Hi everyone, got a good result yesterday and want to share my experience here:
A bit of background info:
- Male 26 y.o.
- Indonesian
- Prep was 3 months, self prep with
MGMAT and
OG mainly
- my first GMAT
I had been studying GMAT since January. Up until then I only had
OG, Kaplan, and Princeton books.
I then decided to get serious and after some googling decided to buy
Manhattan Prep GMAT books.
The books weren't available in Indonesia so I had to buy it from Singapore.
Those book are amazing btw, especially the sentence correction part.
So on March, I took my first (out of 6)
MGMAT CAT test and got 510 (Q:31 V:29) and didn't do the AWA and IR sections.
I realized I had a long way to go.
Honestly there's no secret recipe in my success. It all comes down to perseverance. Motivating yourself to isolate yourself from any social events for 3 months, motivating yourself to sit your butt tight for 3 months.
Here's how I studied:
1. Finish reading quant books from
MGMAT. Those books have some practice questions (in the book and online), use them wisely.
I aimed to finish at least 1 book per week
2. Finish reading the verbal book, same rule, 1 book per week
3. Start doing some problems in the
OG, you can choose which one you wanna do first, but I find the big
OG book harder than the supplementary books.
4. Aim to do at least 30 questions and understand EACH of them well (right or wrong don't matter, just read them all, try to identify all the errors in the wrong answers in your own words)
5. Depending on your focus, you can shift the ratio of quant and verbal questions you do. For me it was 10 quant, 20 verbal
6. 1 month before the test, I started studying more, how much more?
- in the toilet? read GMAT
- waiting someone? read GMAT
- stuck in traffic? read GMAT
- lunch break? read GMAT
7. It's important to find your best study time. If you're not a morning person, don't try to be one and study in the morning
8. Studying at home is very comfortable for me, avoid public places especially if you have weak bladder
9. In total I did 5 CATs, 2 from
MGMAT, 2 from Kaplan, and 1 from GMAT prep. I built my stamina from doing questions everyday for hours. I noticed that by the end of my study routine I no longer feel dazed by flurries of GMAT questions thrown to my face. The CAT was to gauge my progress
9a. My CAT in order:
1.
MGMAT 510
2. Kaplan 600
3.
MGMAT 580
4. GMAT prep 610
5. Kaplan 670
10. Prepare to adapt. For me this was true when
MGMAT RC doesn't help me at all. I read the book cover to cover maybe three times and still get half of RC wrong every time I practiced. I ended up using rhyme's guide lol.
11. The same goes for AWA, I ended up using chineseburned template, just practice maybe 10 AWA and you'll be good to go
12. IR scared me and
MGMAT has some of the most challenging IR questions there is, I ended up getting a 6, not bad at all
13. You may notice there's really no structure here. This is how I like to study, find your own rythm. If you're a schedule freak then make one and adhere to it. For me it was more like, hmm what do I feel like doing today (might not work for everyone)
14. I did not keep any error logs, in retrospect I probably should lol. What I did to compensate was to review all the practice questions I have done.
15. Timing will come naturally if you train yourself to train with time constraint. I recommend using
OG online question bank to practice both your skill and your timing. I hate how
OG will log me out every 5 minutes but I got no other choice.
OG online RC question is also super useless, all the questions are scrambled. It's supposed to be passage followed by questions about the passage, not new passage every time you click next *smh
2-3 weeks before test day:
doubts started to creep in, I haven't practiced all the
OG materials, I felt like I should reschedule, changed my mind after finding out rescheduling costs 50 bucks, FIFTY!?
doubts still there but I'm prepared to face the test
D-1
Felt like I was gonna get a flu, so instead of doing final review, I took a nap and rested. At night when I felt better I reread some materials, especially AWA from chineseburned
D-Day
arrived early in the morning at 8:30 AM, my test was scheduled at 9:30 AM. This is Jakarta so better to be (super) safe than sorry. Couldn't sleep last night and was feeling nervous as heck. bought some juice to drink during break. I also bought a banana as well for snacking.
Test:
AWA
pretty easy thanks to chineseburned and the topic wasn't that hard either
IR
was decent, not too hard, finished on time.
1st break - ate banana, drink water, toilet break
Quant
feels a bit too easy, I felt like I did it too fast though and might have done some silly mistakes, I got too much time left by the end of the quant so I slowed down a bit but the damage was done. nothing I could do.
2nd break - drink coconut water, toilet break
Verbal
It wasn't that bad, I kept my timing better this time and finished with only a few seconds remaining. The CR was hard for me, CR is my nemesis.
Clicking the next button revealed my score, quant 49, verbal 37, total 710
I kept my composure and did my victory dance on the way out lolol
to everyone who will take the GMAT I wish you all the best and I hope this can inspire you. I went from "reading other people's success stories scoring 700+" to "scoring 700+ myself", you too can do the same.
close
09 Jul 2015, 04:21
