I finished my second attempt at the GMAT in mid-December just before the holidays and thought I’d post a debrief for those of you taking it for the second time (or even the first time) in the next few weeks.
I started studying for the GMAT back in April, as I was a bit bored at work given I had just finished a project, and had very little to do. So I bought Kaplan’s Premier GMAT book at the bookstore and then for about US$10 I got a guy to scan the entire 700 pages for me in just a few hours (gotta love cheap labor in China!) so I could study inconspicuously at work.
I initially studied for about 2 hours each day, just taking in the material, and reviewing all the math concepts I had forgotten. For this, the Kaplan book is good. If you’ve been out of academia for over 4 years, then this helps to set the very basics back into your brain. Around that time, iBooks had a sale in which all of Kaplan’s books were free! So I got the Advanced GMAT book, the Verbal and Math Workbooks, as well as 101 Verbal Questions.
Around August I decided to sign up for the GMAT on October 12th. I decided then to start doing some CATs just to get into the whole exam mode. My initial test scores were between 660 and 690, which I thought was OK, given I still had two more months to brush up on the more advanced math. The problem is I was getting very high marks on the Quant and low on the Verbal on some tests, and the complete opposite on other tests. Still, I felt that on test day I would be able to easily get a score above 700.
Then I came across GMAT Club, so I signed up for the “
question of the day” emails. After a few days, I panicked. I wasn’t able to answer most of the verbal or quant questions. I dug deeper into the forums, and the feedback from most people was that Kaplan’s books were rubbish and only
MGMAT or
OG books should be used to study. With about 3 weeks left, I downloaded the
OG 12th edition and postponed my test by one week. I hit that book hard and I also started doing all of the GMAT Club questions of the day, which had piled onto my inbox. A few days before the test, I took two of
MGMAT’s CATs as well as the GMATPrep CATs and did relatively well. However, two days before the test, I did a retake of one of the GMATPrep CATs and got a 680, so I panicked! By now I thought I should be getting scores above 700.
In any case, October 19th came. The test was scheduled for 5pm, which I didn’t like. I would have preferred either a mid-morning test or early afternoon. I did some review of key math concepts as well as the AWA, which up to this point I had completely ignored.
I arrived at the test center around 4:30pm and gave my passport to the proctor. She then told me the name on my passport didn’t match the name on the exam registration! I really panicked! I had entered my name as “First Name” + “Middle Initial” + “Last Name” whereas in my passport my middle name was fully spelled out. I got quite upset at the proctor, telling her in the US the middle initial is sufficient. After about 20mins and a few calls, she told me I could take the test as an exception. This really made me nervous going into the test.
I finally started the test and got on with the essays. The essays were relatively easy, and I think I had a pretty well structured essay (although my AWA score was 4.5). Then came the math. I froze on the first question and it took me more than 5mins to answer it. After that I recovered and continued the test. I found the math part very challenging, but I took that as a good sign that I was answering the questions right. My problem was that on the easier questions, I spent too long on reviewing my work. Suddenly, I realized I was on question 30 with one minute left! For the last 7 questions, I didn’t even have time to look at the question stem. I just guessed randomly hoping I could at least answer all the questions within the allotted time.
This made me feel terrible. At this point in time I knew I would have to do very well on the verbal to get anything above 700. The good thing was that on all of the practice tests, I was finishing the verbal section with at least 15mins left on the clock. So when I started on the verbal section, I was relatively at ease. I relaxed in my chair and took my time to read the RC and CR. Then, the same thing happened all over again! I was around question 34 or 35, and immediately I saw I had less than a minute left on the clock! Again, I had to click through randomly on the questions to make sure I didn’t leave any question unanswered.
In the end, I knew I had done poorly. I still wanted to report my score because I wanted to know how badly I had actually fared. And I knew I would be taking the test again in any case. I clicked through and got a 650. Wow. That was even lower than I had expected!
I was pretty down, but not really depressed or sad. The thing was that now I would have to take the test in late Nov or early Dec and I wouldn’t have enough time to write the essays for R2 applications, which meant I would have to either apply in R3 or wait for R1 in the fall.
The first thing I did when I got home was to schedule the test again. The only available slot was Dec 15th, so I took that one. The test, again, would be at 5pm. After that, I immediately went online to search the forums for material to get. It seemed most people recommended the
OG verbal and quant as well as all the
MGMAT books, plus others like the CR Bible, Powerscore, etc.
There aren’t many bookstores in Singapore, and the ones I went to mostly had Kaplan books. I only managed to find the
OG Quant. So I bought the
OG Verbal on iBooks as well as the
MGMAT Advanced Quant and Advanced SC. By now I also had a collection of over 350 questions from the GMAT Club question of the day. I also made sure I kept an
error log. This part is CRITICAL. There is much more to be learned from the
error log than from doing hundreds or thousands of problems without knowing why you got them wrong or, for that matter, right.
I found the GMAT Club questions of the day very useful, mostly because you can click straight to the forum for the explanations. But the best part is that different people have different ways of tackling problems. I would troll through all of the responses to find the approach that would suit me the most, and I would record this. I know some of the people on this forum are very, very bright, but their approach would take way more than two minutes (from my point of view). It’s a matter of choosing what works for you.
I also found the explanations from
MGMAT’s CATs as well as Advanced Math book very, very useful. They’re usually long explanations, but they manage to really break down the problems for you. This is crucial and the quality of the explanation is above and beyond Kaplan.
The last thing I found very useful were some of the strategies outlined in the other debriefs. I think the most important one I read over and over in so many posts is that if you come across a question on the test that you know is in your weak area or you have spent two minutes and can’t figure out, then you must guess strategically and move on. On the original test, I made the mistake of spending up to 5mins on questions I had no clue about. This is a terrible strategy. You need to learn to lose battles so you can win the war. This means saving the valuable time for complex problems for which you know how to solve but might take a little bit more time.
Dec 15th finally came and I felt much better prepared this time around. I was targeting a score of 700 – 740. I eased into the essays and skipped the break. I was eager to get started on the math. I felt the math section this time around was much, much easier than in October.
Having felt pretty confident on the math, even encountering about 4 or 5 questions that were particularly hard to me, I finished the section with about 3 minutes left on the clock. This time I decided to take a break so I could go to the toilet, drink some water, and eat a granola bar.
After 5 minutes I went back into the testing room and sat down to the verbal section. I found the section about as challenging as the first time I took it. I think fatigue also started sinking in by about the 10th question. However, I was very focused on the time and as soon as I started falling behind by one minute, I would think about the question one last time and move on. As I found, during studying, that my weakness was the math, I didn't spend that much time studying for the verbal. I did many SC and CR exercises on the
MGMAT workbooks, which helped a lot. I've also been a reader of the Economist and the NYT is the only newspaper I read, so I guess year's of practice made me feel like I didn't need to spend that much time. There were about 4 CR questions that I found very tricky, those in which I thought two of the answers were very good. I probably picked the wrong ones. I also found about 4 SC questions to be quite tricky as well. I never really practiced RC as I find this the easiest. Would I have been happier with a higher verbal score? Absolutely. Perhaps that would have bumped me to a 720.
For now I feel a 700 is good enough. I have solid work experience having worked in various countries in Europe and Asia, which is a big strength for me for applying to INSEAD, my top choice. So I based on that I decided not to take it again, especially at the risk of getting a score below a 700.
A breakdown of the two tests and the practice exams:
Kaplan 1: 660 (Q43/V40)
Kaplan 2: 690 (Q40/V52)
Kaplan 3: 690 (Q51/V32)
GMATPrep 1: 710 (Q48/V40)
GMATPrep 2: 710 (Q48/V40)
MGMAT 1: 700 (Q48/V38)
MGMAT 2: 700 (Q48/V37)
GMATPrep 3: 680 (Q47/V36)
GMAT 1: 650 (Q45/V35)
MGMAT 3: 730 (Q45/V45)
GMAT 2: 700 (Q47/V39)
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Updated on: 30 Jan 2012, 03:51
