I just Beat The GMAT!

On Dec 15, 2008 I took the GMAT and scored:
740 (97th percentile), Quant 47 (79th percentile), Verbal 44 (97th percentile), AWA 6.0
My initial goal was 700+, so I am very happy with the score.

My background
I am from Germany and I have so far not lived in an English speaking country. None the less my English is ok, as I also regularly practice English at work (verbal & written). I made my diploma / master in computer science and started to work with one of the two major global IT consulting firms (5 years of work experience). Because of my mathematical background and being a non-native speaker, I expected to be strong in Quant and weak in Verbal. The CAT format or similar multiple choice formats were completely new for me, as this is very uncommon in Germany.

Plan of study
I started mid of September with my first efforts to prepare on the GMAT. During the first weeks I used to learn in average 4 hours each Friday. Initially I started with reading the basics of all areas with the Kaplan GMAT 2009 Premier Program. After the first day (Critical Reasoning), I learned that everybody should do an initial full CAT, which I did on day 2 of my learning journey.

After attending the “World MBA tour” and looking at all the quite impressive GMAT averages of the top schools that gave me all the nice handouts, I decided that my prep needed some acceleration. I decided to sign up for the test (15.12.) and in order to get a kick-off I signed up for an in-person Manhattan Review GMAT prep course (2 days in the beginning of November). The course was really good. Not that I learned a lot of new things. But a real person – not a book - explained the stuff in-person and sometimes a bit slower than I usually did the theory for myself (as part of the audience was not very advanced in their studies). Further, the course was a unique opportunity for me to ask questions. Also the personal hints and tricks that the faculty provided us were excellent and I definitely used them extensively throughout the prep and the test itself. Does one have to take a course? Definitely not, but it can help to accelerate learning for the test if time is running short. Even the quite expensive tuition fee is not an issue a weekend course can help if the timeline for the GMAT prep is short.

After the course, work permitted only very limited time for my studies. I tried to stick to the Fridays and tried to spend a little more time (~6 hours). But I soon realized that I would have to take some time off to really make the 700+. Therefore, I took vacation for the 2 weeks preceding the test and I tried to minimize normal work. During these two weeks, I did 1 CAT per day and the respective debrief on the afternoon. I did no further review, just some quizzes in case some time was left. In this final timeframe of my prep I usually spent around 7-8 hours a day on GMAT prep.

Books and Materials used
Kaplan Premiere Program 2009: Very useful and the starting point for my preparation. I read all the theory for verbal and quant. For verbal I only did the first couple of practice questions because I was a bit impatient. In the math part I did some questions to practice especially for the section “Math Content Review”. In general the book is quite easy to read and understand, provides quite good explanations and is an excellent starting point. I did not do too much of the practice questions from the book, as I wanted to get used to the computer testing. That’s also the reason why I found the CD and the internet (kaptest.com) with the quizzes very useful to practice.

Manhattan Review Book Series (4 blue books): These were the materials we were provided in the weekend prep course. Part of the course was based on these books, but I also found them useful to again repeat the theory after the course. I did only do very few of the questions from the books.

GMAT Review – The official guide 11th edition: Actually I bought this book because it was recommended in the preparation of the weekend course. I never opened it, though I cannot rate it.

Manhattan GMAT Test Simulation Booklet (amazon.de Marketplace 16€): A colleague of mine actually mentioned that an issue he had in the GMAT test was that he had problems with the scratch paper and marker that has to be used in the test center. Therefore I wanted to already do all my prep with comparable material and I definitely can recommend this product to everyone. This set provides both, the scratch pad and the official marker. The scratch pad is a bit different from the official one (different size) but is very similar to it.

CATs
CATs were the central element of my GMAT preparation. In the last 2 weeks before the test I concentrated only on CATs. The important point is to not only do the CAT itself, but spend sufficient time in analyzing the results afterwards. What were the correct answers, are there better or faster solutions, how was the timing, are there areas which were particularly good or bad, etc. Actually after a while I had my standard Excel sheets which I used for the analysis of the test results. Another recommendation I want to give is that from my point of view it was very good that I did not only do the CATs from one vendor. Indeed I found that the CATs from the different vendors have different strengths and weaknesses. My short overview about CATs I used:

• Kaplan: 1 free CAT, 4 CATs available with the purchase of “Kaplan Premiere Program 2009”
  Cons: The CD-ROM rating is not working properly though Internet rating seems fine, Question pools seems to overlap a bit between CATs and quizzes which is the biggest disadvantage from my point of view
  Pros: Overall difficulty seems to be a bit more challenging than other CATs, explanations are very good
• Manhattan Review: 3 free CATs came with the weekend course
  Cons: Quant part seems way too easy, I always finished ahead of time. This happened to me just for MR tests and one of the PowerPrep tests.
  Pros: Verbal seems fine, overall the scores also seemed fine, no overlaps in question pools
• Manhattan GMAT: 1 free CAT + 5 extra CATs for 39 US$
  Cons: none?
  Pros: From my point of view the Manhattan GMAT CATs were the best, that’s why I also decided to purchase the 5 extra CATs. MGMAT provides a very sophisticated analysis (correct answers per difficulty level, per question type, per subject area and many more) and exceptionally good explanations (especially for the verbal part). There are no overlaps in the question pools.
• Official (GmatPrep, PowerPrep):
  Cons: no or just brief explanations, from my point of view the difficulty of the CATs varied between the 4 official tests
  Pros: best, if not only real possibility, for evaluating and assessing the current score

List of CATs performed including date and scores: Some comments to tests:

• CAT #3, #6: Very depressing, as by then I was not aware that the rating of the CATs on the Kaplan CDs is not working properly. For me it seemed that my performance decreased from the last test though I had done quite a lot of study in between. I only learned in CAT #11 that the scoring mechanism of the internet based Kaplan CATs was fixed and works properly.
• CATs #4, #10: MR CATs are way too easy in the Quant part. I always finished ahead of time
• CAT #7: This result really depressed me. 1,5 weeks to go and my scores do not improve significantly. But it seems this CAT was also the turning point. From there on I really improved.
• CAT #12: Ouch. In the evening there was my projects Christmas party. Forget this day quickly.
• CAT #16: Yes! What a motivator 2 days before the test. With this result I could easily relax on the day before without opening a book or GMAT related website.

Challenges & focus areas
Result of my first CAT (Free Kaplan CAT) was quite promising. Overall, a score of 540 with 4 hours of prep did not feel bad. Especially if taking into account that I e.g. did not even know what to do in the first sentence correction questions. Were there any other results I could take away from the test? Yes, a very important one: that there was a lot to do in the next weeks. My best area was Critical Reasoning (82%), the chapter which I already read in the Kaplan, the weakest area was Reading Comp (36%). Timing was horrible; I did not finish Quant or Verbal in time. In the next weeks, I used all the available time to fresh up my rusty math knowledge and to get a better understanding of the verbal background (all based on Kaplan book).

I took the next CAT (GMATPrep #1) after I prepared all the fundamentals. The result was a promising 640 (Quant strong, Verbal weak). My weaknesses in this test were timing, timing, timing and verbal. And timing was also my main focus point over the remaining preparation time. I did all tests and quizzes timed and carefully analyzed my timing in the post-test analysis. Further to get used to the time pressure, I decided to focus only on CATs. Another key for mitigating the timing issue was an advice provided by the faculty in the prep course. It is actually not rocket-science and everyone can derive it for himself, but I found it very useful and I extensively used it throughout my prep in the post-test analysis (for details see recommendations section). I also found out that I had severe problems when I encountered quant questions I could not solve quickly. I just could not drop these questions and make an educated guess. Most probably this is due to my maths background – actually I did not really solve this until the end, I just tried to improve.

My other weakness, the verbal part, was also automatically resolved by doing CATs over and over again in the last 2 weeks. Because the verbal questions are always applying the same schemata of errors, practice is everything from my point of view. And the Manhattan GMAT explanations for the CAT questions really did the difference for me.

Exam experience
During my test 3 to 4 people were simultaneously taking the test. I do not know why, but in my test center the workstations had the noisiest keyboards one can imagine. Further, 3 persons were starting AWAs at the same time, furiously hacking into the keyboards. As I was already used to the scratch pad and pen, this was no issue for me.

I did not like the AWA topics and I am quite skeptical that my overall good score will be matched by the AWA score, but on the other hand I did quite little preparation for the AWA.

Quant, though usually my better part on the GMAT, was only 79 percentile in the actual test (compared to 97 percentile for verbal). The reason for this was again timing. Actually I was doing very well in the beginning and until the very end of the 2nd section, both in terms of answers (very few wrong questions) and timing. Maybe that made me a bit too confident. But then, around the 25th question, I probably spent too much time on 2 – 3 questions as the difficulty increased and somehow lost track.

The verbal part was actually going very smoothly. In the beginning I was quite a bit ahead of time, but due to the timing issue in the quant part, I carefully watched the time as I proceeded through the test. And in the end it was one of my best results in Verbal.

Recommendations

1. Timing: For me timing was the most important point in the GMAT. And the only thing that helps here is to have a timing schema and practice, practice, practice. Probably everyone has to judge for himself what the individual weakness is by doing practice CATs over and over again. Here is the theory that I applied for myself:
   I divided both the quant and the verbal section in three parts à 25 minutes:
   Quant: 1st part 10 questions, 2nd part 15 questions, 3rd part 12 questions
   Verbal: 1st part 12 questions, 2nd part 15 questions, 3rd part 14 questions
   Personally, I had to be a bit faster in the first part, because I had lots of trouble keeping the time in the second part, while I was doing ok in the third part again. What I therefore did is to again divide the 2nd part in smaller chunks (3 questions with 5 minutes of time).
2. Always conduct a careful analysis of your CATs. Do not only check the wrong answers, but also correct answers for which you took too much time. Further, check in sentence correction if you really decided on the correct answer because of the right reasons. This is making the difference. If you just picked a correct answer because you were lucky – you are betting that you are again lucky in your next test.
3. Guess on questions you cannot solve. I know this sounds very easy, but personally I have lots of problems with this. As I already said before, especially in quant this was very difficult for me, but also in Verbal this is not easy. Example: You encounter a CR assumption question, follow all the nice advice and pre-phrase your answer. But then your answer is not present in the answer choices. Damn! You exclude 3 answers, but the remaining 2 both are not perfect from your point of view. Which of the answers is better? You can loose a lot of time with a situation like this. And finally you often decide for the question that was your first intuitive guess anyway – why not take this answer right away?
4. Do not trust the rumor that only the first 10 questions count. The reason why the first questions are important is that they are used to calibrate the test. The reason why the questions in the middle are less important is that most experimental questions are located in this part (at least that’s a theory I found very convincing). The reason the last part is again very important is that this is fine-tuning your result. But all answers matter!
5. Finish all questions and do not leave unanswered questions, otherwise you give away points.
6. Train your verbal skills as much as your quant skills. Even though probably everyone has an area he prefers (for me math definitely is more fun), both areas are equally important. Try to balance your score. The GMAT punishes extreme differences (e.g. 52 quant, 30 verbal) by assigning poorer total scores. Train your weakness, but also improve your strengths.
7. Submit the AWAs before time is over. It happened to me a couple of times in practice CATs that I was proofreading my essay when a popup told me that time is up. I do not know if this would result in 0 points for the essay, but I did not want to find this out on test day.
8. Read forums and blogs, but do this early and stop it a couple of days before your exam. Especially avoid negative postings in these days

Probably I already forgot tons of stuff. By contributing this article to this great community, I just wanted to give back something in hope that it might be of some little tiny micro help