Hi Everyone,
Thanks a lot for your considerate feedback. My nerves are settling after three days of taking the test and I think I'm settling on the decision not to retake, at least for the time being. My next step, like some of you suggest, is to start doing research and gathering information about different schools regarding admissions, scholarships, and suitability. After that, I hope to get inspired by a few schools and start drawing up my application.
More about my background: My undergrad is degree is in engineering, so it's as quantitative as it gets. I have three years of experience working as an expat in an Asian country, and other than being 'international' I don't think adcoms will consider the experience particularly interesting.
Anyways, I want to contact some 3rd-party recruiters who help with MBA admissions for a living and get them to judge my case. Maybe it's against the website rules, but I'd like to know if there are some good agencies.
And, I guess I owe you a DEBRIEF:
STARTED study March 24, TEST date June 8.
I was planning to write a GMAT ever since I graduated three years ago. I studied for it for about a month in 07 but I canceled because of personal issues. Finally this March I found myself free and bored with a regular, though not light, work schedule, so I decided to start GMAT study.
My local bookstore was limited: I saw only
Official Guide, Princeton Review's Cracking the GMAT, and some KAPLAN books. Right away I bought
OG and PR. I realized PR is a kind of strategy book, so I started reading it meticulously with a pencil and notebook in hand.
PR CRACKING THE GMAT - APRIL:
My first notes were March 24 so that's when I started. I remember I took it easy that month, not intensive study by any means. I read the PR slowly and did the sample exercises as I went. As I went through this book I got the feeling that the material is too easy to be true, but having natural tendency to trip over fundamentals (which I in fact did to a small degree at actual the test), I decided to still pay attention. Finally at the end of April I decided I did enough background research and did the Warm up Test, Verbal Bin 2 and 3, and Math Bin 3 and 4 in the Cracking the GMAT. My scores were 17/20, 23/27, 22/26, 23/26, 20/26 respectively. The scores spurred me to gear up more, but I could tell that I'm easily in top 20%.
The book is good because it's very easy to read and it gives you a down-to-earth perspective on the test. The tone of the book is somehow positive. If I didn't learn the math stuff a few times over in my life I wouldn't be confident learning math only from this book. However, given my quant background the combination of PR and internet was perfectly sufficient to fully refresh the required math knowledge. Also, the scope of the questions was somewhat limited, but my impression is that they mimic the actual GMAT questions quite well.
For the verbal part, I learned the basic tips like comparing answer choices to get the clue about the right answer. This is crucial I think for sentence correction. For reading comprehension, my strategy is to read the whole damn article word by word and then answer questions. On the actual test I did this for all three passages, and when answering the relevant questions I went to back to the article for every question, and still I had time. For critical reasoning my answering techniques were quite holistic (either I get it or I don't), except of course I always read every single answer choice every time. PR gave me good advice here in teaching me to eliminate answers that sound too general, too specific, or too offensive or derogatory - this is a great tip.
OG GMAT REVIEW 2010 - MAY:
Took the diagnostic right away on May 9, scored 44/48 on quant, 48/52 on verbal. After the quant I took GMAT Prep first practice ten and shocked myself by scoring 770. If I could have booked GMAT the next day I would've done it, but the test center in my town is very busy so I had to book in a month. I managed to squeeze an early booking on June 8th, and figured I'd aim for 780.
Until this point I wasn't visiting forums much but when I realized I scored 770 I started googling GMAT discussions up because I wanted to find out if GMAT Prep software gives you reliable estimate -770 seemed too good to be true. That's when I discovered gmatclub website
For the rest of the month I just attacked the 807 sample questions in
OG. I didn't do all of them, only the last about 40% for each of the five sections. My schedule was very routine, Monday to Saturday I averaged about 30-40 questions a day, Sunday I rested. Every time I do a batch I checked my answers and paid special attention to questions I got wrong. I did a good job of memorizing quite separately all the difficult math problems. In the end, I think I answered about 100 questions wrong out of 1000, many of them simple lapses of concentration.
May 29 I did the other GMAT prep test and I got 770 again. My quant score fell from 50 to 49, my verbal score rose from 44 to 47 compared to the first prep test.
After the 2nd practice test I started to wind down my study intensity. I shifted focus from shelling out sample questions to paying attention to math concepts for the toughest questions - all that tricky probability, number theory, inequalities etc. I looked for advanced material on the net and came across jumbotests and 4gmat. I didn't pay anything but did the free questions - jumbotests was so ridiculously hard I concluded the website is a scam that tries to make you purchase their ebooks by destroying your test-taking confidence with unreasonably hard free online questions. 4gmat was a little better, but in retrospect, considering my real gmat score fell because of worse quant performance, I think I would've been better off if I remained ignorant of those websites and content with my quant skill. Instead I had a surge of panic that lasted about three days about one week before the real test.
The whole time I never went to an academy or took a GMAT course of any kind. Only self study.
Oh, also I bought KAPLAN advanced book. I didn't even finish 20% of samples there, I just meddled with their critical reasoning questions because at some point my practice was showing a weakness in critical reasoning. I didn't have time to do the whole book. Also, the questions I saw there seemed not to mimic GMAT questions extremely well.
AWA: Throughout my study I did a total of about 20 practice essays. I wrote them all within half an hour, many times during short breaks at work. At the beginning I created my own loose template and modified it as my practice taught me.
TEST DAY AND DAY BEFORE:
Had a half day off work before the test and the morning of the test off as well. I slept about 6 hours and my girlfriend showed up at the tests center without telling me. I had a tiramizu and apple juice at the starbucks downstairs, then went up to the room, registered and started writing the test. No complaint about the noise, but the notepad surprised me. The notepad is much bigger than I thought, It has maybe 5 sheets spiraled together and each sheet is larger than A4. I was confused before the test about whether I get an erasable pad (which I imagined to be some kind of whiteboard) or an actual notepad with a couple of pages. It turns out you get both in one. Each page of the pad is erasable, each page is a sheet sleeved into transparent erasable plastic. What annoyed me too was that the square grid on every page was too bold.
I don't have my AWA scores yet but I did between 5 and 6 I think. My essays were well structured but I was afraid I wrote a bit too short, maybe 450 to 500 words on one of the essays.
As I said before, I stumbled on quant at the beginning, totally unexpected mind block on an easy question. I got rattled a bit and although I came back and did great anyways, I'm sure my tactics could have been much better. I just wasn't feeling it like I usually do.
Verbal was also good. Actually during my second break I tried to drink the cold coffee I brought in my bag (in the locker) but the test center lady said I can only drink the water from the cooler. This angered me a little because I thought I read on GMAT website that I can have food that I bring over the break. However, I didn't push the issue and just settled on water. Towards the end of verbal, my eyes and brain were getting somewhat numb but I can't say it would have been any better had I had coffee.
In terms of life-study balance, well, it wasn't that balanced. I was tired and stressed the whole month. Prior to my study period I was having it quite easy, and when I have too much free time I tend to get lazy. Therefore, I thought working and studying at the same time will push me into some kind of battle mode. I had very little free time except on Sundays, but this didn't matter because even when I had free time I couldn't stop thinking about how I have to study for GMAT. Another words, I was always thinking about GMAT.
The good thing was my girlfriend was totally supportive. She cleaned my room and did some of my chores, plus she was 100 emotionally behind it all. This helped a lot. It's very important to have someone close to you support you hundred percent - if your parents or friends are not pushing you, find someone who will.
I guess that's it. Hope you get some insights from my experience and feel free to share your thoughts.
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Updated on: 16 Nov 2010, 17:10
