My name is Stefan and I am a 22 yrs. old guy from Germany.
I took the GMAT yesterday after 2 months of preparation time and scored 680 points (86%).
I will receive my bachelor of business administration in September and would like to apply for a Master program at Rotterdam (NL). As I made this decision a few months ago, I saw in the application requirements a mandatory GMAT score of 600. At this time, I had not heard of GMAT before and gathered some information. After that, I realized that this test seemed to be a real beast and I was not sure if I could beat it.
I start my preparation with the OG 11 which I borrowed from a colleague. I soon realized that the GMAT is really no magic and can be beaten. Sure, it contains really tricky stuff, but if you remind yourself that you can adopt all these math concepts, which are used in the test, without being a math genius, you can successfully pass the math section. Verbal, did not really frighten me, although I am not a native speaker. But after the first weeks of practice, I realized that I make many, many mistakes in SC, what really bothered me. So, I concentrated on SC through the next days, weeks of preparation.
After four weeks of preparation (ca. 1-2h per day) I tried the free Manhattan practice test and scored 650 (43/36) what made me quite happy because I did not believe that I could score above 600 at this time. Nevertheless, reviewing the results gave me the expression that almost all of the 700-800 questions were wrong answered… So I thought to concentrate on the really hard questions and bought the Kaplan 800 book, which helped me to adopt some new concepts.
After three more weeks, I tried the GMATprep software and I was really nervous, because I had heard that this tool is the most accurate simulation of the real thing. I scored on Prep1 700 (46/40) and 710 (47/41) on Test 2 and I was just overwhelmed and really, really confident for the real test. At this time, I set the goal to achieve 7xx points, what was so much higher than I had expected me to achieve a few weeks before.
Like I told you before, I scored yesterday 680 (45/38), a score which is really satisfying to me, although I did not reach the 700 mark. I was not really nervous because I knew that I would cross the 600 barrier, which I needed for my master application. Quantitative was ok, I had two minutes left for the last question, so quite perfect timing. However, I had to guess on two or three questions, because they required some concepts which I apparently had not learned.
In my opinion the verbal part was trickier than GMAT prep, especially some CR questions and in my opinion, this ruined a score above 700. AWA was ok, I think.
To put in a nutshell, I am so happy that I have successfully done the beast, although not scoring as high as in the prep tests. If someone had told me two months ago, that I would score 680 I would have been delighted. So I will not bemoan the fact that I did not reach 7xx.
Ah, in addition I like to tell everybody, that this is such an awesome discussion forum. I came across this community a few weeks ago. Your stories really gave me encouragement, hope and the nice feeling not to be the only one who suffers from hard GMAT preparation.
Best regards,
Stefan
