GMAT Strategy

Hy all,

Last week I took my GMAT and I scored 650. It should be enough to the business school I will be applying to.

Nonetheless, I want to express my opinion on the GMAT and Native Speakers. I scored 38V which ranked me in the 83% percentile. That means that I am in the top 83% regarding my verbal capabilities to understand coherently english.

Therefore, I am scoring higher than native english speakers. How could it be so?. For me, being not-native speaker of english, though a proficient one, it is a always a challenge to discover new english words and to understand the meaning of awkward sentences. I simply can not understand how can I score higher than native english speakers.

Believe me, if the test would be taken in my language (spanish) I wouldn't have needed so much more effort for the verbal part of the test. Same applies to french, german, indian or chinese test-takers.

English native speakers, you should be very ashamed of someone being non-native, being capable to beat you in your own language.

Here it is a useful link for spanish test-takers:

https://rapidshare.com/files/186093063/G ... y.xls.html

Another concern I have is connected with the correction of Princeton Review AWAs. After purchasing the tests, I was struggling all the time to get anything higher than 4 in the AWA section according Princeton graders.

Nonetheless, I got a 6.0 in my AWA in the real test. I think they are trying to fool people, telling them that they are getting a lower score than they actually have, therefore propelling them to purchase more and more Princeton online review services.

awesome post ! congratulations !

tarrascazo wrote:
English native speakers, you should be very ashamed of someone being non-native, being capable to beat you in your own language.

So at the end of the day you think that GMAT verbal section is a TOEFL test...Nice!

I don't think being a native speaker helps people to understand the logic of the CR passages or how someone infer something from a RC. And the native speakers have the disadvantage (sometimes this could be an advantage ) of using their ear for the SC. But most of the non-native speakers can apply solid mechanical rules to the SC problems and do not get distracted with their language habits.

But if you still think that your verbal skills are better than 83 % of the native speakers, I want to have the same drink you are having It should be a good shit!

"English native speakers, you should be very ashamed of someone being non-native, being capable to beat you in your own language."

Are you kidding me? Good luck going into your interviews with that attitude.

I would like to wish all of those taking the test, both native and non-native English speakers, the best of luck on their tests. Don't let posts like this deter you at all. Some people simply do not know the true meaning of dignity and character.

As mentioned above, sometimes native speakers are actually at a disadvantage because they try to use their "ear" on sentence correction rather than the necessary grammatical rules. And we all know what happens when we use our ears instead of concrete rules... !

In many ways, the CR and RC sections don't really require very advanced English skills. The vocab is usually pretty simple. What is tested in these two sections is really the ability to reason through an argument and to pick out important information from long passages (again, non-native speakers might have an advantage here because they don't get lost in the details if they are simply trying to grasp the main idea of the passage). I'm sure that I'd perform better on a GMAT in Spanish than many native Spanish speakers would, because I have those foundational skills.

One last reason that non-natives might do better is that many English speakers assume that the verbal will be easy and neglect to study it. Non-native speakers understand that they need to work hard at this section.

Congrats on a great score!