Kinda got lucky: 720 Q47 V42

Hello, I've not really been reading these forums much but I have been following the Twitter feed and occasionally popping in to read "I beat the GMAT" threads.

My preparation was not really that conventional so I thought it would be worth sharing.

I'd actually intended to do the GMAT two months ago, so that if I did badly I could book another one a month later (now) and try to improve my score. For one reason or another I never got round to that early, so I only had one shot on goal (deadline for the school I want is Friday). So I had one month to study for the GMAT - that should have given me four weekends (including the long Easter weekend), however I already had a long weekend holiday booked and one of the other weekends I had a bunch of friends visiting for a boozy weekend - so scratch two weekends!

Things is I'm not really that great at studying. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook et al, I now have an attention span of about 3 minutes. :/ So most of the evenings I got a bit of study done and each free weekend I got some time in too. I also tried to do some study at lunch time at work, but towards the end I reverted to going for my lunchtime stroll around the Science Park - good for body and mind!

The only two books that I used were the Official Review and Quantitative Review. I started by quickly reviewing the maths section. There was loads I knew nothing about. My background is biological sciences but my maths only went to Scottish Higher level and even then I had forgotten most of it. I'd also say there was a bunch of stuff I had never seen before. For example factorials were new to me, and I knew nothing about probability. I hate all those "train approaching" questions too.

So after a brief review of the maths in the Quant book, I did all the sample questions working from the start. To be honest I would not recommend this - it's a bit like a frog slowly boiling to death in the pan of water - it's difficult to notice where the inflection point is in the difficulty. I got loads of questions wrong when practising and there were quite a few that would take me 20-30min to get - or I would never get them at all.

When I went through the main Review book I decided this time to do questions in sets of 15 - 5 from the start - 5 from the middle and 5 from the end of the questions. It felt much better doing it this way - the step-up in difficulty is more noticeable and after killing yourself on some tough questions you get to do some easy ones so the frustration is relieved.

Now what really concerned me was the practice tests. I had the two from GMAC and a set of 6 Manhattan ones that I *ahem* acquired from a friend who had excess tests.

I did a Manhattan test first and scored, 550 Q33 V33. I have to be honest, the quant section of the Manhattan exam scared the bejesus out of me. It was hard as nails - I completely froze - paused it for ages - stormed round the flat swearing. It totally knocked my confidence.

A few days later I decided to use one of the official downloaded GMAC ones and I scored 700 Q43 V43 (I think - can't remember the exact Q and V). It seemed so much easier - I didn't panic at all when doing it.

So I figure I've just got cleverer over the week and so on Friday decide to do another Manhattan test. This time I got 550 Q30 V36. Again it was mentally difficult and my quant was even worse. I was getting quite depressed by this point, but cracked on.

Yesterday afternoon I did the final GMAC test and this time got 690 Q38 V46 (only two questions wrong in the verbal!!).

OK, so now I'm a bit confused - which one is more like the real thing? I'm seriously hoping its the GMAC one - which it should be I figure, seeing as it is "official".

I should add that I never did any studying for the verbal part other than in those practice tests. It just all seemed like common sense to me. I have no idea how you are meant to do the verbal if English is not your first language - hats off to those of you who do it as a second language! To be fair I have written a PhD thesis, which was a real lesson in English grammar (my supervisor's comment upon seeing my first draft was that it was barely O-grade English. Git!). Also a lot of my work over the past 5 years has involved writing articles and reports and reviewing other people's work, so I was quite confident my English was up to scratch.

So I go in to this test not sure whether I should expect ~550 or ~700. I was hoping for 640+ as the 80% range for the school I want is 640-720.

So I got 720 Q47 V42 and I am still totally amazed. I never expected I would do that well. I actually found the test pretty tough. The quant started off well, but towards the end I was running out of time quite badly and there were a whole bunch of questions where my answers were really barely-educated guesses. The verbal also seemed pretty tough and I figured that there was no way I was going to get anything near the 46 I got in the previous GMAC test. In fact towards the end I was getting really bored and just wanted it over with. I was really convinced I had done badly and just hoped I got 600+.

Obviously I am very happy, but my first thought was that there was some mistake. If I'm honest, I think I totally fluked the Quant. I had never got higher in Quant than Verbal. There are loads of things in the quant where I still can't really do the type of questions, but I guess none of them came up. I suspect that the ones where I really struggled must have been experimental questions and maybe I just got lucky with my guesses. I'm still half expecting a call to tell there's been a terrible mistake and the person at the next terminal got my 550 score!

My take home message is probably about the Manhattan practice tests - they are far too hard and they really depressed me! Don't pay too much attention to them! I suspect that because they are based on Manhattan books that I did not use then maybe my Official prep didn't mesh with the Manhattan test expectations. Well, it didn't do me any harm!

Hmm this has turned in to a bit of an essay. I hope it is of some use to someone. Now I've got to write some admission essays...

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