-
leeman
- Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:20 am
- Location: Southern California
- GMAT Score:700
600  620  700
Okay, so I didn’t quite beat the c*** out of the GMAT but I accomplished what I had set out to do and that was achieve a score that would give me a reasonable chance at getting accepted to Anderson UCLA. I’d like to acknowledge what an excellent source this site was for me (props to you Eric!) and hopefully add to its usefulness by contributing a summary of my own experience. My apologies in advance for any typos or minor errors in the problem sequences I detailed below.
Profile: I’m a 37 y/o male, 3 kids, 3 dogs, full time job with a national accounting firm, with a small business I’ve owned since 1989. I graduated with a BS in Accounting and a BS in Finance in June 2005. My composite GPA - 3.5ish.
600 - I first took the GMAT in July 2005. I had just completed my undergrad and was still up in the air as to whether I would apply immediately for grad school or sell my soul to the corporate gods, pick up a couple of years of experience and then return. I had done nothing but own / operate my own company since I was around 18. I remember buying the OG prep book and thinking when it arrived in the mail, “Okay……. This looks like a phone book. Apparently someone wants me to memorize a freaking phonebook for this exam!!!” I had always been an excellent test taker, so I simply perused the book for a couple of days and took my shot. 600. I don’t recall my exact scores but I did better in the verbal than quant. Curious….. since I’m a math junkie but I do love to argue so maybe that gave me a boost in the CR section. I guess I’ll be checking out the corporate scene.
620 – I had now completed approximately 2 ½ years in accounting / consulting and was ready to make my glorious return to higher education. Of course I went through the usual hoops of narrowing my choices of schools and concluded that I would need a 700 to give me a decent shot. I bought the most current version of the OG and just started going through the book. My intention was to complete all the problems from beginning to end. I had done very little planning which is unusual for me and of course, that ended up being my downfall. 1 week out and I had barely started studying in earnest, just going through some of the PS and DS problems with no sense of timing or record keeping of my actual results. I recall thinking how impossible some of the questions were but that since I had scored 600 the first time with almost zero studying then the meager effort I had put in would be enough to put me over the top. By test date I had completed all the PS problems and probably the 1st 50 or so DS problems. Why? Because that’s the order the book is written in! I skimmed through some of the verbal questions the day before in the misguided hope that some great epiphany would come to me and I would suddenly become the verbal master. Bad idea.
The day of the actual exam is utter frustration. I got 8 - 9 hours of sleep the night before and slopped down a double espresso immediately before but for some reason my energy level is low. I remember thinking how difficult some of the questions were and that I must have guessed on ½ of the quant questions. I rec’d my preliminary score and was surprised that I had actually scored that high. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m just not cut out for an MBA.
Last chance – I’m determined to give this one last shot and take my preparation seriously. I visited every possible GMAT forum I could find. Of course I read Ursula’s and Twinsplitter’s blogs. Many of the posts in beatthegmat were especially helpful in providing me with some guidance to my studying strategy. More so, it was encouraging to see posts from many of you who seemed to be in the same situation I was in. After taking in as much information from the GMAT masters as possible I decided on the following.
Materials:
I would purchase PR, OG, GMAT Verbal Review, and GMAT Quant Review. I wanted as many questions as possible that were as close the actual question types I would encounter. And most of the posts I read recommended PR for test taking strategies.
Introspection / Overall Strategy:
I think it is especially important to understand what kind of learner you are and what sort of things have contributed to past successes. I’m very much a tacit learner. I need to DO things to understand them, and repeatedly. I’m also very easily distracted. I’d studied for the CPA exams and would catch myself wandering off to you tube, email, msn news etc. The internet has been a blessing, for example in finding the beatthegmat site, but it can also be a curse to me. Sometimes I would read things repeatedly and then completely forget what I had read 10 minutes later. Maybe some of you can relate. Also, I knew that my weak spots would be DS and SC so I planned to do more work in those areas than others.
With that in mind, I decided my best approach would be to go through the PR for some test taking strategies, especially in DS which I believed to be my nemesis, write them down on flash cards and then complete most of the questions from the books above until I had achieved a predetermined level of proficiency (more on that below).
I intentionally ignored most of the earlier questions in each section as these would be unlikely to come up assuming I’m on track to 700. If the easy ones started to pop up then I’d be in trouble anyways since I’m assuming that means that I’d missed the earlier mid-level questions. For each session, I would complete a set number of questions, generally 50 for each quant, 50 for SC and 25 each for RC and CR and record my answers in excel. Each session would be timed so I had exactly 2 minutes for each question to most closely resemble the actual test environment. Once I completed each section, I would then check the answers. For those that I missed I would try to find the correct answer first on my own and then look to the detailed answers provided only if I still couldn’t solve them. If I achieved a 90% on the first attempt then the session was complete. If not, I would delete all my answers from the excel file and then retake the same group of questions. I would repeat this until I achieved 90% or better. Of course there were some questions that I was able to answer just from having memorized (inadvertently) the answers. For those, I still wrote out the entire process to get to the answer to mitigate some of the “cheating” effect. I would take a practice test about ½ way through and then another 2 days before test date.
I would not recommend this for everyone however; I made a strategic decision NOT to practice my essays. I’m pretty confident in my writing ability and also the essay scores do not seem to carry the same weight as the raw score. So, just for the sake of ensuring I would only spend my time only achieving 700, I purposely ignored the essays. BUT, I did do the essays in the practice exams since these will definitely drain some of the energy out of you on the test date.
During the week, I would study early in the morning since this is when I had the most energy. I think it’s important to know when you have the highest level of concentration since practicing anything when you’re tired results in bad habits, so I always studied 2 – 3 hours each morning before taking the kids to school and heading off for work. I also studied 4 – 5 hours on the weekends……
Energy levels:
I have no practical way of quantifying its effects but I do know that my energy levels have a huge impact on my ability to concentrate. My best guess is a difference of between 50 to 100 points on the final score. I generally feel the best early in the morning with about 5 - 6 hours of sleep (that may not work for everyone) so I scheduled my exam for 8am and got to sleep around midnight. I also brought one of those 5 hour energy drinks with me. I had not taken this before so I drank one right before my 1st practice exam and got great results. I was able to concentrate, even with the temptation of the internet calling to me, for an extended period of time. On the test date itself I waited until AFTER the essays to drink it and it worked great. Before anyone goes rushing off to buy a case of these, I would recommend that you try one first, maybe just a Red Bull works for you, and see what happens. I have heard from some people who said that their hands were shaking immediately afterwards which made it difficult to write notes so please find out what works best for you.
Schedule:
Day 1 – Review PR / write note cards
Day 2 – Review PR / write note cards
Day 3 – OG PS questions 150 – 199:
Day 4 – OG DS questions 6 – 55
Day 5 – OG RC questions 92 – 116 / OG CR questions 75 - 99
Day 6 – OG SC questions 39 - 88
Day 7 – OG PS questions 200 – 249
Day 8 – OG DS questions 56 – 105
Day 9 – OG RC questions 117 - 141 / OG CR questions 100 - 124
Day 10 – OG SC questions 89 -138:
Day 11 – Practice Exam 1: Results: PS 7 wrong, DS 3 wrong, CR 3 wrong, SC 11 wrong, RC 1 wrong. Overall score 690. I’m VERY encouraged by this but somewhat suspicious. It’s a little hard for me to believe that I only got 3 incorrect in DS especially since I recall guessing on more than a few of them. Therefore I make no plans to change my focus on DS. 11 wrong in SC?!?! Is that even statistically possible? I guess one way to look at this is that even if I can improve slightly in the SC section then 700 is certainly within my reach.
Day 12 – GMAT Quant Review PS questions 127 – 176
Day 13 – OG DS questions 106 – 155
Day 14 – GMAT Verbal Review RC questions 56 - 80 / GMAT Verbal Review CR questions 33 - 57
Day 15 – GMAT Verbal Review SC questions 14 - 63:
Day 16 – GMAT Quant Review DS questions 19 – 68
Day 17 – GMAT Verbal Review questions RC 81 - 105 / OG CR questions 58 - 82
Day 18 – GMAT Verbal Review SC questions 64 - 113:
Day 19 – GMAT Quant Review DS questions 69 – 118
Day 20 - Day 11 – Practice Exam 2: Results: PS 6 wrong, DS 6 wrong, CR 1 wrong, SC 9 wrong, RC 3 wrong. Overall score 660. I have a lower score than in PT 1 above but strangely enough I’m not that concerned. During the practice exam I got a phone call from my daughter that cost me about 7 minutes and also my energy level was pretty low. I got a more even distribution of mistakes in the quant section so that made more sense, but I’m still doing poorly in sentence correction. I have one last day of preparation so I do 20 more PS problems, 20 DS and 20 SC.
Test Date – Quant 45, Verbal 40, Total 700, Essays 5. I was so thrilled when I rec’d my prelim score I wanted to jump out of my seat and grab the poor guy sitting next to me and give him a “Booyah!” to his face. As I was taking the test, I honestly didn’t think I was doing that well and assured myself that I would be in the 650 - 670 range so I was pretty ecstatic over the 700. I think I could have done better though. 740 – 760 are definitely doable but just not necessary.
Final notes and tidbits:
- Planning, planning, planning. I cannot emphasize how much this will effect your final results. Learn from my first attempts and don’t repeat the mistake of ignoring the planning portion of your work.
- Retaking each question sequence until I achieved a 90% was a huge confidence booster for me. Even if some of the answers were drawn from knowing the answer key. It still felt great to know that I could answer 90% of those questions correctly – the same questions that seemed impossibly difficult a few weeks before. If you want to avoid possible “cheating effects” from knowing the answer key you may want to alternate the retakes to put some time in between your 1st and 2nd attempts.
I hope this helps at least a few of you out there. If anyone has any other questions or comments please do feel free to contact me. You can even hit me up on Facebook or LinkedIn if you’d like. Good luck and hopefully I’ll see some of you from across the boardroom.
Many thanks to beatthegmat!!!!!
Okay, so I didn’t quite beat the c*** out of the GMAT but I accomplished what I had set out to do and that was achieve a score that would give me a reasonable chance at getting accepted to Anderson UCLA. I’d like to acknowledge what an excellent source this site was for me (props to you Eric!) and hopefully add to its usefulness by contributing a summary of my own experience. My apologies in advance for any typos or minor errors in the problem sequences I detailed below.
Profile: I’m a 37 y/o male, 3 kids, 3 dogs, full time job with a national accounting firm, with a small business I’ve owned since 1989. I graduated with a BS in Accounting and a BS in Finance in June 2005. My composite GPA - 3.5ish.
600 - I first took the GMAT in July 2005. I had just completed my undergrad and was still up in the air as to whether I would apply immediately for grad school or sell my soul to the corporate gods, pick up a couple of years of experience and then return. I had done nothing but own / operate my own company since I was around 18. I remember buying the OG prep book and thinking when it arrived in the mail, “Okay……. This looks like a phone book. Apparently someone wants me to memorize a freaking phonebook for this exam!!!” I had always been an excellent test taker, so I simply perused the book for a couple of days and took my shot. 600. I don’t recall my exact scores but I did better in the verbal than quant. Curious….. since I’m a math junkie but I do love to argue so maybe that gave me a boost in the CR section. I guess I’ll be checking out the corporate scene.
620 – I had now completed approximately 2 ½ years in accounting / consulting and was ready to make my glorious return to higher education. Of course I went through the usual hoops of narrowing my choices of schools and concluded that I would need a 700 to give me a decent shot. I bought the most current version of the OG and just started going through the book. My intention was to complete all the problems from beginning to end. I had done very little planning which is unusual for me and of course, that ended up being my downfall. 1 week out and I had barely started studying in earnest, just going through some of the PS and DS problems with no sense of timing or record keeping of my actual results. I recall thinking how impossible some of the questions were but that since I had scored 600 the first time with almost zero studying then the meager effort I had put in would be enough to put me over the top. By test date I had completed all the PS problems and probably the 1st 50 or so DS problems. Why? Because that’s the order the book is written in! I skimmed through some of the verbal questions the day before in the misguided hope that some great epiphany would come to me and I would suddenly become the verbal master. Bad idea.
The day of the actual exam is utter frustration. I got 8 - 9 hours of sleep the night before and slopped down a double espresso immediately before but for some reason my energy level is low. I remember thinking how difficult some of the questions were and that I must have guessed on ½ of the quant questions. I rec’d my preliminary score and was surprised that I had actually scored that high. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m just not cut out for an MBA.
Last chance – I’m determined to give this one last shot and take my preparation seriously. I visited every possible GMAT forum I could find. Of course I read Ursula’s and Twinsplitter’s blogs. Many of the posts in beatthegmat were especially helpful in providing me with some guidance to my studying strategy. More so, it was encouraging to see posts from many of you who seemed to be in the same situation I was in. After taking in as much information from the GMAT masters as possible I decided on the following.
Materials:
I would purchase PR, OG, GMAT Verbal Review, and GMAT Quant Review. I wanted as many questions as possible that were as close the actual question types I would encounter. And most of the posts I read recommended PR for test taking strategies.
Introspection / Overall Strategy:
I think it is especially important to understand what kind of learner you are and what sort of things have contributed to past successes. I’m very much a tacit learner. I need to DO things to understand them, and repeatedly. I’m also very easily distracted. I’d studied for the CPA exams and would catch myself wandering off to you tube, email, msn news etc. The internet has been a blessing, for example in finding the beatthegmat site, but it can also be a curse to me. Sometimes I would read things repeatedly and then completely forget what I had read 10 minutes later. Maybe some of you can relate. Also, I knew that my weak spots would be DS and SC so I planned to do more work in those areas than others.
With that in mind, I decided my best approach would be to go through the PR for some test taking strategies, especially in DS which I believed to be my nemesis, write them down on flash cards and then complete most of the questions from the books above until I had achieved a predetermined level of proficiency (more on that below).
I intentionally ignored most of the earlier questions in each section as these would be unlikely to come up assuming I’m on track to 700. If the easy ones started to pop up then I’d be in trouble anyways since I’m assuming that means that I’d missed the earlier mid-level questions. For each session, I would complete a set number of questions, generally 50 for each quant, 50 for SC and 25 each for RC and CR and record my answers in excel. Each session would be timed so I had exactly 2 minutes for each question to most closely resemble the actual test environment. Once I completed each section, I would then check the answers. For those that I missed I would try to find the correct answer first on my own and then look to the detailed answers provided only if I still couldn’t solve them. If I achieved a 90% on the first attempt then the session was complete. If not, I would delete all my answers from the excel file and then retake the same group of questions. I would repeat this until I achieved 90% or better. Of course there were some questions that I was able to answer just from having memorized (inadvertently) the answers. For those, I still wrote out the entire process to get to the answer to mitigate some of the “cheating” effect. I would take a practice test about ½ way through and then another 2 days before test date.
I would not recommend this for everyone however; I made a strategic decision NOT to practice my essays. I’m pretty confident in my writing ability and also the essay scores do not seem to carry the same weight as the raw score. So, just for the sake of ensuring I would only spend my time only achieving 700, I purposely ignored the essays. BUT, I did do the essays in the practice exams since these will definitely drain some of the energy out of you on the test date.
During the week, I would study early in the morning since this is when I had the most energy. I think it’s important to know when you have the highest level of concentration since practicing anything when you’re tired results in bad habits, so I always studied 2 – 3 hours each morning before taking the kids to school and heading off for work. I also studied 4 – 5 hours on the weekends……
Energy levels:
I have no practical way of quantifying its effects but I do know that my energy levels have a huge impact on my ability to concentrate. My best guess is a difference of between 50 to 100 points on the final score. I generally feel the best early in the morning with about 5 - 6 hours of sleep (that may not work for everyone) so I scheduled my exam for 8am and got to sleep around midnight. I also brought one of those 5 hour energy drinks with me. I had not taken this before so I drank one right before my 1st practice exam and got great results. I was able to concentrate, even with the temptation of the internet calling to me, for an extended period of time. On the test date itself I waited until AFTER the essays to drink it and it worked great. Before anyone goes rushing off to buy a case of these, I would recommend that you try one first, maybe just a Red Bull works for you, and see what happens. I have heard from some people who said that their hands were shaking immediately afterwards which made it difficult to write notes so please find out what works best for you.
Schedule:
Day 1 – Review PR / write note cards
Day 2 – Review PR / write note cards
Day 3 – OG PS questions 150 – 199:
Day 4 – OG DS questions 6 – 55
Day 5 – OG RC questions 92 – 116 / OG CR questions 75 - 99
Day 6 – OG SC questions 39 - 88
Day 7 – OG PS questions 200 – 249
Day 8 – OG DS questions 56 – 105
Day 9 – OG RC questions 117 - 141 / OG CR questions 100 - 124
Day 10 – OG SC questions 89 -138:
Day 11 – Practice Exam 1: Results: PS 7 wrong, DS 3 wrong, CR 3 wrong, SC 11 wrong, RC 1 wrong. Overall score 690. I’m VERY encouraged by this but somewhat suspicious. It’s a little hard for me to believe that I only got 3 incorrect in DS especially since I recall guessing on more than a few of them. Therefore I make no plans to change my focus on DS. 11 wrong in SC?!?! Is that even statistically possible? I guess one way to look at this is that even if I can improve slightly in the SC section then 700 is certainly within my reach.
Day 12 – GMAT Quant Review PS questions 127 – 176
Day 13 – OG DS questions 106 – 155
Day 14 – GMAT Verbal Review RC questions 56 - 80 / GMAT Verbal Review CR questions 33 - 57
Day 15 – GMAT Verbal Review SC questions 14 - 63:
Day 16 – GMAT Quant Review DS questions 19 – 68
Day 17 – GMAT Verbal Review questions RC 81 - 105 / OG CR questions 58 - 82
Day 18 – GMAT Verbal Review SC questions 64 - 113:
Day 19 – GMAT Quant Review DS questions 69 – 118
Day 20 - Day 11 – Practice Exam 2: Results: PS 6 wrong, DS 6 wrong, CR 1 wrong, SC 9 wrong, RC 3 wrong. Overall score 660. I have a lower score than in PT 1 above but strangely enough I’m not that concerned. During the practice exam I got a phone call from my daughter that cost me about 7 minutes and also my energy level was pretty low. I got a more even distribution of mistakes in the quant section so that made more sense, but I’m still doing poorly in sentence correction. I have one last day of preparation so I do 20 more PS problems, 20 DS and 20 SC.
Test Date – Quant 45, Verbal 40, Total 700, Essays 5. I was so thrilled when I rec’d my prelim score I wanted to jump out of my seat and grab the poor guy sitting next to me and give him a “Booyah!” to his face. As I was taking the test, I honestly didn’t think I was doing that well and assured myself that I would be in the 650 - 670 range so I was pretty ecstatic over the 700. I think I could have done better though. 740 – 760 are definitely doable but just not necessary.
Final notes and tidbits:
- Planning, planning, planning. I cannot emphasize how much this will effect your final results. Learn from my first attempts and don’t repeat the mistake of ignoring the planning portion of your work.
- Retaking each question sequence until I achieved a 90% was a huge confidence booster for me. Even if some of the answers were drawn from knowing the answer key. It still felt great to know that I could answer 90% of those questions correctly – the same questions that seemed impossibly difficult a few weeks before. If you want to avoid possible “cheating effects” from knowing the answer key you may want to alternate the retakes to put some time in between your 1st and 2nd attempts.
I hope this helps at least a few of you out there. If anyone has any other questions or comments please do feel free to contact me. You can even hit me up on Facebook or LinkedIn if you’d like. Good luck and hopefully I’ll see some of you from across the boardroom.
Many thanks to beatthegmat!!!!!
leeman
