Disclaimer: I scored very well on the GMAT, but it's mostly due to my verbal. I didn't study for verbal. I've always paid super close attention to grammar and sentence structure, and that--combined with good fortune--really helped. Nonetheless, I’ll share some preparation principles I learned that helped me to score well and drastically improve my quant score:
SIGN UP FOR THE GMAT NOW. DON’T WAIT TO BE “LESS BUSY.” You won’t be.
GET A BENCHMARK SCORE ASAP.
MAKE STUDYING YOUR PRIORITY. Easier said than done.
FIND A STUDY TOOL THAT WORKS FOR YOU.
CALM YOUR MIND. Meditation, prayer, whatever works for you.
My road to the GMAT began when a friend said, “Take it now; life is only going to get busier as it goes on.” Holy cannoli! That obvious fact hit me like a ton of bricks, and I signed up for the GMAT that night, giving myself about 8 weeks to study.
I took an official GMAT practice test immediately, which informed my decision of how to spend my study time. I got Q34(35%), V41(93%), a 620. I knew my time should be spent on Quant. I totally excluded Verbal from my study.
I studied very little for three weeks after signing up because it wasn’t my priority. Work, life, everything got in the way. Then I started freaking out about the lack of time to study and realized I needed to change. I immediately began searching for a good online study program.
I knew my criteria: self-paced, online, lots of practice questions, simple explanations, no textbooks, decent UX, and inexpensive. A friend who took the GRE told me about
Magoosh, so I checked it out online and did some other research of my own. I saw
TargetTestPrep (
TTP), which was highly rated, met all of my study criteria and was relatively inexpensive ($150 for one month, which is all I needed). I signed up for their 5-day trial for $1 and really liked it. I immediately received LinkedIn requests from Jeff and Scott (
TTP founders), and Jeff texted me to set up a phone call. I loved that. I asked him some general questions about the GMAT, one or two questions about
TTP, a question about
Magoosh, and told him I was sold and I’d subscribe for a month.
TTP ended up being the best help for me. I loved that I could blaze through the chapter tests to gauge my knowledge in each area (while feeling like I was being kicked in the face repeatedly-seriously, do I not know how to do 7th-grade math? Apparently not). The scoring and explanations and lesson breakdowns were SUPER easy to understand and made it easy to study only what I needed to study. It eliminated wasted time-which was good since I had very little of it.
I took another practice GMAT a week before my actual exam. I got a 720 with Q47, V42. Woo! But my goal was 750, so I wanted to improve my quant a little more. The last day before the exam I practiced AWA for a couple of hours and took a rest from the quant. I never studied for verbal or IR.
This’ll be anti-climactic, but I’m skipping to the end. I got my official scores last week: 770 overall, Q47 (67%), V51(99%), IR 6 (67%), AWA 5.0 (59%). Verbal obviously caused my high overall score, not my quant. Nonetheless,
TTP helped me jump 13 points on quant in one month of real studying (averaging ~4-6 hrs/day). And because I didn’t study for verbal, all I can vouch for is
TTP. Prayer, meditation, reading religious text, and other ways of keeping my mind clear and free from fear and nervousness were also invaluable. I fully believe in God and divine assistance, so that's just a thought. I was grateful to have a clear mind going into the exam.
Good luck, hope you crush it!
, than any meaningful suggestions/motivations for students..
Sorry for being blunt but you joined GMAT Club today itself and stayed for half an hour to do the marketing...