Hey everybody,
Just wanted to thank everyone for the wonderful advice I found here, and to take you through my journey and give advice and answer questions while I still feel motivated to. I took my 1st and only official GMAT this afternoon:
IR: 8, 92nd percentile
Quant: 50, 88th percentile
Verbal: 44, 98th percentile
Total: 760, 99th percentile
Some background: I'm a radiologist; I finished medical school about 8 years ago, did 5 years of residency and then 1 year of fellowship. The whole process started about 2 years ago - I started looking through GMAT material while I was completing my fellowship - I started perusing the Official GMAT Review. After my fellowship finished, I bought the entire
Manhattan GMAT kit, and read everything there. I did all the practice questions in the Official GMAT Review (big book only). I had been taking so many exams throughout my medical career, I figured this wouldn't be too big a deal. Boy was I wrong!! My math skills had completely atrophied in the last decade.
I studied pretty lightly over the course of 2 months, just doing practice questions without timing or anything. I took my first
MGMAT practice exam - I was shocked when I got my first exam score: 610
I don't remember the breakdown, but I ran out of time on both sections and had to guess on a ton of questions. Timing was a big issue for me.
Subsequently, due to some changes in my work schedule as well as the rotten score, I was like, the hell with this, and dropped it...
Buuuut I'm too stubborn to quit. Starting again this last August, I decided I would buckle down and really study. I reread the
Manhattan GMAT review books - I read everything except the book on AWA and IR (I'll get to that in a moment) and the sentence correction - for that, I used Aristotle Sentence Correction Grail.
After finishing reviewing the books, I began to do practice questions: BUT here's the key - I timed myself for every question I did. First, I started with the Kaplan question bank. I would do 10 quant and 10 verbal per day, in that order. After I completed all of those over the course of a month or so, then I started the
OG. I would put a timer for 20 minutes and do as many questions as I could, with a goal of completing 10-11 questions. I would study about 1-2 hours per day - I would do 10 PS, then review the results - and then 10 DS, and review the results. The next day, I would do 2 RC passages (2-4 minutes to read the passage + 1 min per question), 15 SC (20 minutes), and then 15 CR (20 minutes). The only sources I used for practice questions: Official GMAT Review, GMAT Quantitative review, and GMAT Verbal review. I would do this back and forth for about 4-5 nights and then take a night off. I did this from when I finished reading the books until about 2 days before the exam.
I also had sticky colored tabs that I would stick to each page where I missed a question and write the question number there, so I would know to go back and review it later. I didn't review any of these until the week before the exam.
About a month before the actual exam, I started doing 5 practice quant questions of the day from here...The quant questions are good; I stopped doing the verbal questions after I saw several errors, so do those at your own risk.
Here was the trend of practice exams - all
Manhattan GMAT:
9/24/2014: 700; quant 45, verbal 40
10/9/2014: 710; quant 44, verbal 42, IR 3.8
10/22/2014: 710; quant 42, verbal 45, IR 6.6
11/5/2014: 740; quant 46, verbal 45, IR 3.87
11/30/2014 (2 days before exam): 720; quant 44, verbal 44, IR 4.43
In all honesty, I wasn't thrilled about scoring lower on a practice exam 2 days before the actual exam - but my timing really fell apart on the quant section. I never had an issue with timing on the verbal section; in fact, I usually finished about 5 minutes early, so I knew I had to really focus.
3 days before the exam, I reread the Aristotle SC Correction Grail. Worth it.
After the last practice, I took 2 hours off, had some dinner, relaxed a bit, and decided I would spend the next 36 hours reviewing every quant question in the practice exams I had taken and every quant question I had marked in the
OG books. That was definitely worth it!
Key points:
-I was rusty in math, so I used the Kaplan question bank to brush up on things. Their questions were too easy in general, I thought.
-Aside from Kaplan - the source to use for practice questions was the 3 official GMAT books -
OG GMAT review, GMAT Quant, GMAT Verbal. Don't read the crap inside, that's what the
mgmat books are for. Just do those questions - but know them inside and out, and most importantly, understand why the answer is what it is. For verbal, understand why the answer choices that are wrong are wrong. And do these questions over and over again. I marked all the questions I got wrong with a sticky tab; I didn't review the verbal ones at all, but I did go through the quant questions the day before. It is important to do this!!
-I read the AWA and IR book a week before the exam. I also did practice AWA for each exam; I have yet to see what the score I get will be - that'll come later I guess.
-Actual GMAT Quant - this felt much easier than the
manhattan GMAT quant. I actually thought I was messing up along the way because the questions near the end felt much too easy. Guess I was wrong. Get comfortable with the
manhattan gmat practice exam questions, it is worth your while. I had about 30 seconds for the last question, I let that happen on purpose. I had decided that probability questions that I couldnt solve right away and combinatrics questions that weren't straightforward I was just going to guess on. I never did figure those out
-Actual GMAT Verbal - The verbal did feel a little harder on the actual than the
MGMAT material.
Anyways, if there are any questions, feel free to reply. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. I was thinking about applying for an Exec MBA, but I'm not sure what my timeframe is so we shall see.