I have been a silent reader and user of the knowlge shared around here but now that I have achieved my aim of doing more than 700, I feel I need to share my experience with all of you, because this place is really GREAT !
I will make it short for now, here are the result I received this morning :
Overal : 740 (97 th percentile, not official yet)
Quant : 49 (87th percentile, not official yet)
Verb : 41 (91th percentile, not official yet)
It is time for me to chill a bit, as the last few days have been really terrible for me (I have never been so stressed about something), but I will come back to you with a detailed explanation of my study plan in the coming days!
Edit: Ok so now lets go with the debrief
To set the context, first a couple of words about my background : I graduated as an engineer in june 2007 and have been working as an IT consultant since september 2007. I have always been good in mathematics so I hoped I could perform well in quant (but still I was ready to not leave it to chance) but as a native french speaker, I was completely in the dark regarding the verbal part.
I have had the will to do an mba since before I graduated from university, so my journey with the gmat was kinda long, even tough I did not start studying until a couple of month ago. During my first year and a half of work, procrastination was the rule... Then in march 2009 I took my first action, I subscribed to The Economist (that I was only buying once in a while to read some specific articles). During the following 3 or 4 month, I forced myself to read every week's edition almost from cover to cover (ok I admit it I always skipped the art part). With hindsight this is probably the best decision I took, because going trough this pile of articles every week helped me develop my reading skills (to the point I had to slow myselft down during the verbal part), something I think is critical to perform well on the GMAT, especially for not native english speakers. And then after those 3 or 4 month, I continued to read the economist every week, but limiting myself to what I found interesting. Even in the last weeks, every time I was bored with quant study or verbal or was tempted to procrastinate, I the forced myself to read an article of The Economist, to ease my conscience. In the end this is a great newspaper and I'll continue to read it every week, even though the GMAT is now behind me...
In parallel to this reading "bootcamp", I started to get information on the GMAT itself and to collect the books I thought would be needed. Around July 2009 I was convinced that I needed 3-4 month of study to ace this test. I was quite busy at work and with other personal projects at the time so I decided that I would pass the GMAT around end April-start of may 2010. In the end I was caught a bit and only started to study somewhere in February so decided to book an appointment at the test center as I felt a deadline would help me to focus, but for the 04th of June, so a bit later than first planned. The books I used were :
- Manhattan GMAT complete edition (great Math and Sentence correction books, I cant say anything about the reading comprehension and critical reasoning ones as I did not even open them)
- Kaplan (bought it for the cd with the CAT test, I was not convinced by the study material, especially in comparison to Manhattan GMAT)
- The Princeton review (oh my god that was some wasted money, I had read that it was giving some great strategies but I fond them to be crap, like for instance the advice to look first at the question stem of a CR question before reading the stimulus - an error that Kaplan also does by the way - I started with this book but I feel i have really wasted my time with it, it is probably only interesting if you want to achieve a medium score without too much effort, by relying mostly on cheap tricks)
- Powerscore critical reasoning bible (purely gold material)
- Official guide 12th edition + Quant and Verbal review (not surprisingly the closest source of exercise to the actual test itself).
- 198 level 700 questions found on this website
In the beginning I studied a couple of hours per week, then in the last weeks I upped my pace (I even took some "vacation" to study just before the test). Unlike others here, I did not keep an error log, as I found it to be too time consuming to maintain to my liking, but I still kept trace of the problem I got wrong on the official guide (circled the question number) or the ones I guessed (underlined the question number), to be able to go back at them. What I felt missing with this technique is an overview of the type of mistake I was making, but anyway it was too late to go back and change my process.
I do not have much to say on the way I studied, except that I was timing myself for every question I was doing, ensuring I could feel when my 2 mins were up. Manhattan GMAT quant is great to teach you the concepts, but the exercises are a bit different from the official ones, so I would focuss on these books in the beginning, but closing to the test it is the official guide that should have all your attention. If you focuss to much on Manhattan, I have no doubt you'll be great at math, and you'll score great on the MGMAT cat, but it is still quite different from the official one. Each publisher of math content and test (also speaking about Kaplan here), has its own "feel" or "taste" and the more time you spend on a particular type or material, the more you are geared towards the question coming from there. As in the end it is the official GMAT you want to ace, be sure you spend most of your time doing official question, and that you keep them for the latest part of your study.
Some more general thoughts on the questions :
- for data sufficiency, the key is rephrasing. If you jump too quickly on the question, you'll probably miss the perceptive needed to solve the toughest questions
- for reading comprehension question, the key is to understand the text. Do not go cheap by skimming through, if you want to answer the more difficult question you have to understand what the text is about. I would usually read the first and last paragraph twice, and stop at then end of each paragraph to briefly rephrase what I just read. I devoted 3 to 4 minutes (depending on the length) to reading, then a bit less than 1 minute per question (some become really easy once you have a good understanding on the text).
- for critical reasoning, again the key is to understand fully the stimulus. Do not distract yourself by reading the question stem (or even worst, the answer choice) before reading the stimulus. Identify the conclusion and understand the logic of the argument and it will be a piece of cake (I read the critical reasoning bible 4 times, that might have helped).
- for sentence correction, study all the Manhattan book, it is great!
So far I have only talked about the study, but there is another very important aspect to the gmat : it is long and hard! So you have to prepare yourself for that as well. The first step is to study by shifts of at least 1h, to build your stamina. But this is not enough, you really need to put yourself in the condition of the test itself, there is really way for improvement just in the way you handle the test and are able to stay focus throughout the test. By doing so, you will also be able to see if your time management is good or bad, another thing that is key to success in the gmat!
Here is the list of the tes I took during my preparation:
13/03/2010 : Kaplan paper test - 530 (was shocked, boy there was some work ahead of me...)
27/03/2010 : First Kaplan cat - 570 41Q 27V (completely exhausted during the verbal part, but also a bit suspicious about the quality of the questions...)
17/04/2010 : Second Kaplan cat - 600 41Q 32V (at least some improvement, but still the question on the verbal look crappy, fi some are not correctly spelled, ...)
01/05/2010 : Third Kaplan CAT - 640 50Q 35V (work seems to pay off, was glad to find out on this forum that Kaplan usually underscore you and that I was not the only one complaining about the quality of the verbal part).
21/05/2010 : Power Prep 1 - 760 49Q 44V (wow what a great score! I felt I was a bit lucky on the quant as I guessed correctly a few questions and was caught by the time at the end, and on the verbal I had some repeats from OG - how silly is that after all you have paid to have the books...- This convinced me I was on the right track, but at the same time my test was now looking so long away, why did'nt I scheduled it before? )
28/05/2010 : Power Prep 2 - 760 49Q 44V (exactly the same score as a week before, but there I felt it was more deserved as I did not guess on the quant, and had fewere repeats on the verbal)
31/05/2010 : Manhattan GMAT cat 2 (burned the first one without actually doing it) - 730 48Q 41V (I was a bit surprised by how different the questions "felt" compared to the official material)
01/06/2010 : Manhattan GMAT cat 3 - 700 44Q 41V (that freaked me a bit as I was on a downhill trend just 3 days before the real test... So I decided to stop with the Manhattan GMAT cat and focuss on the official questions)
04/06/2010 : Official GMAT - 740 49Q 41V
Something terrible happened to me during the test. If you are still reading (congratulation, you have some patience!) and have yet to pass the test, be sure NOT to do what I did. At the end of the quant, I was perfect on the time management side, with 2 min remaining for the last question. I did not really figured it out so I selected an answer but allowed myself to think about it until a couple of second before the end. But 10 sec before the end I had an "idea" and tried to rush trough, by the time I realized I had not enough time, I was only able to click on "next" to see the validation pop up appeared just an instant before the screen froze saying my time was out. I was GUTTED. I had read so many time that you had a harsh penalty for not completing all the question. At that time I wanted to kill myself... So I started the Verbal part almost straight away to "end the farce" and see how much I screwed... During the verbal I had trouble to focus because my mind was still furious about that mistake ("so much effort to screw in such a bad way, you're a complete idiot"). In the end I was shocked to see a 740 on the screen! So please, make sure to complete the laste question some 10 sec before the end, and also, do not try to evaluate yourself until the end, just take each question at a time. I have no idea how much I lost due to my antics (does someone know the penalty for one unanswered question?) in quant and my bad mood in verbal, but in the end this 740 is still much more than what I hoped, so it is not so bad!
About the practice test, I really felt that each one has is flavor, and powerprep is by far the best to judge your ability on the real test. If I could go back and change my preparation, I would do the Manhattan cat earlier, at the time I was studying the books, to make sure I was getting the concepts, and then closer to the test I would have focused more on power prep. Also, each test I did included the AWA part. I think it is important that the AWA does not eat your stamina, and I must say that arriving at the exam with 8 AWA done allowed me to be quite relaxed about that part and still be fresh to start the quant. I do not have my AWA result yet but I felt I did them well enough to earn a 4 (we'll see in 20 days...)
Ok I understand this debrief was atrociously long and I am now probably talking only to myself, but I wanted to conclude that this place was a great asset during my preparation (especially for the 198 question of 700 level difficulty and the numerous answers and explanation of them).
The GMAT was a long journey, that I am happy now to put behind me to start an much much much more important one: my application to my dream business school! I understand I am still nowhere with only that score, but it is a huge boost in motivation as it shows that I can aim for what I dreamed of!
Best of luck to all of you who intend to take the gmat in the future! Be sure to use this place, there are some treasuries to be found
