OK, So I am finally awake.
To re-iterate, I got a Q50 V35 and my final score was 700. I didn't really think about it before, but now I have realized that this score is 10 points lower then expected. I have a mate who took the exam as recently as late August - early September period and he got Q50 V35 with a 710!
Hmmm...Oh well..... I am really not too fussed (though, honestly if I got a 690 I would have been devastated! that bloody 7XX, it really is a psychological thing)
Anyway, How did it all go.
I had been contemplating taking my GMAT for sometime this year but as most important things(like dirty dishes) in life, GMAT went to the wayside and I duly forgot! I am a Project Manager/Lead Consultant at a small BI company and I am very very busy. Being in NY on a monday, LA on a wednesday, and then SF on a friday is fairly ordinary for me. Oh yeah another thing, I could not take time off work as I had some major deliverables at one of our(my company's) most coveted projects all within the last 6 weeks. Talk about pressure! I was in back-to-back meetings at client site on the day before my exam!
I clearly remember that it was late september when I decided for a certain that I gotta get cracking! I ordered the standard books, OG(orange book), OG(Green), OG(purple), Kaplan 2008(Premier), Princeton Review Verbal, Princeton Review Quant. I knew I ordered too much, but I much prefer more then less.
I also went ahead and set my d-day as Oct 25 .
I received all my books on Sep 29, but prior to receiving my books I found this forum! I love you guys!
I can almost feel the pain, the love, the excitement, the anger which goes on in this forum. Its great and makes me(a self-studier) feel part of a family!
One other thing, once I set my date and received my books, I had entered the GMAT world, ie I did nothing else apart from work, GMAT, eat, and sleep and in that order. Any spare moment was spent on GMAT, whether that was at home, client site, at the airport, on the plane, in a taxi or on a boat. I lived and breathed GMAT. Keep in mind that there is reasoning behind my madness, I read some "de-briefs" on this forum and it floored me when the determined folks (crazy people) spent sometimes a year studying for the GMAT. I could not do that, its just not in me, I would have run out of steam in 3 months.
My study schedule was as follows:-
3-4 hours every work night. No matter what! even if it meant to cut my sleep for a hour or two.
8-12 hours on every weekend on my day off.
First thing I did as soon as I received my books was I took the diagnostic test in the orange book! Within each section(minus SC) I only made one error but was in "Excellent" category for all topics. I was stoked!
I started with Maths as that was my bread and butter and I wanted to make sure I could kill it on the D-Day.
October 6th came around and I decided it was time to see where I stand! I knew I could take Gprep but I was worried that I would "waste" a exam so decided against it and instead did one of the MGMAT as I heard so much about them. It was a shocker:-
580 (Q38, V31) or thereabouts. (I forgot to mention, I cheated, I paused the clock)
I was SO depressed that even after cheating I could only manage a 580! Almost gave up on doing GMAT this year. Did some major analysis and realized that I got almost every single SC question wrong and there were silly mistakes galore! I instantly ordered all MGMAT books. (Note my books pile was growing!) I infact loved the SC book, but the CR and RC books, not so much. The RC/CR books talk about short hand notation and other aspects which MGMAT claims generally takes 3 months to master. I had about 3 weeks left! HA! So not for me.
Spent the next week on Maths alone, using only select MGMAT chapters/books - absolute value, inequalities, Coordinate geometry and the whole of Number Properties book. All are fantastic chapters/books.
Took second MGMAT exactly seven days from first and scored a much improved score of
640(Q47,V31).
Finally we were getting somewhere!
I realized I had to do work on my verbal and spent the next week reading up various things. Read up about exam strategies, reviewed my errors, spent copious amounts of time understanding if first 10-15 questions were important or not (they are not in my opinion) One week before my exam D-Date I took the GPREP1 brimming with confidence knowing that I had been doing MGMATs and I was going to do better in the Gpreps. HA!
660(Q47,V34)
I felt like somebody bashed me! But I knew what happened! With Maths I fell into alot of Gmat's traps and in english I ran out of steam! I could not focus at the end of a 4 hour exam. It was all too much. My goal at this point was 740 and I knew it was not realistic for me to think that I could get 80 points improvement in a week. I sadly re-scheduled it to 8th Nov, giving myself 2 more weeks. Over the next two weeks I studied the OG Green/Purple books.
I then took 3 exams in 3 days with essays and with appropriate breaks.
MGMAT3
Q(47,V41) 720 (much better)
KAPLAN
Q(49,V40-something) 730 (from memory)
Was overjoyed, felt like I could murder Mr Gmat.
GPREP2 - exactly one week before d-day
Q(47,V32) - 640
I was devastated! I could not believe my eyes. I still can't believe it to be honest! I was so sad, I didnt even want to look at my mistakes and went to bed early, the only day in my entire 5-6 week regime where I went to sleep before midnight.
Next morning, I reviewed my mistakes and found that I fell into alot of Gmat traps. them bastards!
Verbal was suffering due to my stamina, of which I had none. At certain points in the exam I actually had to look away from the screen to focus, I constantly looked at the question number and saying to me(I'm only at 8/41....what the.....Im only at 15/41 what the....) at times I felt that I could not read a line no matter what I tried! So upsetting!
2 days before my real exam I took another
GPREP1 (again) (Q48,V42)(7 something)
I had a couple of repeat questions but otherwise it was good!
I did one thing different in this exam which I had never done before.
For every maths question, before jumping in, I stopped, read the question and tried to see what was GMAT trying to test, about 5-10 secs each question.
I set myself a one minute clock(in my head). If within that one minute I was still working on it but wasn't at least 80% done, I stopped, guessed and moved on. Verbal was still a big question mark as I assumed it was inflated with one repeat RC passage.
On my last day I spent 4-6 hours just searching for posts by two specific instructors who I grew to respect enormously in the past 5 weeks, Ron Purewal and Ian Stewart. This is not to say that I did not respect/like/use solutions/explanations written by other instructors such as Stacy, Stuart and Jim but for me personally Ron and Ian are GMAT Gods.
One particular post written by Ron, really struck home. I am too tired right now, but type in DELIBERATE and Ron, I am sure you will find it. Ron talks about how we deliberate in an exam to even guess. It sounds obvious but I realized that in Quant I would spend close to 3 minutes if not more on questions that I could not solve. This was retarded when you realize that when you enter 48-50 Q range, there will be at least 6-7 questions which you can't do. I did some further analytics and realized that due to my deliberation's lost time I guaranteed myself at least 3 questions wrong per test. Not smart.
D-DAY
On the way there I did a lot of thinking! I thought about what I have done, what I could have done better, why I did what I did...etc ....... I also realized that my personal strategy to set an test date as a goal was wrong. I found that on the one hand if I hadn't set the test date I might not have been motivated to really get started but I felt having that date looming over me exerted further unnecessary pressure. For example - I am studying a certain maths problem or a certain type of CR question type but because of my timetable, I don't have time to do any further exploration, so felt I was never hundred percent ready. You might think, "Why didn't you just shift the date?", well...... I wanted to maximize my time for the applications so I prioritized, I had to give some to get some....
Anyway sorry to get off the topic, but I really was thinking these sorts of things on my way to the test. I decided that after this exam I wasn't going to set myself any more dates. I was going to come back home and study till I felt ready and then just called the Pearson office and ask for earliest available date. This might be just me, but after thinking these thoughts, I became amazingly relaxed. I got to my exam earlier then planned at about 2 pm. (Exam time was 3 pm.) The lady at the desk asked if I was ready for the test, I said yes, I was seated and away I went.
First essay popped up wrote a fairly confident reply. Second Essay came up, not a very good reply but I fiddled around here and there. Took my break-had my banana, monte carlo bicciez, bottle of water and went straight back in. When I was ready to go back in for more pain, there was someone else checking out, this created a slight delay for me to get back in and I actually went over my 10 minute break. Felt a little bit flustered but took a deep breath and got cracking. Its funny that its only been one day after my exam but I honestly cannot remember my first question. The only thing I remember is looking at the questions and thinking for a second before solving. I know I must have looked like a crazy person smiling at the screen, realizing what GMAT was testing. I definitely stopped myself from falling into a few traps.
One Quant tip for everyone - If the question is a DS - number properties type question like "Is x > 0", follow these steps.
1. Does it say anything about being positive. If not then get suspicious, you need to test using negative and positive numbers
2. Does it say anything about it being an integer. If not then that should raise flags, you need to test fractions (and probably both positive and negative.)
3. I generally used the following numbers as my test cases. -9, -1, -1/2, 0, 1/2, 1, 10
I formulated this list after falling in many many gmat DS traps, in the beginning I fell for lots of traps around 0. I still remember getting very stroppy when I realized 0 was even, or when i tested for everything but a negative fraction. bastards.
The interesting thing, is that the first time I looked the clock I was at question 21, which incidentally was the first question I could not do in the alloted 2 minutes. I had no idea how I was going because I did not create myself my
75-0, 65-5 ..... chart.
so I stopped for 10 seconds and did some time calculations in my head and realized I was about a minute or so ahead. Felt good, so I spent/wasted another 30 seconds on the question before giving up and guessing(without deliberating).
Around question 30 onwards I felt like GMAT brought out its tanks, like almost saying to me, oh you think good do you, I don't think so!!! , I couldn't look at a question and see what the traps were. I had to work with it.... I got to question 35 and I had 3 minutes left.....Not a smart move..., so instead of getting question 35 right and wildly guessing 36/37. I spent 1 minute per question on each(and obviously made educated guesses). As soon as the exam finished I kicked myself realizing I shouldn't have spent so much time in the early thirties. I honestly didn't think I did very well because I got NO probability or combinations questions(which in fact I was looking forward to) but I guess I was wrong.
Took my break again, ate another banana, more monte carlo bicciez, more water and back at it again. (thankfully nobody leaving this time).
Took a deep breath and started verbal. Now here is the mystery....... I flew threw the exam. At question 10 I was 2 minutes ahead. At question 20 I was 3 minutes ahead. At question 30 I was 3 minutes ahead. At question 40 I was 2 minutes ahead. I have never been ahead of time in my verbal practice exams. I never felt pressured to answer quick either. I just felt like the answer was blatantly obvious, clearly with a V35 I was wrong. I must have fell into a lot of verbal traps for which I never really practiced much and it really did show. At the end of the verbal I knew I didn't do well because I didn't get any boldface CR and no completely underlined SC.
Selected the "Report Score" radio button and hit submit. Closed my eyes for a second, prayed, opened them up to see a 700.
So in the end what resources did I use .....
1. Study from OG (orange, purple, green)
2. Manhattan SC guide
3. Various Manhattan Maths study guides
3. MGMAT Exams
4. KAPLAN Exam
5. GPREP tool
Thats it..... I hope my ranting and opinion is beneficial to someone out there.....
When I was studying, I clicked on the "Just Beat the GMAT" forum link at least twice a day. Like I said I was an addict.
Sumi
PS. I may join you guys again for more pain if the adcoms come back and say my marks are too lopsided, but otherwise good luck all.
