Writing too much and in detail tends to drain people's energy, so this post will not appear like a story. I gave my first GMAT last December and bombed it; I don't blame myself as I didn't study for longer than 2 weeks and I gave it more for accompanying a friend to ace his GMAT than for any other reason. I scored only a 560 on it.
Just two months back, around 1st of August, I started my preparation for my second shot at the GMAT with the intention of going to business school in 2017. I quit my job at an MNC after 4 years of work so that I could dedicate my entire time to preparation. I guess that helped very much. Not to brag, but I've always had an above-average IQ, clearing and acing two tests: the International High-IQ Society test (recently) and the GRE (a few years back with a score of 324). But the GMAT was a truly different experience. I thought I'd score well the first time around, but apparently didn't! The score yanked me back to earth and instigated a lot of humility in me. What they say about not getting in over your head is absolutely spot-on if you're preparing for standardized tests after years of working.
The
GMAT OG, '15 or '16, is like a bible for easy and medium-level questions (i.e. sub-600 and 600-700 level q's). I ran marathon sessions of 3-4 hours to complete all sections of '15 in 2 weeks. There's a common misconception among Indians that they're so good at quants that they need little preparation for it; they couldn't be more wrong. Quant prep is as important as verbal at any phase during your prep. I'd purchased
OG Verbal '16 for supplementary verbal prep. The orange-coloured book is like vitamin-c for your RC and CR preps as the questions are pretty standard. After doing that for another week, I used the
Magoosh question bank (my friend had bought the course recently and hadn't used it, so I decided to make use of it). I was sweetly surprised by the standard of the quant questions on
Magoosh; some of them were real brain-crackers. People, DS questions on the
Magoosh will go a long way in helping your accuracy on the actual test. I want to thank Mike McGarry for teaching me probability & combinatorics (my two toughest topics) in a way that I've never been taught before. The verbal questions are also pretty good, but the CR questions can get long and hard if you're not on adaptive mode. The video explanations are extensively useful if you can understand the concept, rather than just the question itself. During the last 2 weeks of my prep, I focused on 800-Kaplan, a collection of some pretty challenging questions. Other resources used include 700 SC questions and Bunuel's DS questions (didn't use them except for my weak areas) picked from GMATClub Downloads. Chineseburned FTW (!) for AWA; I followed the format with keywords diligently.
What helped me most in terms of resources were the mock tests. I bought the 7-test collection from Veritas Prep (scores of 630, 710, 700, 760 and 710 from tests 1-5; I could finish only 5 of these), did the two GMAT Prep tests (scores of 710 and 720), the Manhattan Free Test (710), the Kaplan Free Test (640) and the
GMAT Club Test (680). Getting acclimatized to the real test conditions is very crucial for mental stamina.
Test Day: I am a perennially late person; it didn't change much since I got to the test centre just 10 minutes prior to the start time. AWA started brilliantly and I finished with 2 minutes left on the clock. IR went haywire since I felt I got 80% of the last 5 questions wrong. I wasn't too fazed by it though; I realized the next two sections are what really matter. I took the 8-minute break (please keep a tab on the time you take as it can run fairly quickly) and came back refreshed after a kit-kat. Quants started off pretty okay I guess. I was paying close attention to every question and saw I got at least 9 of the first 10 right (Bunuel's analysis of getting first 10 q's is amazing and I think it works!). Breezed through 10-15 and things got hard, really hard. I couldn't waste time so I made guesses and moved on. I may have got only 2-3 of the last 5 questions right. Took the break again and started verbal. It's important to get SC q's right so that it gives you leeway to guess on CR's and RC's. Accuracy is very important and again I made sure to work harder on the first 10. Finished the test and my heart was racing (as does with most people). My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when I saw 680 (Q48, V35).
Resources Used:
GMAT OG '15, GMAT Verbal '16,
Magoosh Question Bank, Kaplan-800 and some GMATClub downloads.
Important Tips:
- Remember to love the GMAT, rather than thinking of it as a burden. Don't think of and use words like 'crushing', 'acing' or 'beating' the GMAT; you're not fighting a battle here, you're enduring a journey. But then again, this was my attitude - others may think differently.
- Practice tests are a MUST for acquiring test-day stamina and scoring well.
- If you're studying after a couple of years, it's very crucial to start with the basics; do a course.
- Do quants and verbal with the same vigour and seriousness, both scores are important.
- Finishing the quant section is absolutely compulsory (even if you have to guess the last few q's), but accuracy is more important on the verbal (even if you miss a few q's, it's the same result as getting them wrong). This has been proven.
- Also, it's more important to review questions and learn concepts during your prep than rote, continuous and voluminous problem-solving.
- Keep your head down and trust yourself to do well, things will fall in place.