I had started my preps by joining Princeton Review in June this year, and my main motive in doing so was to keep me on track. I know that I would not stay on top of my preparations so had to enroll into the course.
After a three months preparation, I took my first GMAT on the 7th of Sept '09. It was a nightmare, not because I was not prepared but that I was not prepared for such testing conditions. I have complained a lot about that day on BTG alone, but would repeat that once more...because it helps me prove one thing - No failure is ever final, nor is any success!!
The problem was that there was some construction work going on in the shop adjacent to our test center and they were making a lot of noise (drilling and hammering etc.) and that was a huge distraction...right from the time one enters the test center.
My suggestion to anyone who faces such a problem will be that you should not jeopardise your preparations and the money you have put into the test by being polite and not complaining enough. I think I should have called the Pearson Vue head office from the test center itself and should have informed them about the test center's condition and also that I will not be taking the test in such a condition. It would have been much better than following up with them later on.
Moving on, that day I couldn't manage the noise along with the test anxiety and landed on my face with a score of 630(47q, 30v). It was very disappointing and disheartening, more so because just the day before my actual GMAT I had managed a 750(50q, 41v) on GMATPrep Test2. I raised a complaint regarding the test conditions and my request for a retake was declined on the basis that no one else had raised a similar complaint!! It was even more agonising
Anyways, then I started preparing for another try at the GMAT, after a break of about 2-3 weeks. The things I did different in this round of preparation added a lot to my confidence and test taking ability.
(Here I will brief about my second preparation round only)
I bought the MGMAT CATs and took the first test without any preparation. (well, at least after the 3 weeks break).
I realised the MGMAT test seemed a lot lengthier and was more time consuming than Princeton and GMATPrep.
And somehow the quants section seemed more close to the actual GMAT quants experience I had had.
So my take would be that although the MGMAT CATs are a bit tougher than the actual GMAT, they prepare you for the worst and thats better than anything else.
Along with the MGMAT CATs I used the following
Powerscore LSAT LR Bible - if your CR is weak, this book is actually a bible.
MGMAT SC Guide
Kaplan Verbal Workbook
MGMAT Quants guides
OG 10, 11 and 12
Sets of the 1000 Series SC, CR, PS and DS.
And here are my test scores:
04/10 MGMAT CAT1 610 - 30v 45q
29/10 MGMAT CAT2 670 - 34v 47q
05/11 MGMAT CAT3 640 - 31v 47q
12/11 MGMAT CAT4 680 - 36v 47q
19/11 MGMAT CAT5 710 - 36v 51q
22/11 MGMAT CAT6 680 - 35v 47q
25/11 GMATPrep1 740 - 39v 51q
28/11 GMATPrep2 760 - 41v 51q
02/12 GMATPrep2-II 740 - 39v 50q
04/12 GMAT 730 - 38v 50q
In my second round of preparations, I did not solve a single question without a timer. I think this helped me a lot in SC and quants. I trained my mind so well that it knew by when it should stop solving a problem and start looking for possible elimination options and make an educated guess and move on. It is very important that you should not get stuck in a question for too long. Getting stuck with a question inevitably leads to losing time for questions that you could have solved otherwise. So it is very important to learn when to detach yourself from a question and rely on guess work. Along with that it is equally important to have moved your mind away from the previous question and focus on the one that you are faced with. At times during practice tests I had observed that my mind used to get stuck thinking about the previous question for around next two questions and that lead to some silly mistakes. You should train your mind to stay detached from questions that you have answered and moved on.
I developed a strategy for SC which helped me improve my score on verbal a lot. When we read the SC questions generally we start reading the text, trying to understand what the sentence is saying. But what we have to do is just look for the elements of a sentence and check that they qualify all the rules. This approach helped me a lot to improve my speed in and accuracy in SC specifically. The MGMAT guide teaches a fantastic way to do this, it lists down the key features of different types of questions and all you have to remember are the key features and once you encounter them remember what to look for...that does it.
For CR, LSAT LR Bible is all that is needed. I have not read the GMAT CR Bible so cannot comment on that. But this is another book which changes the approach towards CR questions. It teaches a very methodical approach towards solving CR questions and makes it as simple as just putting values to a linear equation.
For RC, once you have mastered the CR approach I think you can use most of the learnings in RC as well. Again the rule of detachment and not trying to understand the text helps in case of RCs. I think this section was the toughest to overcome in verbal for me. I always had a very low score in verbal mostly because of RC, but only after I worked on my CR muscles I could start getting better at RC. It is important to stay detached from the topic of the passage. You don't have to know the subject to which the topic is related, all you need to know is understand that the topic is from a particular topic. Rest all the information needed to answer the questions are in the passage, just skim through the passage and note down the information content in your head. I think the Kaplan Verbal Workbook teaches a very good way to approach the RC questions and it is important to practice RCs a lot and regularly. At least about three to four RCs everyday all through your prep schedule should help you master the RC questions and approach.
For PS and DS, go through the MGMAT CAT questions as many times as possible. Do as many tough questions as possible. And it is very important to maintain a master notebook where you keep noting down all the important concepts or tricks you learn all through your preparations. I used to even write down how I should think when I am posed with certain questions. Like I used to struggle a lot with absolute value questions, I wrote down the approach and stuck it in front of my study table and trained my mind to use the approach every-time it came across any absolute value question. Maintain an error log and keep referring back to it to remind yourself of your mistakes and recall the lesson learned from it.
And last but not the least, it is important and very very important that you keep your spirits high!!
Like many of my fellow BTGites told me, you should keep doing a lot of positive self talk, it does wonders!!
Phew!! It turned out to be a huge post
Post me any questions you have and I will try to answer them to the best of my ability
All the best to all,
Vivek
