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28 Jan 2015, 19:52
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My tryst with GMAT
It was a fine Monday morning. Never in my life, had I been that nervous or scared about anything, let
alone a test. Never in my life had the stakes been that high. Well the stakes were very high back when I
appeared for my high school public examination, but I was too young to understand the gravity of it all
back then, in that the cumulative scores from a series of high school tests were going to decide my entry
into a college, and supposedly so, "My future".
But that day, September the 2nd, 2013 this GMAT I was going take, was easily the most important single
academic pursuit of my life. One may wonder, what's really the big deal? It's only a standardized test.
Besides, you could always retake it for a fee, $250 to be precise. It's not just the test which made it so
important. It was everything else. To begin with, the sheer amount of time and money I had invested
into it. All that would not have mattered, had I taken it during my college days, when I had nothing to
lose and everything to gain. But now, I have begun my career as an automation engineer and have
accumulated two years of core engineering experience already. So I had taken a break from that job, I
had been salary-less for the past 5 months and all this while, the whole world knew, that I was studying
for the mighty GMAT. And that wasn't a lie. Because I did prepare. And all I did was prepare.
To begin with, I had invested in private GMAT classes attending their tutoring for 3 hours a day, for a
month. They gave me their own study material, and every day after attending the classes I diligently
worked out that corresponding topic from their work books, which actually took hours, sometimes days
to complete. Apart from that, in the 5 months time, I had read and solved through some 15 of the best
GMAT books available in the market, including the Official Guide for GMAT review, Official guide for
GMAT quantitative review and the Official Guide for GMAT Verbal review, which were all from the
makers of the tests themselves and which contained hundreds of actual questions from earlier GMATs.
And on top of that, I had paid for and taken a dozen practice examinations from leading online
providers which gave me their own evaluations. I could not manage more than 680/800 in any of these
tests. Apart from the fact that each "mock test" replicates the actual GMAT, an excruciating 3 hour
marathon, the difficulty of the questions keep raising as you keep getting them right, just as it does, in
the GMAT. I even practised speed reading with a software called "7speed reading", which helps you
with overcoming basic reading limitations such as vocalization and word-by-word progression.
As planned, I carried a relaxed attitude into the penultimate day of the exam, scoring 720 on 800 with
the official GMAT simulator, which I reserved for that day. Even that wasn't enough with the kind of
preparation I put in, considering that I'd be competing with people from my country, who score
notoriously high in the GMAT, way above the world average.
On the D-day, I wake up, get ready, check my vitals and my passport, which are pretty much all I would
need to appear for the exam, and not to mention some snacks, which I'd be allowed in the break. I check
in half an hour before my appointment and I wait there to be biometrically verified and to be let into the
exam. The actual exam hall, other than the fact that it has a flight control centre style glass window
projection inside it, to monitor the candidates, looked only like an internet cafe with separate cubicles. Except only that people come in to do some very serious business , taking their first step towards top
notch business education.
And so I am checked in, allotted a seat and logged into a computer. I couldn't right dive into the test
because there were some terms and conditions that I needed to accept first. After Painstakingly reading
through them, I go into my first section of the exam, called Analytical Writing Assessment or the AWA.
Like the rest of the GMAT, which is full of multiple choice questions, including critical reasoning,
sentence correction and reading comprehension, which read like puzzles, and change difficulty
depending on your performance, the AWA is a boring case study, for which one has to comment on how
well the given argument is constructed, how it can be made more air-tight, and give a conclusion.
Because the score of the AWA is on a scale of 0 to 6, which does not interfere with the main score on
800, I didn't put in much preparation. I regretted this so much, and I thought I would have to retake the
test because as the clock kept ticking, despite my decent typing speed, I wasn't able to complete it and
worse, I didn't have time enough to click the "Submit" button. Would I be even eligible to apply with a
zero on the AWA? All that I had written had gone to waste. Or so I thought. After asking supervisor, I
came to know that whatever I typed was already recorded and would be submitted at the end of the
session. Big relief!
Took my break, and signed in for the Quantitative section. The clock ticking down from 75 minutes. My
sailing wasn't smooth. In the beginning of the quant section, I completed the questions much faster than
the two minute average that I had in mind. But as the questions progressed, and I kept getting them
right, so did the difficulty. Tough questions were a good thing because it is a rough indicator that you're
in the higher bracket of performance and so will your score. But such questions would stress you out
and eat up your time. And so they did. So much so, that at the end of the Quants section, I had 5 tough
questions left to complete in the last 5 minutes. A near impossibility I knew, from all my experience
having taken the mock tests. Just as I had planned for emergencies like this, I blind guessed a couple of
questions and bought myself some time. I knew that would affect my score, but better that than a time
penalty.
Time for some English. Unlike the Americans, Indians have no problem whatsoever with the Quants,
which is nothing but some twisted school math. But for the Verbal, you couldn't just practice yourself to
perfection and speed, only to a certain extent. For the sentence correction(SC), you need to have read a
lot of literature before, in order to spot errors and choose from the 5 alternative structures. Sometimes,
there might not be any error in all of them, just awkward structures. The questions are so tricky that the
wrong choices are the ones that will always sound so correct when read. And then there is Critical
Reasoning(CR), in which an argument is provided and you are supposed to identify which one of the 5
choices does the said job of "Weakening the Argument", "Strengthening the Argument" and so on. And
then there is Reading Comprehension(RC), the daddy of them all. Huge and complex passages, typically
consisting 350 to 600 words, on any topic ranging from Stem cell therapy to an Anthropology
commentary, would put your patience and composure to the limits. The toughest thing was to complete
all of it on time. Because if you don't finish all the questions within the given time, there's a time
penalty. I started with the Verbal and unlike Math, you can't zip through the initial questions no matter how
proficient you were. You still have to read the arguments and passages, which always took some time.
Having done that, progress was painfully slow, or so it seemed may be because I was suffering from
more than hours of mental exhaustion. Nonetheless, I completed the verbal without sacrificing any
questions. But all the while, on the back of my mind, it was disturbing, knowing that you could never
know for sure in verbal, your answers and their difficulty level, because it's not numbers and variables
you finally arrive at, to verify with the choices and move on; and besides all questions took more or less
the same time.
After completing the test, one more laborious endeavour that you are required to undertake, is the
selection of business schools. Before looking at the score, you need to choose, whether or not to report
the score in the first place, and if so, which b-schools to report to. The entire score reporting process
was shaky and half-minded. Because I had already prepared a list of schools before hand, I could
manage to tick them off, despite the fact that my heart was beating so loud that I couldn't really
concentrate. And finally, the moment of truth. 760 on 800! 99th percentile. But what really puzzled me
was that, I had secured 89th percentile in Quants and 96th percentile in Verbal, but an overall in the
99th percentile. Only later did I realize that it was the combination of good scores in both of the sections
that really mattered. And good for me, the native speakers are generally very good at Verbal and Verbal
only; and the non-native speakers excelled in the Quants, but struggled with Verbal. While I considered
myself very lucky, achieving that scoring despite some failings and confusions at the test, people seemed
surprisingly not surprised. They told me it was eventual that all my hard work would lead up to this and
that their real surprise came when they saw me slog for hours, burning my midnight oil. I was always
considered an intelligent boy who underperformed. I never studied hard my academic scores were only
average in college and just above in school. Even I had a burning curiosity buried deep within me for a
long time. If I put some effort, could I go toe to toe with the academic toppers. Am I even capable of
such studiousness. I never knew. Until now! Thanks to GMAT and to the people behind it who supported
me through this beautiful and fruitful journey.
It was a fine Monday morning. Never in my life, had I been that nervous or scared about anything, let
alone a test. Never in my life had the stakes been that high. Well the stakes were very high back when I
appeared for my high school public examination, but I was too young to understand the gravity of it all
back then, in that the cumulative scores from a series of high school tests were going to decide my entry
into a college, and supposedly so, "My future".
But that day, September the 2nd, 2013 this GMAT I was going take, was easily the most important single
academic pursuit of my life. One may wonder, what's really the big deal? It's only a standardized test.
Besides, you could always retake it for a fee, $250 to be precise. It's not just the test which made it so
important. It was everything else. To begin with, the sheer amount of time and money I had invested
into it. All that would not have mattered, had I taken it during my college days, when I had nothing to
lose and everything to gain. But now, I have begun my career as an automation engineer and have
accumulated two years of core engineering experience already. So I had taken a break from that job, I
had been salary-less for the past 5 months and all this while, the whole world knew, that I was studying
for the mighty GMAT. And that wasn't a lie. Because I did prepare. And all I did was prepare.
To begin with, I had invested in private GMAT classes attending their tutoring for 3 hours a day, for a
month. They gave me their own study material, and every day after attending the classes I diligently
worked out that corresponding topic from their work books, which actually took hours, sometimes days
to complete. Apart from that, in the 5 months time, I had read and solved through some 15 of the best
GMAT books available in the market, including the Official Guide for GMAT review, Official guide for
GMAT quantitative review and the Official Guide for GMAT Verbal review, which were all from the
makers of the tests themselves and which contained hundreds of actual questions from earlier GMATs.
And on top of that, I had paid for and taken a dozen practice examinations from leading online
providers which gave me their own evaluations. I could not manage more than 680/800 in any of these
tests. Apart from the fact that each "mock test" replicates the actual GMAT, an excruciating 3 hour
marathon, the difficulty of the questions keep raising as you keep getting them right, just as it does, in
the GMAT. I even practised speed reading with a software called "7speed reading", which helps you
with overcoming basic reading limitations such as vocalization and word-by-word progression.
As planned, I carried a relaxed attitude into the penultimate day of the exam, scoring 720 on 800 with
the official GMAT simulator, which I reserved for that day. Even that wasn't enough with the kind of
preparation I put in, considering that I'd be competing with people from my country, who score
notoriously high in the GMAT, way above the world average.
On the D-day, I wake up, get ready, check my vitals and my passport, which are pretty much all I would
need to appear for the exam, and not to mention some snacks, which I'd be allowed in the break. I check
in half an hour before my appointment and I wait there to be biometrically verified and to be let into the
exam. The actual exam hall, other than the fact that it has a flight control centre style glass window
projection inside it, to monitor the candidates, looked only like an internet cafe with separate cubicles. Except only that people come in to do some very serious business , taking their first step towards top
notch business education.
And so I am checked in, allotted a seat and logged into a computer. I couldn't right dive into the test
because there were some terms and conditions that I needed to accept first. After Painstakingly reading
through them, I go into my first section of the exam, called Analytical Writing Assessment or the AWA.
Like the rest of the GMAT, which is full of multiple choice questions, including critical reasoning,
sentence correction and reading comprehension, which read like puzzles, and change difficulty
depending on your performance, the AWA is a boring case study, for which one has to comment on how
well the given argument is constructed, how it can be made more air-tight, and give a conclusion.
Because the score of the AWA is on a scale of 0 to 6, which does not interfere with the main score on
800, I didn't put in much preparation. I regretted this so much, and I thought I would have to retake the
test because as the clock kept ticking, despite my decent typing speed, I wasn't able to complete it and
worse, I didn't have time enough to click the "Submit" button. Would I be even eligible to apply with a
zero on the AWA? All that I had written had gone to waste. Or so I thought. After asking supervisor, I
came to know that whatever I typed was already recorded and would be submitted at the end of the
session. Big relief!
Took my break, and signed in for the Quantitative section. The clock ticking down from 75 minutes. My
sailing wasn't smooth. In the beginning of the quant section, I completed the questions much faster than
the two minute average that I had in mind. But as the questions progressed, and I kept getting them
right, so did the difficulty. Tough questions were a good thing because it is a rough indicator that you're
in the higher bracket of performance and so will your score. But such questions would stress you out
and eat up your time. And so they did. So much so, that at the end of the Quants section, I had 5 tough
questions left to complete in the last 5 minutes. A near impossibility I knew, from all my experience
having taken the mock tests. Just as I had planned for emergencies like this, I blind guessed a couple of
questions and bought myself some time. I knew that would affect my score, but better that than a time
penalty.
Time for some English. Unlike the Americans, Indians have no problem whatsoever with the Quants,
which is nothing but some twisted school math. But for the Verbal, you couldn't just practice yourself to
perfection and speed, only to a certain extent. For the sentence correction(SC), you need to have read a
lot of literature before, in order to spot errors and choose from the 5 alternative structures. Sometimes,
there might not be any error in all of them, just awkward structures. The questions are so tricky that the
wrong choices are the ones that will always sound so correct when read. And then there is Critical
Reasoning(CR), in which an argument is provided and you are supposed to identify which one of the 5
choices does the said job of "Weakening the Argument", "Strengthening the Argument" and so on. And
then there is Reading Comprehension(RC), the daddy of them all. Huge and complex passages, typically
consisting 350 to 600 words, on any topic ranging from Stem cell therapy to an Anthropology
commentary, would put your patience and composure to the limits. The toughest thing was to complete
all of it on time. Because if you don't finish all the questions within the given time, there's a time
penalty. I started with the Verbal and unlike Math, you can't zip through the initial questions no matter how
proficient you were. You still have to read the arguments and passages, which always took some time.
Having done that, progress was painfully slow, or so it seemed may be because I was suffering from
more than hours of mental exhaustion. Nonetheless, I completed the verbal without sacrificing any
questions. But all the while, on the back of my mind, it was disturbing, knowing that you could never
know for sure in verbal, your answers and their difficulty level, because it's not numbers and variables
you finally arrive at, to verify with the choices and move on; and besides all questions took more or less
the same time.
After completing the test, one more laborious endeavour that you are required to undertake, is the
selection of business schools. Before looking at the score, you need to choose, whether or not to report
the score in the first place, and if so, which b-schools to report to. The entire score reporting process
was shaky and half-minded. Because I had already prepared a list of schools before hand, I could
manage to tick them off, despite the fact that my heart was beating so loud that I couldn't really
concentrate. And finally, the moment of truth. 760 on 800! 99th percentile. But what really puzzled me
was that, I had secured 89th percentile in Quants and 96th percentile in Verbal, but an overall in the
99th percentile. Only later did I realize that it was the combination of good scores in both of the sections
that really mattered. And good for me, the native speakers are generally very good at Verbal and Verbal
only; and the non-native speakers excelled in the Quants, but struggled with Verbal. While I considered
myself very lucky, achieving that scoring despite some failings and confusions at the test, people seemed
surprisingly not surprised. They told me it was eventual that all my hard work would lead up to this and
that their real surprise came when they saw me slog for hours, burning my midnight oil. I was always
considered an intelligent boy who underperformed. I never studied hard my academic scores were only
average in college and just above in school. Even I had a burning curiosity buried deep within me for a
long time. If I put some effort, could I go toe to toe with the academic toppers. Am I even capable of
such studiousness. I never knew. Until now! Thanks to GMAT and to the people behind it who supported
me through this beautiful and fruitful journey.
28 Jan 2015, 20:22
Kudos
Bookmarks
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing!!! Edit the format a little bit
28 Jan 2015, 22:06
Kudos
Bookmarks
Yes, the format is off. Looks like a copy paste from somewhere...
