Hello everybody! Here's my case. I've scored 760 (Q49, V44) on the GMAT on Jun.28 2009 and I'm just going to explain what it took me to succeed. But first, a little background information since in my case it may be relevant. I live in Russia in a remote area where generally people have no idea of what MBA is, let alone the GMAT. The point is that in the process of preparation I was doing it all by myself. I mean almost all of you guys are living in an environment where there's a lot of other people doing the same thing (preparing for the GMAT) and you always have the opportunity to discuss the problems you encounter, which wasn't my case.
What did I do to prepare myself for the test.
I've purchased complete online course from the GMAX Online for $399, which is a reasonable price compared to actual physical courses out there. I also bought the OG10 because it wasn't included but was most frequently used during the course. The course itself covers all of the aspects of both verbal and quantitative sections. It consists of a total of 31 lessons with a duration of 2hrs in average. After each of those lessons you have to do a homework which is specifically relevant to the topic of each particular lesson. On average it took me another 2hrs to do a homework. During the course I took three simulation tests, which were included in the package, and upon completion of the course I took another two tests provided by Pearson VUE, creators of the GMAT (available on mba.com for free). Overall it took me two months for preparation. The GMAX course was comprehensive enough, so that no single question on the actual test took me by surprise. I also have managed not to sacrifice any question because of timing and I felt myself confident all through the test.
To make things clear, the GMAX course can't do magic by itself. I still had to work very hard in the course of preparation. But, like I said before, it covers everything and once you've done everything you're asked to - boom - you're ready for the test.
Another good thing about taking such kind of online courses is that you can actually save time and patience by skipping some parts of lessons, which contain the information you're familiar with. My major was in engineering so for me a lot of math was piece of cake and I just skipped it. By contrast, when I was taking the TOEFL classes at
Kaplan in East Village NY, I was spending 60% of the time in the class listening teacher explaining obvious things to some other student. It was really boring and unproductive although besides of that I'm not saying anything negative about studying at
Kaplan.
To sum up, for those able and willing to work hard the GMAX Online course may be the ultimate tool for getting a good grade at the GMAT.
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