Scored a 760 day before, and a large chunk of gratitude goes out to all the folks who made Gmatclub such a great place - it has been my single largest source of information and inspiration throughout the journey, and well, thanks, guys.
First off, let me tell you that the GMAT is not a monster, a beast or the seven labors of Hercules.
It is a standardized test. Not only can it be beaten with the right attitude and approach, but you can come out unharmed, un-burnt out, happier.
Do not make the GMAT your life, your arch enemy, your bête noire. I repeat, it is a mere standardised test. You…are human (most probably).
Making it your “all” amplifies its importance in your life and you start obsessing over it. Getting all fired up and angry helps you study harder, study more, dream and day dream increasingly more of scoring a humongous score. You book a date, you go to the exam with your energy bars and energy drinks. Your planning is perfect – not only have you broken down your quant and verbal timings, you even have a schedule for what you’re going to do in the break. You keep telling yourself that you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna make it to the big leagues, that you’re prepared to take the aforementioned beast down.
If you are like most people, this is what happens to you when the exam starts. You start solving – you either rush through the earlier questions or go slow on them since they’re the most important. Somewhere along the way, and more often than not during the first few minutes of Quant o Verbal, you get a bogey question. A question you’re not sure of. You narrow down the answer choices to a few, and then … you’re stuck. It’s a trap. You inwardly curse yourself for not putting enough effort into P&C, or Parallelism, or whatever. This is where you start to unravel. It seems best to guess and move on, but the GMAT Beater hat you are, you decide to spend a little more time. Every 3 seconds you glance at the stopwatch, you mentally beat yourself down, and more often than not you’re forced to guess and move on – something you should’ve done anyway. The next question is about something you know, you solve it quickly… but wait.. was that too easy? Did you just drop down to a lower level? Aargh. Okay, you breathe deep, try to stabilise yourself , trying to achieve the Zen like state of control or something. Of course, you’re beating yourself down even further at this time, as you try to take back control . And thus you carry on, no longer the manly man or the empowered woman. Tentative, prodding, doubting. Fear creeps up on you, your façade of confidence shaking. You hate yourself, you hate the “beast”, you read and reread questions, double guess your answers, waste your time ruling out options you instinctively know are incorrect. And then, you’re almost out of time. You blaze through the rest of the questions, rush to the loo, splash your face with water, and consume glucose, caffeine, taurine, water etc. As you complete the formalities prior to the next section, your hands are stable but your mind is shaking. You feel fatigued, you want out, you hate yourself for letting yourself, your family, your friends, Oprah etc down. But the hours of day dreaming and ego-investing into a high gmat score have spawned a black beast inside your heart (nee brain) that won’t let you quit. Now you feel sadness, a sense of loss,…shame, perhaps? Meanwhile the clock is still ticking.And the brain is fatigued, of course. You’re also probably wondering when the caffeine or glucose will hit your bloodstream and you’ll become fresh again. You start the next section, but the same cycle follows. And the caffeine hit never comes. Or it comes and goes but you never know.
After everything is done, the gmat asks you background questions. You’re close to getting the metaphorical fruit of your labours. You hesitate a moment at the cancel test scores button… but then you click on the report button. You fear, and yet, you hope for a miracle. An 800, or in the very least a 750. You bargain with God as the scores are processing. You deserve a miracle because you’re a special snowflake, you’ve set ambitious goals, you’ve worked hard, you’ve “visualised” the goals (aka day dreaming), you “want” it badly, you’ve personalised the fight….And then the scores come and its no miracle. You take your broken heart (or may I propose, broken ego) back home and cry, or take it like a man or something. Either way, you’re shattered. You come back to gmatclub for inspiration, for people who suddenly seem like demi gods and their 780 debriefs. You vow, someday, to beat the beast. To live, to fight another day. Let me tell you something. The exam isn’t really the beast. Its something else.
To quote someone I admire, “By the time most people realize that the fears shackling them to a mediocre existence are creations of their own diseased minds – it’s already too late.
Be sharp, work smart, focus on the basics first, figure out your weaknesses, close them down. Even when you’re done preparing, you will never be 100% confident of getting the score you desire… embrace it. To be reasonable confident in your abilities is not a bad thing. Don’t try to be a perfectionist, don’t try to gun for an 800…don’t try to control everything .So long as you have a reasonably good idea of how you’re going to approach each section, you should do well. Especially if you want a score in excess of 730+. There is a certain amount of luck that can swing it either way and at scores of 730+ this just gets more pronounced.
Background –
Part of this topic already chronicles the start of my prep – I had a bad accident 2 days before the exam and broke a few bones so had to go to the exam in crutches. Finished the exam, scored 700, finished an entire beer tower.
About three weeks ago, read 2X2 Matrix’s debrief, soul searched, set a date 15 days in the future.
My quant was excellent, and I am a good standardized test taker. My English is okay too, however I had a little difficulty with SC.
Materials used –
1)
OG 12 /13
2)
MGMAT books – Sentence correction is beautiful, number properties is sexy, CR and the rest of Quant is very good, RC and AWA+IR are, for lack of a better word, *meh*.
3) The collection 700-800 level questions for SC, CR, DS. The ones for SC and CR are most helpful ,with explanations.
Strategies –
A lot of good debriefs out there – one of the best for strategies is this -
770-q50-v45-3-weeks-prep-journal-advice-materials-155273.html 2X2 Matrix.
Only thing I’d like to add , it does help to keep an
error log……for a while. For example, when I started out with SC, I tried to identify relevant categories in each of these – for example, parallelism, SV, subjunctive etc. Took a LOT of time in the beginning, but after a certain point, it got internalized. I no longer had to consciously classify, it happened of its own accord. This is when I stopped logging errors in SC(marginal returns and whatnot, although did still measure certain parameters such as accuracy and time per question.
If making an
error log is too tedious or boring for you, at least measure the accuracy every time you do a set or topic. I kid you not, constant measurement brought about the single largest improvement after every plateau.
Exam Day –
It went like it did for most people. Signed in, wrote the essay, IR’d my way to the break, drank some water and orange juice, half a banana, back in, quant, back out, water + orange juice + banana, verbal, score!
I was averaging around 60 minutes for 37 Quant questions on prep tests, so I consciously rechecked every answer before submitting. Not recommended unless you have the same luxury of extra time and make a similarly large number of silly errors.
That’s all for now, there are a couple other things that I’d like to add, but maybe another day.
Till then, good luck.
May the force be with you.
Sand Tiger.
*********
My name is Sand tiger.
My life is okay, I guess. Nothing great. Above average intellect, okay-ish English, working in one of the better IT companies. Decent pay, fairly long hours, boring work. Heavy smoker, since office started 2 years ago. Also put on a fair amount of weight.
Today was my last smoke. Tomorrow I quit work, with a notice of 3 months afterward. I have a girlfriend (irrelevant?).
Anyway, I was gonna write this on a private blog, but I've been lurking around Gmatclub for so long, that I thought, I'll write here. I've been mentally mastur... enough as it is.
I plan to give the GMAT on the 39th day from tomorrow - that's May the 31st, give or take. Also, along the way, I plan to go from 10 kilos overweight to 4 kilos over. TOEFL percentile is ~99 with perfect scores in 3 out of 4 categories, so that's taken care of. I know nothing of the GMAT, plan to start tomorrow.
My GMAT Aim is 770.
Yes, with 39 days of study and full time office ~ 14 hours a day.
close
Updated on: 01 Aug 2013, 23:13
uh. 
