I took the GMAT 2 months ago but wanted to wait until I finished the TOEFL exam before I share my experiences with you.
My background:
I am 25 years old, male and native of Germany. I've been working as a Software Consultant / Engineer for the last 5 years, 1.5 of which I spent in the USA.
I've always been strong at Maths and Physics but have never done a great job at languages.
Consequently I was extremely anxious about the GMAT.
This is how I prepared over a course of about 4-5 months for this beast:
1. I went through all the MGMAT Strategy Guides to get a general feel for the difficulty level of the exam. Once I was done with a Strategy Guide I randomly picked about 20% of the questions from the Official Guides to find out where my greatest weaknesses were.
2. Now that I was done with the MGMAT books and understood the exam I felt prepared enough to take the first GMAT Prep exam that I scored with 700.
Many in this forum suggest to take this practice exam prior to studying. I disagree because you only have two practice exams that are done by the test creators. Their value is remarkable and I wouldn't want to waste a single one of them without at least basic preparation.
3. It was no surprise to me that I did well on the Quant part but had my difficulties with Verbal. Reading Comprehension was my biggest problem. I simply wasted too much time reading and trying to understand the passages. I also often struggled with the passages because there was good load of words I simply wouldn't understand. My first course of action was to get a subscription of "The Economist". I would spend the following 5 months reading that magazine for at least 1 hour every night before I went to bed. During the day I read a lot on ft.com.
I wrote down every word that I didn't understand but encountered more than once in the newspaper articles or reading passages. Every week I tried to go through my vocab list at once.
This strategy finally did the trick for me. I became pretty fast and good at Reading Comprehension. It took a lot of time and practice. But it is possible, even for non natives who aren't strong with the verbal side of their brain.
4. Regarding Sentence Correction I found Aristotle Prep most helpful. I created another list of Flashcards for all the Idioms that were new to me and went through them once a week, as well.
5. I also got the PowerScore CR Bible to tackle CR.
6. Once I was done with all my books I dedicated week days pretty much to GMAT. I would come home after work around 6 o'clock. I would then take a 30 - 45 min nap, which helped me to gain full concentration for the following 4-5 hours that I spent studying before going to bed with The Economist.
I would go through every single question in OG12 first and take note of every question I got wrong, including an explanation why.
Afterwards, I went through the new questions of OG13.
When I went through the OGs I tried to not only tackle questions of one type, but at least study one Verbal and one Quant type each night.
For Integrated Reasoning I used the 50 questions that come with OG13 and the ones that come with the GMATPrep software.
I regularly took the MGMAT Practice Exams to build up my stamina. Important notice: While I think the difficulty level of their Quant quant and Verbal sections is about right, the difficulty level of their IR questions is nowhere near the real one. So don't get demotivated if you totally bomb their IR section - the real one will be much simpler.
I scored between 690 and 770 on their practice exams.
I spent approximately 1 week on AWA. I mainly used ARCO's "Answers to the REAL Essay questions". I then ordered a copy of GMAT Write and made sure I wouldn't score lower than a 5. Finally, I randomly picked a few topics of their official AWA essay topic list and made sure I could easily come up with good reasonings.
The final 10 days:
I took the final 10 days prior to the exam off work.
My exam was scheduled for 8 o clock. My concentration reaches its peak usually around 10 at night. So it didn't really matter too much whether I took it in the morning or afternoon - my concentration wouldn't be at its peak no matter what I chose.
In those 10 days I went on a strict schedule:
I would go to bed at 10 o clock every night, to make sure I would at least not be too tired the next morning. I would get up at 6:30 each morning and have the very same breakfast:
Cold oat meal with milk, blueberries, almonds and macadamia nuts. I ate the same thing every morning because I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't suffer from diarrhea or anything fun like that on D-Day.
I also made sure that I would drink the same amount of water each morning because I needed to find out how much and how long prior to the test I could drink without feeling the need of having to go the bathroom (I have a ridiculous bladder.. so this step was vital
)The next thing I would then do is build up my stamina. I went to a local library, because it's just too easy to get distracted at home. In the library I went through every medium and difficult question of GMATPrep's additional question pack. In retrospec this was the most useful resource for my studies.
I tried to at least study 4 hours in a row before I took a break to build up my stamina.
When I took practice exams stamina was a big deal for me. 3 hours in the exam, I would regularly simply lose motivation.
After my lunch break I would study at least another 4 hours. Before I went to bed, I usually went for a run or did some light sort of sport to stay mentally sane.
I also made sure that I went through every OG question I got wrong the first time.
Regarding Timing:
When I started taking practice exams, timing was a huge deal for me, especially in the Verbal section thanks to Reading Comprehension. It was also very hard for me to let go of Quant problems that I couldn't solve. It's however vital that you get over your pride. My strategy was to take a quick look at the timer before I tackled every single question. I would then remember for myself at what time I will have to let go of this question. If I, however, noticed that I don't immediately see a strategy to tackle a quant problem, I tried to make an educated guess and moved on.
I also tried to not waste more than 1.5 minutes on SC.
On RC I would not read the first question - as is often recommended - because I think that your brain will then be too occupied with finding the answer to this one very question.
Instead I read the passage as fast as I could - still trying to understand most of the sentences. If I had big problems understanding an entire paragraph, I would read it again more slowly.
After reading the passage I went ahead and read the questions and answered them.
The test day experience:
I almost didn't sleep at all the night before. I was simply too anxious.
I also broke my own rule and changed my breakfast. I thought I might get hungry later on, so I decided to add banana to my breakfast. Wasn't a smart choice as I felt extremely sick for the following 2 hours. When I got to the test center I thought I have to vomit
Luckily I didn't.
The exam started horribly. The AWA question was pretty tough and I couldn't come up with great reasons.
IR on the other hand went way better than expected. I was at question 11 and had 3:30 minutes left. The question seemed rather tough so I decided to skip it and spend the remaining time on question 12.
During the breaks I took a small sip of Vitamin Water, had a bite of a banana that I brought (yummy... good thing I almost puked because one of those guys a few hours earlier) and a few pieces of those Gatorade energy bites. I then ran to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face.
During the Quant section I thought that I was screwing it up because I encountered too many really easy questions.
Verbal also started out horribly with a Idiom Question. I could narrow it down to 2 answers but then had to guess. I always tried to start out strong so that the testing algorithm would rather throw tough questions at me. Consequently having to guess at the very first question threw me off and I got pretty worried.
SC was MUCH harder than anything I had seen before - no matter in which book. The same pretty much applied to Reading Comprehension.
At the very end of the test I was simply happy that it was done, although I was pretty sure that I wouldn't be too happy with my test score.
When I saw the final score on the screen, I couldn't believe it. It was such a relief. On my way back home I kept screaming and shouting out loud in my car.
The following two weeks were again occupied with worries about my AWA score. When I finally received the email with the offical scores... all those worries were gone:
AWA: 5.5/6
IR: 7/8
In general: I am extremely happy with my score. I think I could have scored 8 on IR and 51 on Quant... but considering how hard Verbal was when I first started, 44 was a great result.
After I received the GMAT result I started studying for TOEFL. I didn't really do that much. I only got the OG and went through all the practice exams. I also paid for one of their online tests which I scored with 113.
I finally decided to take the test and had the most horrible test center experience ever: People were randomly getting up, walking in, walking around, talking to each other etc. As a result, it was extremely difficult to concentrate.
Luckily I still got a 118 on it with:
Reading: 30
Listening: 30
Speaking: 29
Writing: 29
General things I wish I had known before I started studying:
1. Be aware of the MBA application deadlines and read a MBA application book to get a feel for all the work that will be ahead of you. !!! Get in touch with your recommenders !!! as soon as possible. If you have been out of touch, it will take quite a while to reestablish a relationship in which you can comfortably ask for recommendations.
2. Know your metabolism! Know exactly what and how much you can eat without having to go to the bathroom during the test.
3. If you have to take the TOEFL exam: DO NOT add the institutions prior to taking the test. In contrast to the GMAT exam, the institutions will (as far as I know) NOT see your entire test history. YOU will decide which scores you send to which schools. It will cost about 20$ to send your scores later on... but I think that's well worth it.
My fault was that I added institutions as soon as I signed up for the test. 5 days before I took the exam, I went online and removed the institutions for the mentioned reason. 1 day before the exam I went online again to make sure that the institutions were removed. To my surprise - they weren't. I must have done something wrong / forgotten to submit / whatever. Thanks to TOEFL's rules, I couldn't remove the institutions anymore because it was already past 10 pm the day before D-Day.
I struggled for quite some time and even thought about simply not taking the test at all because I wanted to avoid that my dream schools might see screwed up results.
I, however, then decided to just take the risk and get done with that last test because I wanted to be able to fully concentrate on only the applications.
4. Not being native will not prevent you from scoring great on the verbal section. Just allocate a little bit more time. All you need is determinism and discipline. Read, read, read and... read! Everything is possible - it only takes a few sacrifices. I think I aged quite a lot in the last couple of months...
Phew.. that's my debrief.... now I have to get back to my applications
GOOD LUCK!!!
Kevin
