My GMAT journey (2 months prep) and Result (760, Q50, V44)

Some update from my side. I have got an admit from IIM Ahemdabad's one year full time MBA (IIMA - PGPX). I am delighted . IIMA is the highest ranked college in India and PGPX is ranked 11th worldwide in FT rankings of last two years.

So far my app journey has been good considering that I am already 33 years old, have a very common profile, and currently not in a job. I had my share of jitters reading all doom and gloom about my kind of case. So far I have had 100% +ve result (invited for interview or admit) in all the colleges that I have applied in. I think my good GMAT score, good undergrad, and genuine essays have helped. About essays, I followed general dos and don'ts and followed my heart when writing.

I am writing all this just so that others like me can find some good news among a lot of bad news currently present on internet about old and career break guys.

I am pleased to share my GMAT experience and hopefully somone will find useful information here as I found from a lot of debriefs in this forum.

Background: 33 M Indian, Native language - Hindi, B.Tech. from IT-BHU, 10+ years of IT work ex, PMP certified project manager.

Preparation time: 2 months from May 2012 to Jun 2012 with 4 - 8 hrs a day. I quit my full time and well paying job in April 2012 to pursue MBA from a good institute. It was a tough deision with lots on stake but I just decided to give it a solid try. I am happy that the first step, GMAT, is well done but it is still a long way to go.

Prep material: GMATClub helped me decide on which books and other resources are good and how people in general plan for the prep. My prep included:

SC - Manhattan, Powerscore, SC Grail, GMAT Club Grammar book
CR - Powerscore
RC - No book, but practised questions from RC99 and OG13.

Ron Purewal's free video lessons - great resource. I saw only few of these videos as I found them only in the last week of my prep but if you have time, go through all of them.

Quant - Manhattan, Abhijit Guha (Few topics), Jeff Sackman Extreme challenge

IR - Manhattan Book, free workshop video, and mba.com & OG 13 online questions.

OG 13, Verbal and Quant OGs V2.

Test Results: dates are in dd/mm/yyyy format

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT1 03/05/2012 Q45 (18 wrong) V32 (12 wrong) 640 - It was before I started the prep to get the feel and judge my level.

MGMAT CAT1 12/06/2012 Q47 (15 wrong) V38 (14 wrong) 700 - IR (4-6)

MGMAT CAT2 15/06/2012 Q47 (17 wrong) V40 (14 wrong) 710 - No IR

MGMAT CAT3 21/06/2012 Q49 (8 wrong) V40 (11 wrong) 730 - IR (3-5)

Powerprep CAT1 date ??? Q50 V44 770 - lot of overlap from OG, but still a good test

Powerprep CAT2 date ??? Q51 V44 770 - lot of overlap from OG, but still a good test

Veritasprep CAT 24/06/2012 Q49 (6 wrong) V46 (5 wrong) 730 - No IR

Princeton CAT 27/06/2012 Q51 (4 wrong) V47 (10 wrongs) 780 - IR-16 (this IR score does not make sense!)

Kaplan CAT 26/06/2012 Q?? V?? 740 - IR 7 (I do not recall and cannot access the breakup now)

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT2 28/06/2012 Q50 (8 wrong) V38 (13 wrong) 730

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT1 01/07/2012 Q51 (4 wrong) V47 (5 wrong) - 780 repeat test with some repeat questions

GMATPrep 1.0 CAT1 date??? Q?? V?? 770 - some repeats from GMATPrep 2.0

MGMAT CAT4 02/07/2012 Q47 (15 wrong) V45 (10 wrong) 740 - IR (1-2)

MGMAT CAT5 06/07/2012 Q51 (5 wrong) V45 (8 wrong) 780 - IR (2-4)

MGMAT CAT6 07/07/2012 Q51 (2 wrong) V42 (8 wrong) 760 - IR (4-5)

Actual GMAT 09/07/2012 Q50 V44 760 - IR - 8, AWA - 5.5 (IR, AWA rcvd. on 25-Jul)

I also tried free tests from GMAT club and they were good help.

MGMAT IR in general is not representative of actual GMAT IR. Actual GMAT IR is not as time consuming as MGMAT IR, otherwise MGMAT CATs are very good for quant and verbal. My last MGMAT CAT score is same as my real GMAT score.

Reflections on and lessons from the prep and tests:

I have good quant skills but after after 10 years of job, I needed to put some effort to prepare for GMAT quant. The GMAT quant is a pretty good test of concepts, application, accuracy and speed. I went through all the Manhattan quant guides completely once and these books are good. I used Abhijit's Guha quant book for Permutation, Combination and some Geometry stuff. I solved all OG 13 and Qunat OG problems with time constraint.

Unlike some other guys, I never found extra time on a quant section of a test. At best, I found the 75 mins adequate to finish the section on time.
MGMAT CAT quant is tough to complete in 75 mins.

I am not a native English speaker, so I needed to put extra effort in Verbal. I started with Sentence Correction and spent most of my verbal prep time in SC. I had 80 - 90 % accuracy in OG, SC Grail problems, MGMAT CATs but to my horror I had 60 % SC accuracy in GMAT prep test, Kaplan test and Princeton test. I learnt my lesson and started to focus on RC and CR as well and I found my holy grail of verbal. After improving on these two areas, I was able to raise my verbal score to 45 in last 3 MGMAT CATs and 44 in the actual GMAT. I am a slow reader but I kind of memorize the passage after one read and it worked well for me. Even if I took 4 - 5 mins for long passages, I needed only 30 t0 40 secs to answer each question. Contrary to popular opinion, I benifited much more from RC and CR with little effort than from SC with lot of effort. My advice to prospective test takers is to analyse your trade offs well. For RC please pay attention to the twisted sentences, because they are good targets to frame a question from. Even if you need to read these sentences twice, do so to understand exactly what the heck they mean. For CR, powerscore book is awesome ! Learn and use the techniques such as , reverse causality, assumption negation, variance test on evaluate, etc.

Some advice for prospective test takers: Understanding timing consideration in GMAT is very important. Learning to quit and guess after a time limit (say 3 mins on a question) is very important. Also focus on the question at hand, do not think about the past question or the remaining questions or anything else for that matter. If you are not focused, you can mistake precent by for percent to, overlook or assume number properties ( interger, odd, even, positive etc.), miss important words in CR like some, most, never, etc. I limited my liquid intake during test not to be distracted by an urge to go to rest room during a section as I had this issue during practise tests. Some people advise drinking glucose, etc but pay attention to how it affects you during the pratice tests and see what works for you. The test does take a toll on your mind when you reach verbal, so build your stamina of enduring this test for 4 hours.

IR experience on real GMAT: As I am a slow reader, I had issues of timing on this section in GMAT Prep or MGMAT but the real GMAT IR was easy. Unfortunately I had 2 MSR prompts ( 6 questions in total from MSR) and the second MSR had big passages on two tabs so I had to guess on the second MSR prompt but I had a good attempt on the rest of the 9 questions.

Finally, thanks to the GMAT Club and other forum members to be a great source of inspiration, information and fun. I hope that I can contribute more here now. I have attached a basic spreadsheet with my plan of study.