Background Info: I first took the exam a year and a half ago, right in the middle of a pretty stressful time. The actual exam was on the day I would've been getting married if I had not broken up with my fiance (boyfriend of 5 years) just 1 month before the 200 guest wedding we had planned. I scheduled it for this day because it was the last possible day available before I was going on a 3 week trip to Europe and I did not want to worry about retaining what I had studied (and yes, this was supposed to be our honeymoon, but since everything was non-refundable I was going dammit!). When I first saw the 690 score I was actually pretty happy. I was aiming for a 700, and this was really close, I wasn't certain I wanted to take it again, but wasn't planning on applying until 2010 anyway so figured I had time to decide. I hadn't picked up the GMAT books again until this Summer, when I started visiting this site more often and was shaken by all the scores in the high 700's. I regretted wasting a whole year I could've been studying for a retake, although the past year after the whole break-up has been one of incredible growth for me on a personal and professional level as I really figured out who I was and what I wanted in life. I decided I've come a long way and should cut myself some slack, but that if I was going to retake I had to make the decision now and commit everything to it.
How I prepared: The first time around I didn't have a clue about what study materials to use. I went down to the bookstore, flipped through a few guides and picked a couple that seemed good. I ended up with Kaplan 800 and McGraw-Hill (which was just awful and way too easy for the actual exam). I liked the Kaplan 800 book, but when I looked through it again this time I had a different impression of it, didn't seem detailed enough on any one topic (also I broke down crying, when I realized this was a 2006-2007 edition. 3 years of my life and still studying for GMAT) I realozed quant was my weak section and also picked up Princeton Review Quantitative book. I didn't even know about the OG12 until about a month before the exam, then got this as well. Overall I studied inconsistently for 3 years before scheduling the actual appointment and buckled down about 2 months before in the midst of everything else that was going on.
This time, based on comments from this site, I got the
MGMAT Number Properties, Equations/Inequalities/VIC's, Word Translations and Sentence Correction books. I found all of these to be very good, although I didn't fully read the Sentence Correction guide. I was running out of time and math was still my weaker area. Since it had been so long since I took the exam the first time, I was pretty much starting over. I also signed up for the Knewton course, which I was not too impressed with and will be requesting a refund due to their 50 point guarantee. I was scoring between 44 and 45 on the quant on each of the 5 practice tests I took with
MGMAT (I didn't do the verbal) and got a 690 on the first GMAT prep test and 710 on the second. I didn't feel 100% confident going into the exam, but I felt I had learned a lot from the
MGMAT books and definitely had the math down better than the first time I took it. I was only hoping for a 45 in the quantitative anyway since i knew my verbal score would be good enough to put me over the 700 mark if I got Q45 and didn't think I would ever be able to achieve the Q49-51 score I see others get here. The last few weeks of prep I finally discovered what I think I had been doing wrong all along and wished I had just a few more weeks to really solidify those concepts and take more practice exams.
My lessons learned a little too late:-Do not avoid concepts that are difficult or just not interesting to you; do more of these than any other type of problem. I was spending more quality time on concepts I knew how to do pretty well or just enjoyed doing better and kind of glazed over the ones that made me uncomfortable. I needed to get comfortable with them
-Don't start with the difficult questions. I was so intimidated by the
GMAT club tests at first that I felt like giving up, after learning the basics i came back to them and felt better and learned more from them.
I honestly don't know what happened. As i was taking the quantitative section, I felt like I was doing much better than I did the first time I took it. I guess I must have been getting a lot of questions wrong because the difficulty didn't seem that intense to me. There was only one I wasn't really sure about in the first 10 questions. So I either made a lot of careless errors, or screwed up majorly in the middle or the end. I did start to feel some time pressure in the middle and guessed on a few long, complicated word problems I was afraid would take me too long to solve correctly. I was back on track with time and started to ease up a bit towards the end, but that may have already been too late.
I felt the verbal section was more difficult than last time, especially the critical reasoning and RC passages. I usually didn't have to give those a second thought, but this time there were a few that seemed to have equally correct answers. I was overanalyzing too much and was running short on time here as well. I never once came even close to using all the time for verbal on a practice exam, but since this was the real thing I spent way too long trying to overcome my lack of confidence that this answer was correct. I also drank waaay too much coffee in the morning and during the breaks, which caught up with me on the verbal section and made me feel jittery. I don't know why I decided that was a good idea, I think I was so afraid of losing stamina that I wanted to make sure I was alert and on top of my timing. This definately backfired.
So, What Now?I am still deciding whether to give the GMAT one more shot, moving all applications to R2 or to accept this for what it is and move on. The initial disappointment after seeing my score had actually gone down is still lingering. If the 690 score was balanced, I don't think it would bother me so much, but as it stands on my official report I have a score from May 2009 (690: Q41-58%, V42-95%) and Oct 2010 (680: Q42-61%, V40-89%). I don't even know which would be considered the better score, since its at least a bit more balanced the second time.
If I did decide to take it again, the only schools I would really be pushing back is Kellogg and Duke, since those were the only ones I was planning to apply to in R1 anyway. The others (Stanford, Berkeley, and Chicago) I was always planning for R2. I have Kellogg's and most of Duke's application finished and I think my essays are really quite good. I will probably use a lot of this content for my other applications so not expecting them to take as long to put together, and think I can manage the time to continue studying and take the exam again before R2 deadlines, just don't know if I should hold back two completed applications for it. I will only report my scores if I do better. As an honest assessment I think I have excellent work experience, excellent gpa, really good EC's and essay stories, good recommendations and tend to interview very well, I feel if there was one reason for not getting an acceptance it would be the GMAT score. Math is not prominent in my background or too impressive on my transcripts, even with a high gpa, so I see this as a huge hole in my application. Any advice from the wonderful gmat club members is always appreciated!
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07 Oct 2010, 12:57
