I very recently took the GMAT and scored 680. Not exactly what I was hoping unfortunately, but I feel that there is something that can be learned from my experience.
Before beginning my story I would like to thank the Gmat club for the valuable info that you can find in the forums and because reading success stories kept my motivation high during my studies.
I am 26 years old and I work for a global consulting firm in Italy. Recently I felt the need for a career change, possibly abroad ... so I thought about an mba (hopefully this 680 I just got will get me somewhere decent). To access any MBA program, taking a GMAT, unfortunately, is a necessary pain. This was about 3 months ago... and this is how my gmat love affair started.
At the beginning I spent a weekend getting some information about the gmat, learning the structure and doing some practice questions etc. Right away I decided to take an official practice test just to get a feel of where I was standing. My score, right away, was 630, i don't remember the exact breakdown but it was something like quant: 36; verbal: 40 (i didn't take the IR section). I immediately thought: "hey its not too bad, I have to work on math but verbal is good... I might be able to hit 700+!!". There was a little problem however... i work 14 hours per day at least... this doesn't leave much time to study!!
Anyway, weekend after weekend, I went through all the
MGMAT books on math and tried to do practice problems when I had breaks at work. I felt I was getting somewhere so I booked my test for September 3rd!
This kind of studying during weekends went on from the beginning of may to mid July. At that point my preparation, for various reasons got to a halt. The third weekend of July it was my birthday (not much studying there) and the next one it was by brother's birtday (so not much studying there either) ... aaand the first week of august I went to Ibiza (probably not the best choice gmat-wise but i needed a break from the long year at work).
Back from Ibiza I decided to take another practice test, and the reluslts were discomforting ... I scored 640 (Quant: 37; Verbal: 40). So basically no improvement whatsoever!! All the weekends that I invested in studying were all gone due to a week in ibiza? It was a very bad feeling.
Anyway I had two more weeks of vacation and decided to work on my GMAT basically full time. I bought the Kaplan Gmat Premier 2016 and the Kaplan GMAT 800 book, because going through the
MGMAT guides again would have taken to long at that point. So the second and third week of August I studied the Kaplan books mainly going through the math part (with all the practice questions). I found the Kaplan Gmat Premier quite helpful, it was clear and had good exercises. The Gmat 800 however was quite useless for me, I felt that the explanations were not always clear and the type of questions were not like those I found during the practice tests ... maybe simply because I never even got to answer the hardest questions! Having completed all the Kaplan material I purchased the official question pack and also the two other official CATs too keep practicing. During this time I practiced very little verbal and completely neglected AWA and IR since I felt I had time to focus on only one goal ... improving math!
The third week of august I was back to work (yes, still 14 hour days at least) anyways I tried to make an effort and woke up early every morning to study at least 40 min to 1 hr. I don't know how productive this was since I definitely not a morning person but the test was coming up fast!
The final weekend before the exam I took another official practice test, this time the score was not bad! I scored 690 (Quant: 43; Verbal: 41; no IR). At this point I thought I may have little bit of a chance and I spent the rest of the weekend studying.
The day before my test I called in sick from work and decided to take another official practice test ... finally I broke the 700 mark! I scored 720 (Quant: 45; Verbal: 44; no IR). The problem was that my quant score didn't improve that much and this 720 was actually mainly driven by an increase in verbal.
Finally we get to the test day. I was kind of worried since I had never even tried taking a full test with AWA and IR. I was afraid of wearing out too quickly. Fortunately this did not happen (I guess that 14 hour days help with stamina), i found the essay quite easy and also the IR section was surprisingly simple. So after the first hour of test I was feeling fresh and ready. I started the quant section ... I missed the first 2, i just didn't know how to answer them so I guessed and went on. For the rest of the section I had a weird feeling, the questions were actually quite easy. I couldn't tell if it was just my impression or this was the case because I was consistently getting stuff wrong. Incredibly I finished the quant section with 7 minutes to spare!! I took the full break and started the verbal section. I felt that questions were a bit harder than the practice tests I took, this caused me to run out of time and I had to guess the last 2.
So final score ... 680 - Quant: 44; Verbal: 40; IR: 8. Apparently I nailed the IR section without even practicing! Too bad that business schools don't really look at it!
Now I am thinking about trying a test again right away and see if I can break the 700 mark like I did on that one practice test. If I do worst i guess that can always cancel the score.
The lessons to be learned from my experience are that one should never interrupt preparation. This is key especially for people like me who don't have the luxury of taking months off to concentrate on the test. All in all, I feel that my true preparation lasted only 2 weeks! The two weeks I really dedicated full time.
In the meantime, if the club has some specific tips that could be useful for me in improving math... you guys are welcome. Also, if I will retake the test and do better i will let you guys know, hopefully I will post a 700+ story next time!