I just Beat The GMAT!

I just got back from taking my GMAT. While I've never posted in these forums before, I found many answers here during my review period and I want to give something back to the forums by noting some observations.

I am a architecture undergrad senior from a top tier Canadian university. I was born in China but have been living in English speaking countries since I was 7. About five months ago I decided that I would get an MBA instead of an MArch after my BArch. This decision reflected a shift in my interest from the architect's perspective to the developer's perspective, and was fueled by the fact that architects receive pathetic pay.

I began reviewing two weeks before my exam. In retrospect, this was an extremely short amount of time to prepare for the GMAT. I have no excuse for my procrastination and am very relieved that I nevertheless managed to get a good score. This was no doubt made possible by the fact that I'm still in school, and by the consisteny between architectural education and the material covered on the GMAT (though less so for the math). Additionally, I had just completed an elective course on logic, so was very prepared for some of the verbal questions.

The material I used to prepare consisted of:
1. Princeton Review book (2010)
2. GMAT Official Guide (12th Ed)
3. GMATprep (2005 and 2006 versions)

I started my review by reading through the Princeton book. This took a week of my two week review period. This book is utterly useless for anyone aiming for a 700+ score. It is designed for people who have no basic knowledge of math and limited knowledge of English, and would, at most, get you to 600 if you relied on it alone.

After I finished reading through the Princeton book, but before I took a GMATprep CAT, I felt decently confident. At this point I had just one week of review time left. I took a GMATprep CAT and scored 690. I need a score higher than 720 to get into a top school. At this point I made two realizations. First, the real GMAT is a lot harder than what Princeton Review makes it seem; and two, I still had a lot of ground to cover. I was finishing the verbal section with 30 minutes to spare, so this was no problem at all. On the quantitative side, my weakest area by far concerned those terrible algebraic data sufficiency questions.

I paniced a little. Realizing that the Princeton book is useless, I went out and bought the Official Guide. I decided that given my limited time, the best way to review was not to study theory, but to practice with as many questions as possible. Over the final week before my exam, I took one CAT a day after work, and supplemented this practice by doing the hardest 1/5 of the questions in the OG, mostly in the quantitative and particularly in the data sufficiency sections.

My CAT results are as follows:

GMATprep 2005: 690
Princeton Review: 660
GMATprep 2005: 700
GMATprep 2005 (repeat): 730
GMATprep 2006: 730

The questions on the Princeton CAT are very different from the ones on GMATprep and the actual GMAT, so I did not do a second one after my first.

The evening before my exam, I was not feeling particularly confident. I decided that cramming the night before isn't a good idea, so I tried to relax and took it easy. The morning of the exam (11am), I slept in a bit. I had two Nutella sandwiches and a Cocacola for breakfast. I biked to the exam centre.

The centre itself was very professional. The staff was helpful. The temperature was nice and cool. I was provided with two foam earplugs in addition to two pens and an erasable scratchpad. The scratchpad was a portrait top spiral bound stack of laminated graph paper. The pens were of the fine dry erase type. There were ample sheets in the pad and I did not need a second one. All of this wasn't any different from what I had expected.

I blew away the analytical writing assignments. I'm an architecture student and have years of practice in writing. I was feeling pretty good at this point, but reminded myself that the real test has yet to begin. I took my 8 minute break and had some water.

I found the quantitative section to be difficult. The questions were similar to the ones I'd seen in practice, but they were sufficiently different to throw me off a bit. I got bogged down about a third of the way through this section and did not manage my time well. I ended up with just over a minute per question for my last ten questions. I had to guess many questions in order to finish on time.

I felt terrible when I finished the quantitative section. I was convinced that I'd end up with a low 600's score, and decided to skip the break and just get it over with.

I decided that I would try really hard on the verbal section to make up some lost ground. It was worth a try and I had nothing to lose. In my practice CATs I always finished the verbal section with 20 to 30 minutes to spare. On the real GMAT I managed my time well and considered each answer very carefully. I found the verbal section to be moderate in difficulty, although near the end I was hit with a string of extremely difficult questions that required extremely careful consideration of very small details. Often the answer choices sounded like they'd all work. I had to work hard to dig up the grammar rules from highschool to find the answers, and was often left unsure about my choice. I finished the verbal section with five minutes to spare.

After the exam there are a few pages of surveys. I flew through these. I had the choice of discarding my results and not seeing my score, but no one in their right mind should do this.

I could not believe I scored 740. I knew I did well on the verbal section (44, 97th percentile), but I was very suprised at a 47 for quantitative. 47 is 78th percentile and isn't a great score, but I was convinced I'd gotten a mid 30's score after barely finishing that section.

I had scored 730 in my highest CAT, with Q49 V41. My GMAT score is 10 points higher. No doubt the extra care I took in the verbal section made up for my poor performance in the quantitative section.

I expect 5 or 6 on the AWAs.

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In retrospect, things I would have done differently:

1. Spend more than two weeks studing.
2. Buy a book other than Princeton

Things I'm glad I did and think you should too:

1. Do as many of the questions in the Official Guide as possible.
2. Take as many CATs as you can.
3. If you do poorly on the quantitative section, don't give up. You can improve your score if you do extremely well in verbal.
4. Study at the office after work instead of at home. My study sessions at home were always very unproductive.

That's all for now. Good luck on your exams.

Hey Congratz on the great score!

Hey BT,

Fantastic post.. From a fellow Canadian: Thank you!

My question to you is where do you find both the 2005 and 2006 versions of GMATprep? I just downloaded the most recent version from the official GMAT website, which I'm assuming is 2006.. Where can I also find the 2005 version?

Thanks again, and congratulations on your success!

-kc

You can find them here. There seems to be some partial overlap between what I downloaded from the GMAT website and the ones found here. To be honest I'm not really sure how they relate to eachother, or whether there are two or three versions. I just opened all the tests and did the ones which contained no duplicate questions.

https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmatprep-gmat ... 77548.html

Obviously, you can't go into concrete details about the quant, but can you elaborate on why the questions threw you? I'm asking since I'm taking it next week.

Were the questions hard because of the arithmetic (larger number, more complicated computations) or were the concepts different, or just the wording confusing?

Basically, what I'm asking is, if you had to do it all over again, what would you concentrate most on in the quant?

The questions were no more difficult. They're mostly reconfigurations, in one way or another, of the types of questions you've already done during review. I was thrown off because the reconfigurations were unfamiliar to me and caused me to work more slowely than during my review. No doubt this was due to the fact that I hadn't been exposed to a large variety of questions during my very short review. Many of the questions I encountered late during the section were quite easy, but I had to guess on them because I ran out of time.

You should:

1. Do a lot of review questions.
2. Manage time well! If you don't get a question, move on after 2.5 minutes. You can make up for it in the next question. If you waste all your time on one question (and possibly still do not figure it out), you'll screw yourself later. I can't tell you how important this point is.
3. Don't panic, like I did in the second half of my quantitative section.

Bhai

Congratulations on this beautiful score

Please discuss verbal in more details

BeaverTerror wrote:The questions were no more difficult. They're mostly reconfigurations, in one way or another, of the types of questions you've already done during review. I was thrown off because the reconfigurations were unfamiliar to me and caused me to work more slowely than during my review. No doubt this was due to the fact that I hadn't been exposed to a large variety of questions during my very short review. Many of the questions I encountered late during the section were quite easy, but I had to guess on them because I ran out of time.

You should:

1. Do a lot of review questions.
2. Manage time well! If you don't get a question, move on after 2.5 minutes. You can make up for it in the next question. If you waste all your time on one question (and possibly still do not figure it out), you'll screw yourself later. I can't tell you how important this point is.
3. Don't panic, like I did in the second half of my quantitative section.

Ok thanks, that's good to know. I've installed all of the previous versions of the GMAT Prep software and used some of the old official guides to try to get as many question configurations as possible.

ssgmatter wrote:Bhai

Congratulations on this beautiful score

Please discuss verbal in more details

The hardest critical reasoning questions were inference questions which required you to figure out whether the answer choices were within the scope of the passage.

Same with reading comprehension. Do not inferr what is outside the scope of the passage. Also, do not skim through the passages in order to save time. You'll screw up on those "what's the main idea of the passage" questions. GMAT is not stupid and they've written the questions so you can't cheat the exam this way. Funny enough this also applies to reading in real life. Who would have thought?

Pay attention to detail in sentence correction and read all the answer choices before you hit next. There were a couple of occasions when I'd decided that I'd found the correct answer, only to see a better one below. The Princeton book says that you should figure out what's wrong with the sentence before looking through the answers; but at the level I was at, this was not always possible. Even when the mistakes were clear, the answer choices were often close enough to eachother that I had to look through all the answer choices and compare them in order to arrive at the best answer. Use the process of elimination.

Needless to say, sentence correction was by far the hardest. Everytime I saw one, I thought to myself: "damn, not another one of these."

Hi BeaverTerror ----

Excellent score dude....!!!!
I do agree with the statement which you mentioned " Study at the office after work instead of at home. My study sessions at home were always very unproductive. "
Study sessions at home are too hard to zoom in on. That's why I also started doing practice after office work.

Thanks,
Rajesh
Loves GMAT...!!!