Hi,
It was not an easy decision for me to sit for GMAT. But once I took the decision, I focussed all my energies towards this goal. Started with some research on GMAT by browsing through varipus online forums. Found out that
GMAT OG is the best to start with. It mainly requirs basic elementary mathematics and grammer skills.
I started with giving the free practice test and scored 630 something. That meant I had a lot of work to do. My initial target was 700 plus score, preferably in 720s. Learnt basic tricks on mathematics skills and was improving pn that front. But my grammer was still poor and not improving. I was targetting questions based on hit and trial and was not having even 50% success rate. Then I went in for sentence correction guide from
MGMAT. The biggest advantage with it was 6 free mock tests which helped me a lot. As I started learning nuances of grammer, my scored started to improve considerably. Starting with 640, I scored 740 in my last mock test and I was confident that I would score near my target on actual test, unless I goof up something big. I was able to keep my calm during test and managed to score 750.
Strategies which I followed:
- Be honest with your preparation. Analyze the failures and learn from it
- Always stick to time and complete the test. Do not CHEAT. This will help in increasing the speed.
- I worked with some passages which were quite lengthy. Though in GMAT, normally short passages are seen, but answering questions for really long passages helped me a lot
- I distributed the total time for questions in chunk. Like first 10 questions in x min and so on. As it is expected that in the beginning the difficulty level is low, try to complete those faster. Practice this strategy in couple of mock tests. This way I had most of the time for difficult questions
- Do not try to spend much time on any single question. Set a maximum time you want to devote to any particular question. If the question is not solved, make a intelligent quess and move on.
What I felt was that GMAT is not about answering questions. WIth little practise, many of us will be able to solve GMAT questions without any problem. It is the time pressure which adds to this. If you get stuck on any question, do not waste time.