Hi,
ProfileNationality - Indian
Residence - USA
Work - One of the blue chip companies - Business process Analyst
Educatin - One of the IITs in India (Btech) and Masters from a mid tier school in U.S.
Age - 29
GMAT resultScore - 730, Verbal - 41, Quant 49
ScheduleI took GMAT last year. Unfortunately I did not know about gmatclub until recently. I travel for work and I am on road 4 days a week. I had to plan accordingly, so I planned a 1 hr study session on 2 days per weekend. I studied for 6 weekends, for a total of 12 hours. This does not include the time taken for prep tests. I took two online tests. Preparatory material used were
OG, Kaplan Verbal, Kaplan Advanced verbal, and Manhattan Sentence Correction.
What I needed to focus on?For Quant, the questions in
OG were enough because I did not need any practice of the knowledge areas. I am fairly strong in math. Focus needed to be on Verbal but I was not terrible to begin with. My initial Verbal score in GMAT prep test on mba.com website was 38.
Preparation methodI used to condense daily study in 1 hour. Usual pattern was 20 mins SC, 20 mins logical argument, 10 mins RC, 10 mins Quant. I had less time alotted for RC because I was not too bad in RC. Used to get around 8 questions out of every 10 attempted. I always measured my performance in terms of 10 attempted questions.
I have some attention deficit issues. That was one of the reason, I did not plan to practice for more than 6-8 weeks and kept the sessions condensed.
Practice TestsTook 2 mba.com tests - 700 and 740.
Took three
Manhattan prep tests - 680, 700, 720
In the practice tests, my Quant score always was about 51. Verbal used to be around 39, 40, sometimes lower - 37. I never had any issued with time in the practice tests. Always completed before time.
Exam dayAWA questions - first question was easier and I wrote a good answer following the usual pattern advised in the
OG. Second question, I could not think of anything to write! Went blank for lot of time, and finally wrote something - thought it was terrible.
Quant - Quant questions got progressively tougher and time consuming. More so than the practice tests. Towards the end it became right on the buzzer. But I believed I was doing fairly well. Lost concentration towards the end, and I forgot to submit the last question - just sat there with the answer checked on and did not hit submit.
Verbal - Because of the Quant fiasco, I concntrated very hard on Verbal. Most of the questions were about the same level of complexity as the practice tests. Towards the end, there were few complex ones and I took a few guesses. I was happy with my performance.
After the score came up, Verbal was as expected - I got 41 that was more than any practice tests I took. Quant was 49 - which was shocking. This was a terrible performance considering my practice scores in Quant.
Overall thoughtsOrganize your study. My advice is that even practice study hours (and not just practice tests) should be strictly timed. It improves speed in general, plus, for someone like me with attention problems, it helps a lot.
Regardless of how busy your work schedule is, you can always squeeze atleast 2 hours per weekend. Enough to get started with your prep.
I found Manhattan SC the best verbal book among what I read. I discovered in later, I had started with Kaplan. I think it would have been better had I only read Manhattan, it would have given me more time with it.
Good luck to the people taking GMAT and hope this helps a bit.