GMAT today - 770 (Q49, V47)

Great score! Now the top-10 won't ding you for GMAT. Seriously, the essays are where it's at.

Nice score!
Would you care to share your study strategy?

A very controversial issue: if you are above the average or the mean you are “on the fight”, however, to know if a 40 points does any help is very hard to know. A friend of mine told me that with above 750 you need to show the adcom that you’re not a freak, that you have good communication skills, etc. I do not also know whether or not scholarships depend on the GMAT score itself, we have here the case of Pelihu who told that he felt it was essential, though the true we will never know.

Each case is unique, I mean, a non English speaker with above 750 is very rare, and this may count a little. Schools do not say that they have a % of places for a certain nationality but you can easily see that in general they maintain a certain range, so usually South Americans are “fighting” for a place with South Americans, Europeans with Europeans and so on. This could be even narrowed for a specific country.

One thing that someone else said here and I thought it makes sense is that: all parts of the admission process have non comparable variables: they are comparing physicians with engineers, artists with administrators, etc. The only single part of the process that they can compare directly is the GMAT, and that’s why we put it as one of the most important part of the process. I’m not sure if that’s true, however, I think it really makes sense.

Anyway: Excellent score, you will have no problems with your score, now you should focus on the essays.

That score should net you a chance to apply for scholarship money from schools in the 50th-20th range, and the elites will be interested in you. based on the score, you should expect to get recruitment emails from all the top schools. expect $$ mail from BU and others.

if other aspects of your profile are good (like kwam said, as long as you aren't some egghead nerd freak - this is business school, not a physics program) you have a strong shot at any program!

congrats!

Outstanding score - especially Verbal!

Sorry about the delay in the debrief:

Background on my language skills as I find this somewhat relevant:
English is my second language but I came to the US when I was 8. My grammar was actually the part I had to focus on the most (sentence correction).

To summarize: Q 49 is 89th percentile and V 47 is 99th percentile

Study methodology:

I ordered the Princeton Review online course. It kinda holds your hand through the fundamentals, step-by-step, which was a nice thing. But if you want anything over a 650, the PR online material alone will not do it. In fact, I would not really encourage anyone scoring in the mid-600s already to use this material. However, the material did help me with the sentence correction because the information is well-presented. It was effective because sentence correction was by far the weakest subsection of my score.

Manhattan GMAT is seriously where it's at if you need/want a 700+.
I used their 6 GMAT exams and took them all once and then repeated the math sections 2 more times. I took care to note all the sentence correction mistakes I made and memorized the rules corresponding to each. The I purchased the "challenge questions" for math which are basically at a level that is slightly beyond what I was seeing on my actual exam. I was amazed with the Manhattan material I purchased as I invested under $100 for this material which was what I spent most of my time on! If you want a 700+ and have the dough, I would go for the Manhattan GMAT material all the way (and no, I have absolutely no affiliations with Manhattan... I really believe this was where the bulk of my score improvement came from).

I also got that big orange "The Official Guide" GMAT book from the Princeton Review course (but you can purchase this anywhere). I did all the questions from it. I found these questions to be the closest to what I saw on the actual exam. BUT... I feel one really should work on materials harder than one would see on the actual exam to be adequately prepared.

My score for Q is only 89th percentile so I am by no means an expert in math. I had to work fairly hard to finish the Q part of the exam in time. Not once did I finish the Manhattan GMAT math on time (but I do tend to get stubborn and get stuck on a particular question for 5 minutes). I was scoring in the low 700s on the Manhattan exam material.

I think I do have some insight into the Verbal section. I suspect that people who speak English as a second language had similar issues as I did with grammar and reading comprehension. I have always found the critical reasoning to be fairly simple as it is more logic than anything else.

The main thing about reading comprehension is to spend some time really understanding the passage. I know most courses tell you to skim and refer back to the passage. There are also strategies that suggest you don't actually need to understand the passage in order to answer the questions. Personally, I have found myself wasting time re-reading if I do not understand it the first time around. I actually backtrack and re-read the paragraph immediately if I do not quite understand it so that I can follow the logical flow of the passage. My reasoning is that if you do not understand any part of the passage, you will not be able to answer the "purpose of the passage" and "organization of the passage" or "tone of the passage" etc, type of "general" questions.

Finally, I downloaded (from https://www.mba.com) the exam software and did these two exams a couple of days before the actual exam. Ok, I lied, I ended up procrastinating and taking the second one at 3am a day before the actual exam. I would not really suggest doing the same unless you have your exam scheduled in the afternoon.

Any more questions about the exam? Just post and I'll reply.
Good luck.

Regarding someone's suggesting about being a freak with a score over 750...

That was actually the second thought that came to mind... actually the first was that the score was a fluke... glad someone else had the same thought....

After further research, I've found that the score does not matter as long as you score a bit above or around the mean.

Woohoo!!! Someone else preaching the value of ALL the MGMAT books and not just the SC book.

Congrats on the score. Please don't apply to Harvard, Kellogg, or GSB in the first round, you'll take a seat away for sure!

Wow...770 ...Brilliant score....

Congrats!

At a top school it wont get you in but at schools beyond the mid teens tend to throw money at people with high GMATs. Read the thread on GMAT Whores in the applicant forum. Certain schools seem to basically tell people with extremely high scores that they will get in and get money...

link?

This was the easiest search I have ever done on this site...suprisingly there are only a few threads with the word whores in them.

https://www.gmatclub.com/forum/t50160

sorry, that made me LOL.