I had 13 days to study the GMAT and didn't know how I was going to pull it off. I know many of you have been studying for months and you wonder how I got myself in this situation. To be honest, one word: procrastination. I had booked my test well in advance to fit my fall schedule and at the time told myself that I would have 3 months to prepare, but life kept happening and I kept putting off my prep. My daughter Katya was born 2 months ago. I know what you're thinking: "how can the birth take you by surprise?" Well, have you ever had a daughter? I thought that even with a newborn I would have 3hrs a day to study. I was dreaming! When she doesn't need feeding, she needs changing; when she doesn't need changing, she needs soothing, or washing, or taking to the doc... you name it she needs it. Wouldn't trade her though
. All this means that I found myself with two weeks to prepare for the most important academic test of my life. Looking at Katya just reminded me of how much I needed to get this test right. She has been my motivation to excelThe Objective:
Not enough time for detailed lessons and practice. No time to go through all the MGMAT SC guides or the PowerScore CR Bible (scary name by the way). No time to attend a class, sign up for the 60 day plan... I needed almost immediate results so I decided to focus on just GMATPrep. I took a GMATPrep test at the start and scored a 670. A good score, but I wanted more. I wanted to see that magic '7' in front of my score that all of us hope to see
. Some people save GMATPrep for last because it's a great tool for assessing GMAT score. I see GMATPrep as a PREP tool, to be used to practice and perfect GMAT questions. I've heard from many sources that GMATPrep has the best practice questions and is more similar to the GMAT than anything else. So it makes no sense to me to leave it unused until the end! So my objective was to become a GMATPrep master in 2 weeks and get my score to 700+ rangeThe Plan:
Once I had set the objective, I had to face the tough question: how to become a GMATPrep master? One way would be to take and retake the test lots of time. However I knew that there would be lots of repeated Qs after a while and I wanted a methodical way to go through all the GMATPrep questions. I looked around until I found the Solutions Engine (SE) from GMATFix. This is an amazing tool. It allowed me to do exactly what I wanted; sort GMATPrep questions by topic and hone in on the difficulty levels that I was likely to encounter. The Solutions Engine has well over 1,000 questions and explanations from GMATPrep. I divided my study into Quant on week 1 and Verbal on week 2. I used the Solutions Engine to generate drills with questions of difficulty 500-600, 600-700 and 700+ and I took 10 or 15 question drills 4 times a day, then went over the explanations and the video explanations. I did this every day for 2 weeks and this way I was able to work on GMATPrep without seeing repeats (unless I chose to review an older question). In 2 weeks I still didn't have time to go through all of GMATPrep, but I must have done enough because my test scores were 690 (after1 week) and 730 (the eve of my test)
I don't know whether I became a GMATPrep master, but I can confirm that my score (720) now starts with the magic 7. I only wonder what I could have done with 2 months instead of 2 weeks!
