Ok, so I took the GMAT yesterday in Princeton and got a 710. I'm pretty excited I knew I had to score over a 700 but I honestly didn't think I would do it in the first shot. I've read a lot of the success stories on this forum and I think they helped my confidence a great deal. Here is my debrief and story and I hope that it helps some people struggling or at least gives them some hope.
STATS:
3.85 GPA from top 50 school
college senior
native speaker
idk what else to put if you want to know anything else just ask.
What I used?
Books:
Manhattan GMAT Prep Course (they supplied All their books and website)
OG (newest edition)
OG Verbal
OG Quant
Other good stuff:
Stop watch
same marker they give you in the test
same booklet they give you in the test
Studying:
Ok so I took the Manhattan GMAT course and I thought it was amazing, my teacher was in the 99th percentile and he really gave it to us straight, what you need to worry about and what you don't. My class was one day a week for 2 months starting in July and ending in August. I started studying in early July for the exam and probably studied almost 10 hours a day everyday in the library the entire month of July. When August came around I became a little more relaxed with my prep and even too a vacation before my classes started again, I went to China, Japan, and Taiwan (even got lucky and sat next to Jay-Z on the plane home!). This however was the first and only time I went out and partied during my prep.
A.W.A:
I didn't even study for it and the teacher for my course said not to worry about it, I took one practice test with it to see what it was like and then skipped it on the rest, if you grew up speaking english it is just a really basic essay.
Quant:
Quant was by far the hardest section for me, I mean it really interested me to learn it and no matter how much I practiced I would still get stumped on the a lot of questions. As the class progressed we learned a lot of really awesome and simple techniques to answer probability and word translation questions. If you do all of the homework you are assigned you will not only get through all of the MGMAT books but every question in all of the OG's as well. Don't get me wrong though it took forever to do. Basically what i did was create a note card for every single important piece of information i could find, I think that I had at least 150 note cards in quant alone. I looked through these a few times a week to make sure I had the basics down. I thought the MGMAT word translation, geometry, fraction decimals and percents, and equations inequalities and VIC's books were all very valuable to my studying even if you don't take the course they helped me out a lot.
Verbal:
I thought this was my strongest area but I still got only about 38's on my practice exam. Sentence correction is pretty easy as long as you know the basic rules your good, i created couple note cards and looked through them a lot. As far as CR this was the toughest for me though I still think it wasn't too tough I got a decent amount wrong, the only thing i can say is that you need to keep doing the problems and you will get the hang of it. RC wasn't too tough it's just really boring so you need to keep doing problems even if you don't want to.
Practice Exams:
6/26/10 taken before i started studying or anything- 600 (43q,31v)
7/22/10 taken a little into the course- 660 (43q, 37v)
10/3/10 taken after the course-660 (44q,36v) YIKES!
So I took the course and I knew I understood the stuff but i was going nuts, how could my score NOT increase?! You know, everyone is different and no matter how many times I take a "practice test" i still know it is just practice and when test time comes i will automatically focus because i know its for real this time. Still pretty scary because they say you need to be scoring in the 30 point range on your practice tests for what you want to get on the real thing.
Test Day!
Ok so the night before i watched House (awesome show) and ate a giant brownie and at around 11:30 i starting looking through the note cards, got done around 2am and went to bed. I woke up at 9:30 and jumped in the shower and turned the water to FREEZING cold right before i got out to wake myself up (I've read the who divers-blood-rushing-to-the-head thing so i figured if it works when you splash water on your face why not take it to the next level-hey it couldn't hurt) I then ate a bowl of cereal, a banana, some yellow gaterade and took 2 extra strength tylenol (someone else recommended most of those things on another debrief lol). I got to the test center maybe 15 minutes before the test put all my stuff away and began.
I breezed through the AWA, took the break drank some gaterade, nibbled on a granola bar, and went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. Now time for Quant, i got down to it used the scratch paper stuff they give (it was a good idea for me to have practiced with it as it is totally different then a paper and pencil) I thought i was doing bad because the questions were pretty easy and i was thinking "oh man i'm getting all the hard ones wrong!" but I didn't worry about it and figured i got around the same as i did on the practice exams (44 or 43) Took the second break and did the same exact thing as before, came back in to take the Verbal and i breezed through it with 15 minutes to spare and i was on the second to last question i thought i went way to fast and should have taken it slower, i didn't really look at the clock until the middle of each section and then as i got towards the end. I guessed a few on the quant as they were super hard and it would take to long to solve (although educated guesses)
BOOM! I looked at the score and i saw the 710! this was no where near my practice scores and i was really excited since i scored a 47 on q and 40 on v. 92nd percentile, i'm pretty proud of that. Just goes to show that practice exams are not always representative of your real capabilities.
STATS:
3.85 GPA from top 50 school
college senior
native speaker
idk what else to put if you want to know anything else just ask.
What I used?
Books:
Manhattan GMAT Prep Course (they supplied All their books and website)
OG (newest edition)
OG Verbal
OG Quant
Other good stuff:
Stop watch
same marker they give you in the test
same booklet they give you in the test
Studying:
Ok so I took the Manhattan GMAT course and I thought it was amazing, my teacher was in the 99th percentile and he really gave it to us straight, what you need to worry about and what you don't. My class was one day a week for 2 months starting in July and ending in August. I started studying in early July for the exam and probably studied almost 10 hours a day everyday in the library the entire month of July. When August came around I became a little more relaxed with my prep and even too a vacation before my classes started again, I went to China, Japan, and Taiwan (even got lucky and sat next to Jay-Z on the plane home!). This however was the first and only time I went out and partied during my prep.
A.W.A:
I didn't even study for it and the teacher for my course said not to worry about it, I took one practice test with it to see what it was like and then skipped it on the rest, if you grew up speaking english it is just a really basic essay.
Quant:
Quant was by far the hardest section for me, I mean it really interested me to learn it and no matter how much I practiced I would still get stumped on the a lot of questions. As the class progressed we learned a lot of really awesome and simple techniques to answer probability and word translation questions. If you do all of the homework you are assigned you will not only get through all of the MGMAT books but every question in all of the OG's as well. Don't get me wrong though it took forever to do. Basically what i did was create a note card for every single important piece of information i could find, I think that I had at least 150 note cards in quant alone. I looked through these a few times a week to make sure I had the basics down. I thought the MGMAT word translation, geometry, fraction decimals and percents, and equations inequalities and VIC's books were all very valuable to my studying even if you don't take the course they helped me out a lot.
Verbal:
I thought this was my strongest area but I still got only about 38's on my practice exam. Sentence correction is pretty easy as long as you know the basic rules your good, i created couple note cards and looked through them a lot. As far as CR this was the toughest for me though I still think it wasn't too tough I got a decent amount wrong, the only thing i can say is that you need to keep doing the problems and you will get the hang of it. RC wasn't too tough it's just really boring so you need to keep doing problems even if you don't want to.
Practice Exams:
6/26/10 taken before i started studying or anything- 600 (43q,31v)
7/22/10 taken a little into the course- 660 (43q, 37v)
10/3/10 taken after the course-660 (44q,36v) YIKES!
So I took the course and I knew I understood the stuff but i was going nuts, how could my score NOT increase?! You know, everyone is different and no matter how many times I take a "practice test" i still know it is just practice and when test time comes i will automatically focus because i know its for real this time. Still pretty scary because they say you need to be scoring in the 30 point range on your practice tests for what you want to get on the real thing.
Test Day!
Ok so the night before i watched House (awesome show) and ate a giant brownie and at around 11:30 i starting looking through the note cards, got done around 2am and went to bed. I woke up at 9:30 and jumped in the shower and turned the water to FREEZING cold right before i got out to wake myself up (I've read the who divers-blood-rushing-to-the-head thing so i figured if it works when you splash water on your face why not take it to the next level-hey it couldn't hurt) I then ate a bowl of cereal, a banana, some yellow gaterade and took 2 extra strength tylenol (someone else recommended most of those things on another debrief lol). I got to the test center maybe 15 minutes before the test put all my stuff away and began.
I breezed through the AWA, took the break drank some gaterade, nibbled on a granola bar, and went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. Now time for Quant, i got down to it used the scratch paper stuff they give (it was a good idea for me to have practiced with it as it is totally different then a paper and pencil) I thought i was doing bad because the questions were pretty easy and i was thinking "oh man i'm getting all the hard ones wrong!" but I didn't worry about it and figured i got around the same as i did on the practice exams (44 or 43) Took the second break and did the same exact thing as before, came back in to take the Verbal and i breezed through it with 15 minutes to spare and i was on the second to last question i thought i went way to fast and should have taken it slower, i didn't really look at the clock until the middle of each section and then as i got towards the end. I guessed a few on the quant as they were super hard and it would take to long to solve (although educated guesses)
BOOM! I looked at the score and i saw the 710! this was no where near my practice scores and i was really excited since i scored a 47 on q and 40 on v. 92nd percentile, i'm pretty proud of that. Just goes to show that practice exams are not always representative of your real capabilities.
