Hello,
I gave my GMAT last week and scored 760 (Q-50, V-42, IR – 8) on the new shorter format. This was my first attempt. I have been an active part of GMAT club ever since I started my preparation, and this forum has helped me a lot, so I felt I owed to this community to share my experience.
Resources•
Official Guide,
OG Quant & Verbal.
•
E-GMAT – GMAT Prep
•
E-GMAT -
Scholaranium•
GMAT Club Tests• 800score.com
•
VERITAS Prep Practice Tests
• Princeton GMAT Prep
•
MGMAT Geometry & Number properties books.
Background
I am currently enrolled in my final semester of Bachelors in Business Administration (BBA) at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. Having a business background and no experience I wanted to apply for a Masters in Management program.
GMAT Prep
Initial Preparation
I started my preparation back in October, 2017 with only studying on weekends. I initially familiarized myself with the GMAT format and question types. My preparation was going great and I was constantly improving my score until, in January, I hit a score plateau in the range of 620-640.
The RoadBlockThe materials used by me till this point were
OG Verbal & Quant, and the Princeton GMAT guide. This book was good to familiarize myself with the basic concepts, but after a while I felt that learning had become stagnant. At that I attended this free workshop by
E-GMAT, on what score plateaus are and how to overcome them. I started preparing full time from Feb, 2018, after quitting my part time job.
Overcoming the Score Plateu
I subscribed
e-GMAT in Feb, and its verbal was extremely useful. Although I did feel the quant was not as useful for me, because of the fact that I usually use different methods for different kind of questions such as plugging in the answers and other similar techniques, whereas
E-Gmat’s approach was strictly methodical. Even though this method would be very useful for someone with engineering or mathematics background, for me it was very demotivating since I was never good with Algebra. Due to recruitment drives on campus, I had to pause my preparation in March and had to reschedule my GMAT in May.
Regaining The Momentum
I started my preparation again in the second week of April. By this time I knew most of the concepts (other than Permutation, Combinations, Probability & A few advanced geometry questions) from my earlier preparation, so I decided to practice 10 practice questions from each topic, from
the official guide and go through the solutions of my mistakes in detail. This was by far the most effective strategy to finish off my GMAT prep. I had a friend help me in the last week with the topics I was struggling with from the
Manhattan books.
The Last Week
In the last week, solved 5 questions from each question type, and looked up the solutions. I also gave a practice test and scored 700 (Q44, V41). This score was good but the quant was pretty low, that is when I worked on the topics I wasn’t very familiar with (Permutation, Combinations, Probability & A few advanced geometry questions) to improve my quant.
I spent the day before exam resting. I woke up early, went for a walk, saw a couple of movies, revised my notes of Verbal, revised the quant formulas and went to bed early.
The Day of TestI woke up early, had the regular breakfast, called an Uber to the test center. I reached the test center an hour before the scheduled time. The administrators asked me if I wanted to start earlier, I said yes but it took them roughly and hour and half to begin the test. During my first 8 minutes break I overspent the time by two minutes which was deducted from my quant. Because of this I panicked, and wasted more time (I was on the 4th question after 13 minutes) but then I geared up and was done with the entire section 2 minutes before the scheduled time.
Mock Scores• Veritas Prep 1:550 (Q37, V29)
• Princeton 1: 550 (q38 v28)
• GMAT Prep 1: 620 (Q46, V29)
• 800score.com 1: 640 (Q45,V33)
• Veritas Prep 2: 670 (Q44,V37)
• GMAT Prep (New Format) 1: 680 (Q50,V32)
• GMAT Prep (New Format) 2: 700 (Q44,V41)
• Actual GMAT: 760 (Q50,V42, IR 8)Sectional Tips: Reading Comprehension: The best advice that anyone ever gave me for solving RC came from the
e-GMAT course, to truly get immersed in the passage. Attitude is extremely important in RC. If you are reading RC just for the sake of giving GMAT (Which we all are, actually) than it is highly likely that you’ll have GMAT on your mind and you wouldn’t be able to understand what the passage is saying. But, if you read the passage with an intention understanding the topic, that the passage is discussing, you will not only understand the essence of passage better but also be able to answer the questions better.
The second this to do while attempting RC passages is to write summaries of each paragraph (Or portion of a paragraph for one Paragraph RCs) in one or two line. This is extremely important as it does two things. First, when you get a detail question you can go through the summaries and know where exactly to find the answers. Second, when you write all the summaries down you can easily find out the main purpose of the passage by just summarizing the summaries.
Sentence Correction:For sentence corrections you need to
• Know the rules well.
• Learn as much idioms as you can.
• Read the entire sentence first, not just the underlined part.
• Use
e-GMAT's Meaning based approach for the sentence correction
• Eliminate all the wrong options.
Critical Reasoning: I was good at CR except for the Bold Face question. I would suggest, that one should know what conclusion, intermediate conclusion, and premise is. Moreover, it is very important to understand what the question is asking you and what all of the words in options mean. Pre thinking answers for the CR questions helps alot.
Problem Solving:Problem solving is by far the simplest question type, and I believe that everyone is already familiar with that. The key is to understand how to solve major question type i.e. (Algebra, Geometry, Stats, and Word Problems etc.) and to practice. Also tricks such as reverse solving and assigning values to different unknown variable to get the answers can be pretty useful.
For Geometry try finding out as much information as you can with the given information. Sometimes, it seems unclear how you can get to the right answers in geometry, but as you keep on solving and finding out unknowns, the picture becomes much clearer. Also, it is extremely important to memorize formulas involving shapes. (I had a circular cylinder question on my GMAT which was very hard, and I couldn’t have solved it if I didn’t know the right formulas)/
Lastly, it is very important to know your weaknesses. Since GMAT is a CAT, you can attempt a few questions wrong and still get a very high score. However, if you waste time on the kind of questions that are your weaknesses you wouldn’t be able to give time to other questions that you might have gotten right.
Data Sufficiency For DS following tips were very useful to me:
• Get the maximum information out of the question statement as you can.
• Consider both the statements completely separately, and don’t let information from one statement influence your decision about the second.
• Eliminating method is extremely useful on DS.
Lastly Thank you to the GMAT Club community for all the help. Sorry for a longer debrief. If you have any questions regarding the new format of GMAT, any specific topic or just GMAT in general, feel free to comment or to message me on GMAT club.
20 May 2018, 00:01
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