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18 Sep 2011, 04:27
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I gave my GMAT in the last week of July and I'm only posting my debrief now. I had intended to post it on the day of the exam itself but I was so burnt out I never got around to doing it. Recently, a friend of mine approached me for advice on preparing for it and as I narrated my experience I got excited about it again and decided to finally post it here. Hope it's of some use 
A few facts about me that give some context to my preparation. I'm a native English speaker and my college degree was in Maths. But that don't mean I can simply turn up for the exam
I prepared for 6 weeks fairly intensely. My preparation strategy may not work for everyone. If you need to get comfortable with some of the quant concepts you will definitely need more time to prepare. My concepts were fine for most topics so I just needed to get in to GMAT mode and do lots and lots of practice. Alright here goes..
1. I took 2 weeks leave from office which I was able to do as I had piled up my leave over the last 2 years and this time period was fairly chilled in our work cycle.
In these 2 weeks I did the OG from cover to cover. I would recommend you try and time yourself every time you work, like do a batch of 25 questions as they come at you in a fixed time period. If you're finding doing only the OG questions annoying then you can start mixing in some questions from Kaplan/ Manhattan stuff.
At the end of the 2 weeks I felt good about all the topics. I then took the first official Gmatprep test (Simulate it 100%, phone off, lock yourself in a room, use earplugs if you have, AC on, and take only up to the max time allowed for each break, simulate the time of day also if you've fixed up your slot).
On my first attempt at the official test I made the mistake of leaving my phone on and got interrupted with a few repeated calls from work. This resulted in me not being able to finish about 5 questions in quant and I got somewhere between 600 & 650. Don't let this happen to you!
If you like, you could maybe do a few sectional tests of other brands like 800score (which is what I used, they're ok) to get the hang of it before hitting the Gmatprep test. But I definitely recommend giving one of the official ones once you've covered all the topics as it will help to keep you on track.
For the AWA just go through this superb post sometime before you do your first full length test - https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-get-6-0-awa-my-guide-64327.html
2. I was back in office for 3 weeks. During this time period I made a subscription to Gmatclub question of the day on my office id. This allowed me to atleast be doing 2 problems everyday and it just takes 5 mins to do them. I'm still getting the questions today and enjoy solving them.
After office hours, I tried to do either 1 sectional test or about 1 - 1.5 hours worth of questions. I was practicing questions from Kaplan and Princeton Review. The Princeton Review book I have has a few "difficult question" sets, so I only did those. The general Princeton Review questions are too easy for someone targeting a score over 700. I had heard that Kaplan is supposed to be hard, but I felt it was mostly ok. The really hard questions you kind of know won't come on the real test.
You could probably do a sectional every second or 3rd day with the others days used for practice questions, depending on how many tests you have and would like to do. Hopefully you're not travelling extensively or staffed on a murderous assignment
On the weekends definitely do at least 1 sectional per day (preferably 2), or you could do a full length test.
3. Last week before the test - I took off from work. Hardcore time now! Did the 2nd official test at the start of this week and got a 760 so felt really good.
I also did the Sentence correction questions posted in a word doc by Sondenso on the forum after this test. This is an excellent collection of questions and I would definitely recommend it to everyone ( I have attached a copy that I edited slightly with this post). Since the word doc's questions are sourced from the official prep tests you may come across repeated questions. Better to have them repeated in the practice doc than to come across a known question when doing a proper test.
On other days I did atleast 1 sectional test + practice questions. On the last day I did the Manhattan full length test (the free one on their site) midday and got a 720 which I felt fine with as I have seen most people score more in the real test than they do in Manhattan. After that I watched the movie Catch me if you can
Slept at a reasonable hour and thankfully was able to fall asleep. Test day debrief in my next post..
A few facts about me that give some context to my preparation. I'm a native English speaker and my college degree was in Maths. But that don't mean I can simply turn up for the exam
I prepared for 6 weeks fairly intensely. My preparation strategy may not work for everyone. If you need to get comfortable with some of the quant concepts you will definitely need more time to prepare. My concepts were fine for most topics so I just needed to get in to GMAT mode and do lots and lots of practice. Alright here goes..
1. I took 2 weeks leave from office which I was able to do as I had piled up my leave over the last 2 years and this time period was fairly chilled in our work cycle.
In these 2 weeks I did the OG from cover to cover. I would recommend you try and time yourself every time you work, like do a batch of 25 questions as they come at you in a fixed time period. If you're finding doing only the OG questions annoying then you can start mixing in some questions from Kaplan/ Manhattan stuff.
At the end of the 2 weeks I felt good about all the topics. I then took the first official Gmatprep test (Simulate it 100%, phone off, lock yourself in a room, use earplugs if you have, AC on, and take only up to the max time allowed for each break, simulate the time of day also if you've fixed up your slot).
On my first attempt at the official test I made the mistake of leaving my phone on and got interrupted with a few repeated calls from work. This resulted in me not being able to finish about 5 questions in quant and I got somewhere between 600 & 650. Don't let this happen to you!
If you like, you could maybe do a few sectional tests of other brands like 800score (which is what I used, they're ok) to get the hang of it before hitting the Gmatprep test. But I definitely recommend giving one of the official ones once you've covered all the topics as it will help to keep you on track.
For the AWA just go through this superb post sometime before you do your first full length test - https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-get-6-0-awa-my-guide-64327.html
2. I was back in office for 3 weeks. During this time period I made a subscription to Gmatclub question of the day on my office id. This allowed me to atleast be doing 2 problems everyday and it just takes 5 mins to do them. I'm still getting the questions today and enjoy solving them.
After office hours, I tried to do either 1 sectional test or about 1 - 1.5 hours worth of questions. I was practicing questions from Kaplan and Princeton Review. The Princeton Review book I have has a few "difficult question" sets, so I only did those. The general Princeton Review questions are too easy for someone targeting a score over 700. I had heard that Kaplan is supposed to be hard, but I felt it was mostly ok. The really hard questions you kind of know won't come on the real test.
You could probably do a sectional every second or 3rd day with the others days used for practice questions, depending on how many tests you have and would like to do. Hopefully you're not travelling extensively or staffed on a murderous assignment
On the weekends definitely do at least 1 sectional per day (preferably 2), or you could do a full length test.
3. Last week before the test - I took off from work. Hardcore time now! Did the 2nd official test at the start of this week and got a 760 so felt really good.
I also did the Sentence correction questions posted in a word doc by Sondenso on the forum after this test. This is an excellent collection of questions and I would definitely recommend it to everyone ( I have attached a copy that I edited slightly with this post). Since the word doc's questions are sourced from the official prep tests you may come across repeated questions. Better to have them repeated in the practice doc than to come across a known question when doing a proper test.
On other days I did atleast 1 sectional test + practice questions. On the last day I did the Manhattan full length test (the free one on their site) midday and got a 720 which I felt fine with as I have seen most people score more in the real test than they do in Manhattan. After that I watched the movie Catch me if you can
Slept at a reasonable hour and thankfully was able to fall asleep. Test day debrief in my next post..
Attachments
GMAT Prep SC answers.doc [157 KiB]
Downloaded 106 times
GMAT Prep Sentence Corrections.doc [297.5 KiB]
Downloaded 145 times
18 Sep 2011, 04:34
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D Day arrived. I woke up at a comfortable time of 9 or so. My appointment was for 12 Noon. I read the paper and in general tried to stay calm. I had to reach the centre latest by 11:30 so decided to target reaching by 11. I packed a box of cookies, an energy drink, water and some cake and headed off. It’s a good thing I left early coz the parking at the New Delhi centre is a bit of a pain so I had to park quite far away and walk.
As I got to the building with the test centre there were these guys trying to hawk their Admission consulting brochures. I waved them off and tried to avoid getting bothered as I didn’t want my calmness to get spoiled for the test. Unfortunately, we had to wait for quite a while before they would allow us to enter the centre, so there was a bunch of us waiting in the stuffy staircase for about 15 mins.
Anyway once we were in, the check in formalities proceeded as expected. It’s pretty high security stuff, like going for a flight.. frisking and all the works. They gave us earplugs which was great, as during the AWA section the clattering of keyboards was really loud ( I realized coz I finished about 7 mins early and when I took them off I could hear the racket).
Took the break and ate some cookies and did some stretching exercises. I had to focus now as the real deal was starting. I knew I just needed to do the quant confidently as I would then be fine mentally doing verbal. During my preparation I sometimes struggled to finish quant on time as I would get stuck on a question and make it an ego thing for myself to solve it properly. I realized this was costing me, so I consciously decided that on the real test if I’m taking too long on a question I’m going to “F*** it and move”.
I had to do this for 2 questions in the real exam. One of them really pissed me off coz I knew how to solve it (it was a DS about the median of a set) but my brain had frozen and I wasn’t able to do a simple multiplication accurately. When you’ve crossed 3+ minutes for a question and the answers not in sight it’s much better to just move on to the next question as in all likelihood it will be an easier one. This strategy paid off as I was left with 4 questions to do in the last 12 mins so I could relax and do them free of tension.
Took the break then and visited the loo. Ate some more cookies and downed some of the juice and headed back in. Verbal was similar to the practice tests. Got stuck on a couple of tricky SC and CR questions but I knew they wouldn’t impact my overall score too badly as in general I was being able to solve most of the questions correctly. Finished verbal with 5 mins to spare and then proceeded to the new style sample (non-scored) questions.
I hated the new sample questions. Maybe it’s because my brain was exhausted but I just couldn’t get my head around most of them. They had multiple questions as part of 1 larger question and required looking at different tables and doing calculations between them. I tried to do them honestly but had to guess for a lot of them.
Then came the moment of truth. I had decided that I would report my score regardless of how the test went. At this point I felt pretty confident that I would cross a 730 so I clicked the magic button and put my head down ( my friends had told me that the score takes some time to come, so staring at the screen & waiting is torture! ). I kept my head down for about 30 seconds just trying to stay calm.
When I raised my head I couldn’t spot the score immediately, but after scanning the screen for a bit I saw that 750 and heaved such a HUGE sigh of relief! I pumped my fists in the air a couple of times and did my best not to exclaim out aloud. Felt awesome! I had to then raise my hand and the admin guy came and did the check out. They handed me the unofficial score report and I left the centre grinning Went and played football after that to cap off a brilliant day!
As I got to the building with the test centre there were these guys trying to hawk their Admission consulting brochures. I waved them off and tried to avoid getting bothered as I didn’t want my calmness to get spoiled for the test. Unfortunately, we had to wait for quite a while before they would allow us to enter the centre, so there was a bunch of us waiting in the stuffy staircase for about 15 mins.
Anyway once we were in, the check in formalities proceeded as expected. It’s pretty high security stuff, like going for a flight.. frisking and all the works. They gave us earplugs which was great, as during the AWA section the clattering of keyboards was really loud ( I realized coz I finished about 7 mins early and when I took them off I could hear the racket).
Took the break and ate some cookies and did some stretching exercises. I had to focus now as the real deal was starting. I knew I just needed to do the quant confidently as I would then be fine mentally doing verbal. During my preparation I sometimes struggled to finish quant on time as I would get stuck on a question and make it an ego thing for myself to solve it properly. I realized this was costing me, so I consciously decided that on the real test if I’m taking too long on a question I’m going to “F*** it and move”.
I had to do this for 2 questions in the real exam. One of them really pissed me off coz I knew how to solve it (it was a DS about the median of a set) but my brain had frozen and I wasn’t able to do a simple multiplication accurately. When you’ve crossed 3+ minutes for a question and the answers not in sight it’s much better to just move on to the next question as in all likelihood it will be an easier one. This strategy paid off as I was left with 4 questions to do in the last 12 mins so I could relax and do them free of tension.
Took the break then and visited the loo. Ate some more cookies and downed some of the juice and headed back in. Verbal was similar to the practice tests. Got stuck on a couple of tricky SC and CR questions but I knew they wouldn’t impact my overall score too badly as in general I was being able to solve most of the questions correctly. Finished verbal with 5 mins to spare and then proceeded to the new style sample (non-scored) questions.
I hated the new sample questions. Maybe it’s because my brain was exhausted but I just couldn’t get my head around most of them. They had multiple questions as part of 1 larger question and required looking at different tables and doing calculations between them. I tried to do them honestly but had to guess for a lot of them.
Then came the moment of truth. I had decided that I would report my score regardless of how the test went. At this point I felt pretty confident that I would cross a 730 so I clicked the magic button and put my head down ( my friends had told me that the score takes some time to come, so staring at the screen & waiting is torture! ). I kept my head down for about 30 seconds just trying to stay calm.
When I raised my head I couldn’t spot the score immediately, but after scanning the screen for a bit I saw that 750 and heaved such a HUGE sigh of relief! I pumped my fists in the air a couple of times and did my best not to exclaim out aloud. Felt awesome! I had to then raise my hand and the admin guy came and did the check out. They handed me the unofficial score report and I left the centre grinning
Went and played football after that to cap off a brilliant day! 
gurpreetsingh
Joined: 12 Oct 2009
Last visit: 15 Jun 2019
Posts: 2,266
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 235
Status:<strong>Nothing comes easy: neither do I want.</strong>
Location: Malaysia
Concentration: Technology, Entrepreneurship
Schools: ISB '15 (M)
GMAT 1: 670 Q49 V31
GMAT 2: 710 Q50 V35
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18 Sep 2011, 04:48
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Congrats !! Nice debrief. Pls keep us updated about your admission Journey.
