Thanks to everyone in this forum for the inspiration and the indirect mental support. I've been reading this forum daily for a couple of months and it's great to read all the success stories, it kept me going!
Here is my debrief.
Today's test and my CAT History
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My results were Q47 and Q39. Both came a little lower than my recent prep tests:
1/25: GMAT Prep 1: 710 (Q46, V41)
1/31: MGMAT 1: 680 (Q47, V36)
2/7: MGMAT 2: 710 (Q45, V41)
2/15: MGMAT 3: 720 (Q47, V41)
2/21: MGMAT 4: 730 (Q48, V41)
2/22: GMAT Prep 2: 750 (Q49, V42)
2/28: MGMAT 5: 720 (Q48, V40)
I have to say that I was really taken by surprise by the Verbal section. Some of the questions were just so convoluted that I could barely understand some of the answer choices. During the exam I kept telling myself that it was a sign that I was doing well
But I found the quant section to be on par with the MGMATs, and the verbal section was harder than any test I have taken. I had 2, maybe 3 boldface questions, and some of the other RC questions were really, really tough. Maybe those were the experimental questions, who knows. My background
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I have an MS in computer science from Switzerland and have been working in the SF bay area for about 5 years in the videogames world. I started as an engineer but turned into a producer at midnight. *POOF* Sorry, I mean turned into a producer after about 2 years of programming. English is not my first language, but I would say I'm pretty fluent. My school had a LOT of math in the curriculum, which is why I was frustrated at not getting higher quant scores throughout my studies. But I'm not concerned about that as my degree shows that I can handle quant stuff.
I am currently working full time and have a 17-month old kid, so my study time was limited to the evenings and a little over the weekends. Thankfully my kid goes to bed early, and when I got home from work at 7:30 I was able to study for 1.5 to 2 hours. That's as much as I could take after a busy day at work. Over the weekends, I had to take care of my kid, and while my wife helped me a lot, I couldn't let her do everything for a prolonged period of time. Nor did I want to, since I wanted to spend time with my kid. so I averaged 3-4 hours per day on saturdays and sundays for most of my study time, except the last 3 weekends, where I did 5-6 hours each day.
Oh, and I started studying at the end of last november.
Study material
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My study material wasn't anything different from what most people here have:
- Princeton Review
- Kaplan GMAT Premier Program
- OG 11
- OG quant review and verbal review
- GMAT 800
- MGMAT SC bible
I think the Princeton is a great starter that helps understand what the gmat is about and what to expect from it. But that's as far as it goes. Same for the Kaplan I would say. Read it once to get to know the areas that the GMAT will cover, and then proceed with the OG. The MGMAT SC bible was good, but I didn't think it is THAT useful if you already have a strong command of English.
OG 11 and the reviews are the best, as everyone knows, but the quant section doesn't have enough tough questions in my opinion. I could have used a few hundred 700-level questions so I can practice solving them in 2 minutes each. The GMAT 800 was pretty good, and explains some useful concepts in quant.
Preparation
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There are 2 things that people keep mentioning in their debrief, and they couldn't be more true:
1. Focus on quality, not quantity
2. Don't study for much longer than 2-3 months, or you may burn out. Actually, I started feeling burned out in the last couple of weeks, so 3 months was the max for me. It will differ for everyone of course. The point is, as soon as you start feeling even remotely burned out, schedule the exam within a week.
During the first month of my study, I did exactly the opposite of Point 1 above. I went through book after book, exercise after exercise, and didnt learn that much from my mistakes. When I got a question wrong, I would look at the explanation, think "yeah yeah I got it", and move on to the next. Bad, bad idea. If you get a question wrong, here is what I think works better, which is what I did in the second half of my study:
- if it's carelessness, I would mark a C next to the question. Later I would take the question again to make sure I wouldn't make the same stupid mistake twice.
- If there was a good foundational piece of theory to learn from that question, I would mark it with a star. In this case, I would take the time (a freakin' hour if that's what it took) to understand the underlying concept, and make sure that I'd be able to apply it to other, similar questions.
- Every week, I would go over a bunch of my starred questions. With time, the concepts were really starting to get in my little head.
For Verbal, I have to say I'm not sure how much more I could have done. While the first 500 questions give you a really good understanding of what to know and what the test writers were looking for, I wasn't sure it was an area that I could truly keep improving. That applies to RC and CR, but SC is arguably the one area where you can keep learning new idioms and make fewer mistakes, so I focused on that. Even then it was sometimes frustrating: given 2 different questions, one would say that a given answer is wrong because while it was grammatically correct, it was awkward and wordy. Another question would say that a given answer is correct because while it is awkward and correct, it is grammatically correct. So being a left-brain kind of guy, I enjoyed studying the quant more because at least it was either right or wrong.
For the quant, I focused on number properties, which was my weakness. Of course, with a 47, I still have a lot of room for improvement, so it's not like I'm the master of quant, but hey, what can you do.
After a while, it was clear that practicing more wouldn't bring me much. That was a couple of weeks ago, and I wish that I had taken the exam at that time. As you see in my CAT history, that's also when I was scoring the highest on the CAT.
What now
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Well, I am going to move on to the rest of the applications. Here is the thing though, I haven't quite decided whether I want to do the MBA in europe or here in the US. And the issue is that the application deadlines don't allow you to apply to both and then pick the one you want the most. In Europe I'd like to apply to IMD and INSEAD, and in the US it'd be Harvard and Stanford. But if I make the may round for IMD and get a positive answer, I won't have the opportunity to apply to any US university. I may sound like I'm whining, but it's mainly because if I were to get accepted at Stanford, I'd probably choose that over IMD or INSEAD.
One last note about the GMAT: Stanford is the school with the highest average GMAT score, and that's 721. That means that if you get 720, the GMAT is no longer a something to worry about to get into ANY school. The rest of your profile will decide where you're admitted. I'm mainly saying this for people who are thinking about retaking despite scoring 720, 730, or 740. I wish I had achieved that 720, but what's done is done, and I'd rather look forward than back.
All in all, I'm happy that I get my evenings back
I'll take a few days of rest and then start the rest of the application. Thank you for reading this wordy post (if you're still here). I haven't contributed much to the forum, unfortunately, but again it has truly been a source of inspiration and a major component of my preparation. So hopefully some of you will find some useful information in this debrief, which is my modest way of saying thank you to this forum.
All the best to all of you,
Mr Muggles
