Now that my Exam is behind me it is time to finally share and not only profit from this great Forum!
I had a really satisfying overall result with a bit an awkward split:
IR: 6
Q: 44 (58th percentile)
V: 45 (99th percentile)
720 (94th percentile)
Some information about myself
I am a male Swiss (non-native English),, soon 30 years old, with a Masters Degree in Microbiology/Immunology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. I now worked for 3 years as a Product Manger in a small company in the Life Science market. I plan to pursue a career in Consulting in the future and I am looking to obtain a MBA in the next years. During high-school I went to Latin America for a students exchange year and therefore, besides my native German, also speak Spanish very well. I also speak and write in French on my job on a daily basis (we get drilled in French during highschool in Switzerland!).
How did I prepare?I used the OG15 and the Kaplan 800 book. Furthermore I read a lot on the
Magoosh Homepage, a really helpful resource.
Overall I would say, that my preparation was not ideal. I started studying with the mentioned books weeks before test day. However I was still working and had to study in the evening and on weekends (many of them already loaded with other events, it was Christmas time after all). I had the feeling I was actually not summing up as many hours as I should have. I scheduled my exam at a time when I was not fully aware of how much one can and has to study for this test. In fact I thought of it more as an IQ test that you can hardly prepare for (this is definitely wrong).
Something I wish I had done better before scheduling the exam: getting acquainted with all the different facets of the GMAT and the possibilities one has to study for it. Also important is to assess the level one already has before scheduling the exam. I did all this only after I scheduled my exam and then had the feeling I should have given myself more time to prepare. My approach was: let`s schedule the exam first and then go study. I would do it in the reverse order now.
Studying / Practice testsI did two GMAT Prep practice tests without AWA (do it at least in once, it does feel different on test day).
First Test
700 skipped AWA and IR.
Second Test
720 IR: 8
In both I was above 90th percentile in Verbal (but not as good as in the actual test) and at around 43 to 47 in Quant (don`t really remember). GMAT Prep tests are really great for assessing yourself!
Since after the first practice test and solving problems in the textbooks I felt quite comfortable with the verbal section, I focused more on Quant (yeah, it doesn`t look like it). The biggest mistake I did was the infamous “Ah, I got it wrong…well now that I see the solution I know how to solve this, at least next time for sure”. Actually there is a reason you get it wrong and probably you get it wrong the next time again. Just because you can follow the concept of a solution that is given to you, doesn`t mean you will actually find the solution when it counts. I am very guilty of that typical mistake.
At the beginning I solved a lot of easy quant problems and then after a while focused almost exclusively on difficult ones (
GMAT Club Test etc.). This however meant that I neglected the challenging but not ultra tough ones. Not the best idea either. A better approach would have been to tackle the fields I did not feel to comfortable with (i.e. powers, rates, DS) and not waste time with really hard problems.
For the verbal part I almost exclusively focused on Sentence correction, since I almost only got these questions wrong during preparation. You can approach it quite schematically, almost always eliminating two or more options easily. I read the Idiom E-book from
Magoosh, this helped a lot. I always tried to look for parallelism and noun/verb, singular/plural fitting.
Test dayThe night before test day was really bad, I woke up at least 5 times with difficulty to get back to sleep. Part of it was due to being nervous for sure, but probably also because I felt I was getting a cold. I did not feel properly rested unfortunately. At the test center there were some computer issues and everyone had to wait and the test started 45min later than planned.
The AWA went ok I think (I don`t have the result yet…is it actually ok to post the results you get on test day, or should I have waited for the official one?). On the IR I had one screen that I had difficulty with and I misread the last question and had only very little time left when I realized it, forcing me to guess.
The Quant part started horrible with a rate problem I felt I should be able to solve, but I took the wrong approach, burning time and I was not even sure I solved it correctly in the end. Overall I felt I used too much time for question of medium difficulty (more practice!), I also had at least two questions I reached a result (and was convinced I did everything right), that was just a little bit different than those you could select. Nerve wrecking! Time was also an issue throughout and I guessed at least twice to save some.
The test administrator asked how it went so far and I said, that I had the feeling I blew the Quant. Feeling a bit down I forced myself to leave this behind and do better in the verbal section.
It was all very similar as in the practice tests and I think I did a good job at keeping the focus. I would force myself to immediately restart reading when I caught myself “going through the words” after the first two lines rather than consciously reading and understanding the text. This is exhausting but especially for the RC and CR parts very helpful. Restating mentally the most important keywords also worked for me. (i.e. saying in my head immediately when I encounter a keyword: “grey wolves…tundra”, “black wolves…forest”, “only in Alaska”, “elsewhere brown”, for a 15 line text about fur color differences of long nose wolves (made up example, not part of the test). For longer passages I would also take a few notes of the most important pillars of the text.
I was really happy with the score in the end, but do feel that I choked on the Quant part and think that there is room for improvement there. A low quant is more of a problem than a low Verbal, right? I am not sure yet if I should retake the test.
Also practice stamina, it is really exhausting and there are moments you would just like to select any choice and get quickly to the next question.