more than 700. Also considering that I was already good at Quant I wanted to focus only on the Verbal part. I decided to join crackverbal at the end of April. I wanted to take the gmat test before August end. Due to my hectic work schedule I wanted to pace my preparation accordingly. From the test review I figured that I made the most mistakes in sentence correction though there was a lot to improve on the other two sections of the verbal as well.

Firstly, I got a copy for OG 12 ,OG Verbal Review and joined Crack Verbal. I learnt a lot on how to tackle the Gmat verbal question in these classes and I also figured how to handle the pressure that Gmat puts you in with his adaptive question pattern. The advanced document/questions provided with all Gmat prep questions was very helpful to solve the questions at a higher level of difficulty (esp SC with meaning, tough RC/CR etc)

I also made some friends in the fellow-students I met at the classes and this helped in keeping me competitive and more focused on my preparations. At the end, I got a good idea of what was needed and I was a lot more confident about reaching my Gmat target score.

After the classes, I took my second Gmat prep test along with AWA and my score was 680 (Q 50, V36).The section where I was losing marks was SC. So I focused primarily on SC and went through all the types of questions on SC in OG 12 and OG verbal.

But due to the increased work pressure was not able to spend as much time as required on the preparation. So I decided to schedule the gmat test. I scheduled it for the last week of august.

On the D-day I reached the center to take the test and gave my best shot. After the test when the option screen appears where you need to either submit the score or cancel the score I was very tempted to click on the cancel button as I felt I did not perform well. Anyhow after I submitted the score I was happy that I did not give into my initial feelings. I had scored 720 (V40 Q49). I had expected to score 50 in Quant so I was a little disappointed with my quant score. As the score was in my scoring range so I was still happy about it.

-Rahul

Congrats for crossing the barrier of 700

What were your mock scores in tests apart from GMAT Prep??