570 (Q30, V38) to 760 (Q49, V44) in 3 months (long)

Took the exam today and scored a 760 (Q49, V44). I should be happier with my score but am not and here's why:

After my AWA section, I raised my hand for a break. The moderator/observer guy, who was a bit overly friendly, said “alright, take your time!” Like a complete idiot, I assumed that Pearson would notify you when your 8 minute break was up. Unfortunately, this was NOT the case. What was the consequence? When I returned from my post-AWA break and started on the quant section, the time remaining had already been depleted to 71:03. 4 minutes vanished into thin air. Psychologically, I was so in the zone that I was only briefly flustered. I simply told myself that I've trained too long and hard to let this ruin my test day and kept moving forward. In an attempt to stay on MGMAT’s timing schedule, I rushed through a few questions without thinking through them thoroughly. Got to the last question, which was a hard one, with about 1:45 remaining. Took me ~1:30 to finally think of the correct formula but with 15 seconds left, I did not have enough time to calculate it out. So what should have been a surefire Q50 / 770 and potential Q51 / 780 turned into a Q49 / 760.

Would appreciate people's thoughts on me potentially retaking it. In the 3 months leading up to test day, I approached the GMAT with the intention of destroying it. It's really become a matter of pride at this point and the thought of such a stupid and avoidable mistake is driving me nuts. I would have been perfectly proud and happy of my 760 if it were not for this mistake. It’s like making it to the 100M sprint at the Olympics expecting to win gold and then getting silver because you heard the gunshot a half second after everyone else.

Bit of background on me: 25 years old. Currently work in the corporate development department of a well-known Internet company. Prior to that, worked as an investment banking analyst.

Anyhow, here is a breakdown of my study strategy:

Class:

Manhattan GMAT. Enrolled in the live class. Overall it was pretty useful but not so much because of the class as because of the materials and resources.

Pros: Quant strategy guides are really good. SC guide is really good. Extremely detailed spreadsheets for answer/timing tracking on OG problems. Extremely detailed and focused study plan. And, most importantly, 30-minute office hours with their instructors. While my classroom instructor was great, a MGMAT instructor named Horacio Quiroga gave me some advice that was critical to my success. I met the guy through office hours in my last week of class and, if you look at the trajectory of my practice CAT scores after that week, you'll see the results. He acted like he had a vested interest in my GMAT score (offered to hold follow-up calls with me beyond the duration of the class, on his own time) and the advice/guidance he gave was tremendous.

Cons: Unfortunately, because they need maximize their addressable market, class room lecture plans aren't really targeted to the students who are looking to get mid-high 700's. Based on my experience, most of the students are looking for mid-to-high 600's and the classroom is taught with that in mind. They have a separate series of 2-hour segments called "The Quest for 750" but I did not take them so I can't comment. While the class is really good for building fundamentals, if you're shooting for 760+, you'll probably need to do a lot of additional studying post-class.

Study materials:

1. MGMAT Guides - Quant and SC are great. Tried the note taking strategies for both CR and RC and found they only slowed me down.

2. OG 12, Q and V books - Did most of the problems for all three books at first according to the MGMAT study plan. After I exhausted all of the MGMAT study plan HW problems, began to do only the later problems (anywhere from #50 to #90 and on, depending on book/question-type).

3. A set of 400 problems which I got by emailing the guy at this website: http://gmatquantproblems.blogspot.com/. A friend of mine who had taken the test recently recommended the set to me. These problems were most representative of the actual test. $150 for 400 problems, all of which are at least as difficult as the hardest quartile of official guide problems. You should be scoring in the Q47/Q48+ range before purchasing. If you’re shooting for Q50, this is the set to get after you’ve exhausted the official guide.

Warning: the guy is pretty flaky over email. He's apparently a GMAT tutor in Argentina, where customer service is low on the list of priorities. He takes Paypal or money order and physically mails you the questions (I know - old school).

4. Jeff Sackmann's Extreme Challenge - There are 2 guys on this forum who talk about this thing like it's GMAT quant salvation in a PDF. I suspect they might be related to Jeff Sackmann . Don't get me wrong, it's got some good, representative problems. But out of the 100 questions, 30-35 of them were probably combo/probs. How many combo/probs did I see on the test? 1. I did wipe it out quite quickly though, probably purely because of Sackmann's set. The set is split roughly 35/65 PS/DS. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone NOT purchase it but it’s not nearly as helpful as some people here claim.

CAT & actual exam:

MGMAT 1: 6/6/09 – 570: Q30 / V38
MGMAT 2: 7/21/09 – 660: Q44 / V36
MGMAT 3: 8/9/09 – 680: Q47 / V35 – MGMAT classes ended this week
MGMAT 4 : 8/16/09 – 730 : Q48 / V41
MGMAT 5 : 8/23/09 – 750 : Q48 / V44

GMAT Prep 1 : 8/30/09 – 770 : Q50 / V45
GMAT Prep 2 : 9/13/09 – 780 : Q50 / V48

Actual Exam: 9/18/09 – 760: Q49 / V44

Key takeaways

- Before anything else – *****DO NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID AND ASSUME THAT THEY WILL NOTIFY YOU WHEN YOUR 8-MINUTE BREAK IS UP*****. If you did not read my intro paragraph, this cost me 4 minutes in the quant section and turned a 770 into a 760.

- SC: Exhaust all of the OG problems and make sure you read the official explanations for EVERY QUESTION, EVEN THE ONES YOU GET RIGHT. For the ones you get right, go through and read the official explanation for why every other answer choice is wrong. Every wrong answer choice typically has 2-3 errors and chances are you’re only able to identify 1 of them. By going through the official explanations for why each answer choice is wrong, you really train yourself to recognize errors, which is the key to SC. Even on the toughest SC problems, you can use error recognition and POE to arrive at an answer 95%+ of the time. This was the revelation that kicked my score up from a V36 to V41 in a single week.

- CR/RC: you should approach studying for these the same way as you approach SC although you probably don’t need the same level of meticulousness. After a while it’s just pattern recognition. Stay as close to the text as possible, avoid extremisms, etc. etc.

- Quant: Do problems and own the problems. I went from a Q30 to a consistent Q50 by doing somewhere around 800-1,000 quant problems. My history in math is a bit unique though and I can offer up more details if anyone is interested in how to move from a Q30 to Q50.

- Study hard and consistently. I’m not sure I would have been able to make the gains I made by studying in broken intervals. I averaged 20-25 hours a week for 13 weeks straight. There were maybe only 3 days during which I did not study.

- GMAT club is a great resource but try and filter out the noise (this applies to any other GMAT forum, including MGMAT's) . I found motivation through some really solid posts on here. Also found some gems of quant wisdom. But this is a free-for-all forum and not every post is made of gold. There were a few times when questions totally unrepresentative of the exam were posted and proceeded to drive me crazy because I couldn't figure them out. Also, there are some posters who provide wrong answers with such a high degree of confidence that it can be dangerous. GMATclub is a great resource with some amazing contributors, but be careful of how deeply you read into certain posts.

- Don’t use any CATs until you’ve done a decent portion of the OG problems in timed conditions.

- MGMAT CATs are 10-20% harder than the real exam. It’s a pretty good proxy for the real test but GMAT Prep is (obviously) by far the best.

- In my personal experience, the real GMAT was a bit harder than GMAT Prep. Quant section was a tad bit more difficult and verbal was definitely more difficult. I missed 0 SC in my last 2 practice CATs (both GMAT Prep) but probably missed 2 or 3 on the real exam based on my V44 score and my feelings about the RC/CR questions.

- If you’re a native English speaker and you’re in the mid-to-high 30’s in verbal, you can probably get away with not taking any notes in CR and RC.

- Embrace the AWA! I’m actually really glad they make you do this first. It really helps you to ease into the test and overcome any initial anxiety you might have. An hour in the actual testing environment will calm the nerves, especially since you know you're working on the part of the exam that doesn't really count for much.

So that's my story. Happy to provide more insight or answer any questions if people have them.

Nice post understudy!!
The post shows your hardwork!!

I will be taking my real GMAT test in a months test.
Can you please share Verbal Strategies/Tips you followed in detail ?
What books you followed and what strategies have been very representative and very close to the answer while doing practice. It would be helpful for me.

I like the point in which you mentioned to have all the OG explanations for SC in finger tips.
Sometimes i could recognize myself, after getting correct answer for a question that i have identified 1 error that have lead all the way to correct answers somehow.
But infact we should be well prepared to find out all the errors in a question to make sure that we are not leading to any of the wrong answers.

What would be ideal time to utilize the GMAT prep test 1 & 2.

Thanks!!

Wow - CONGRATULATIONS. Very impresssive!

Congrats on super score. all the best for the app process.

thanks for the debrief.

Thanks man.

Verbal strategy is tricky. I basically just did a lot of problems from OG and the GMAT SETS that people have referred to on this and various other boards. I started off with the OG because they have explanations. The key is, like I mentioned in the post, reviewing not only the questions you get wrong but also the ones you get right - when you review the questions you got right, you should just look to fully understand why every answer choice you did not choose was wrong. Oftentimes, you miss the key reason why an answer choice was wrong or you miss 1-2 of the 2-3 reasons why an answer choice is wrong. Error recognition -> process of elimination was my primary strategy, which got me to a v48 in my second (not a re-take) GMAT Prep.

After you feel like you've mastered the OG, you can go on to use the GMAT SETS for additional practice. By that point, you should be well-versed enough to figure out the explanation for any wrong/right answer choices.

For RC and CR, it's really all about staying close to the text. If you have to make any additional assumptions or jumps in logic, you're going too far. You will figure this out after you've done 200-300 problems for both . I never took any notes - I tried it for about 3 weeks and found it really slowed me down and hurt my V score in my MGMAT CATs and abandoned it after that. I read each RC passage ONCE carefully and then referred back to it when necessary. Same with CR, although I will say that initially taking notes on CR really helped me to be confident when identifying the conclusion of each passage (which is one of the key skills for CR).

As for the books, I had the MGMAT books but didn't find them to be too useful. The key strategy they preach is note-taking and for me, personally, that didn't work.

Long and short: do problems, review the explanations and understand why explanations are correct vs. incorrect to train your error recognition abilities, use POE and then follow-up with practice on SETS or 1000 series.

Thanks understudy!!

Nice Post!!
I have given my GMAT a week ago and got 560. Score(Q 49/V 19). I am planning to give GMAT again. I have not decided date yet. Verbal is my weak area and dont know how to improve it.
I have gone through IMS material, OG 12 edition, Kaplan 800 and Manhattan for Sentence Correction.
Can you please guide me what strategy should I follow to improve my score on Verbal. I need to improve it more than double.

Quant: Do problems and own the problems. I went from a Q30 to a consistent Q50 by doing somewhere around 800-1,000 quant problems. My history in math is a bit unique though and I can offer up more details if anyone is interested in how to move from a Q30 to Q50.

Wow!!! That's something. Please shed some light on how you did it. I got a 36 in Quants, how can I bump that up? Thanks!

Much kudos for the huge improvements on the Q part.

Hi understudy,

Could you please say exactly what is MGMAT’s timing schedule?

Thank you

Hi - here's a message I wrote to someone else asking for insight into my studying process:

The key is studying and owning the problems. You should maintain an Excel tracker of every single quant problem that you do with the following:

1. Correct/incorrect
2. Timing (amount over or under 2:00)
3. Any notes relating to why you go the answer wrong or why you spent too long answering the question

You can do grouped sets of 10-30 OG problems at once. If you're not doing well (i.e. you're going well above the 2:00 mark on all problems and/or are getting over 1/3rd of the problems in a set wrong), don't continue to do more problems until you clearly understand why you got each problem wrong or why you spent too long on each problem. The goal should be, within a reasonable limit, to own every problem you do. You need to understand the fundamentals and basics tied into each problem, everything from a conceptual understanding of how it's solved to the basic arithmetic principles needed in order to quickly solve the problem. Deep practice is critical. If you haven't done all of the In-Action problems in the MGMAT guides (they're at the end of each chapter), I'd recommend that you do them as they are really good for building a strong fundamental understanding of concepts.

So do this until you've exhausted all of the OG problems. When you're done with all of the OG problems, go back and re-do every problem that you either got wrong or spent more than 2:20 on. Since you will have studied those problems on the first go-around and taken notes on why you got them wrong, your results should improve greatly on the second time around.

When you've done this with all of the OG problems, you should take a MGMAT CAT and see how your Q score is doing. If it's in the Q47+ range, you can probably move on to either Sackmann's extreme challenge questions or, better yet, the 400 problems I mentioned in my post. The guy who writes the 400 problems is really flaky unfortunately but you should eventually be able to get a hold of him if you're persistent with the emails.

If you're still not yet in the Q47 range, perhaps a third round across the OG problems as well as a thorough review of every Q problem in every CAT that you've done.

Anyhow - I think you get the point . Essentially, it's purely a function of being determined, driven and hungry to destroy this exam and then channeling that determination into a study strategy that gets you deep into every problem set.

Hi - take a look at the key takeaways section of my post and my response to Execkutive. If you have any additional specific questions happy to answer.

Sure thing:

Quant:
45 mins remaining: Should be on problems #14-16
30 mins remaining: 21-23
15 mins remaining: 29-31

Verbal:
45 mins remaining: 16-18
30 mins remaining: 24-26
15 mins remaining: 33-35

Thanks understudy, kudos for you for the nice post and incentive to everybody

Thanks much. That was really helpful! Good luck with your app.

Great score seriously.. too good..

I need some help with the CR questions, my problem is two-pronged:
1.My speed is not up to the mark(I typically take 2-3 minutes per problem).
2.Also, my accuracy isnt that great(I score around 7/10 on practice questions in the Powerscore GMAT Bible).
Any suggestions? how to attack these problems - my test date is about a month and 10 days away.
Also when do I start with the full-length tests? I haven't taken any till now.

Hey understudy.... congrats on your results. I'd kill for your score and personally wouldn't look to retake it. I don't think adding another 10 or 20 points will make a huge diff into getting into a good b-school as even for all the top schools the average is low 700s.

Thanks for the tips. I really like the explanation about SC and making sure you understand every question.

Great advice on studying all the wrong answers, sounds like it would work for the CR/RC questions too! Hope I get a similar score in two weeks. Best of luck on your apps!

Hi. Your thoughts are indeed quite helpful.

If you could explain a little on what inputs you received from that gentleman , it would help. Also if you could explain on the quants strategy it would help. Am exactly at your initial score and would want to move somewhere near your final score in less than 8 weeks.

Thanks.

Ram.