GMAT Debrief: ~650 to 770

I took the GMAT and made a 770 (Q51,V42), IR8, and AWA 6.0 after studying for 7 weeks. This was my first attempt. While there are certainly things that I could have done better to prepare, I think that I made some big strides in a short amount of time, so I wanted to share my experience.

I. Background

I'm currently a medical resident. My only work experience (other than high school and college jobs) has been in the hospital. I became interested in business school and the GMAT for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that so many of our medical problems seem to really be business problems, and I don't know how to go about solving them. I've been interviewing for post-residency jobs, and while there are clearly things that hospital administrators do very well, there are also things that some of them have difficulty conceptualizing because they don't have medical backgrounds. I'm interested in trying to find solutions to some of the business problems that plague healthcare. As I've cared for patients over the last four years, I've thought of tons of ways to improve outcomes and to reduce costs, but I don't know how to go about implementation. I also have many reservations about trying to improve care through the traditional means. I believe that RCTs and QI projects are inefficient and produce misleading outcomes.

The second reason is that I've always been drawn to complex problems. As an intern at DHMC, I took a healthcare business class at Tuck and loved it. I enjoy caring for patients day to day, but I'm more drawn to the large-scale challenges of healthcare as a whole. I've worked with a few MD/MBA friends on various projects, and that work has been the most enjoyable, most fulfilling work that I've ever done.

II. Materials Used
-Magoosh question bank
-Manhattan prep books and online material
-GMAT official guide
-GMATPrep tests
-GMAT Club forum

III. Baseline

It's tough for me to give an exact baseline. I took an "on paper" GMAT diagnostic test a few years ago just to see what it was like. I *think* the score said 680, but it was non-adaptive and I'm not even sure what the source was or whether it was reliable. I think that a more reliable baseline is ~650 as I'll explain below.

I decided that I wanted to take the GMAT around mid-December 2016. I went through the Magoosh quant questions in a week (didn't do verbal), and it was estimating my quant score to be 42-44. I took my first Manhattan CAT on 12/18, and my verbal score was 38. I think that comes out to something close to 650. I would use Manhattan CAT 1 as my "diagnostic," but my math was abysmal. I wasn't coming close to finishing the sections. I'm still not sure if I'd come close to finishing Manhattan math sections, so I think the Q42, V38 650 is more reflective of my baseline.

IV. Preparation

As I mentioned above, I started with Magoosh quant in mid-December. I did all of those in a week. I wasn't doing very well, so I made sure to read all of the explanations (or watch videos) of the ones that I had questions on. I was worried about my math score after that (and the first Manhattan CAT), so I basically ignored verbal and started studying math. After about a week, I was worried that I'd just study indefinitely for the GMAT unless I signed up for it, so I went ahead and scheduled the test for early February. As a resident, my work schedule can be weird, and early February was a good time for me to take it. I decided to use the Manhattan CATs 2-5 to study math. I totally ignored the verbal sections and just took math. Here are my scores:

12/18 Q44
12/21 Q48
1/2 Q46
1/2 Q48

I was doing fairly well on the beginnings of all these tests, but I was always running out of time. Over the last 2 weeks in December, I was also reading through the Manhattan books. I paid particular attention to combinations/permutations, interest, absolute value, work/rate problems, and inequalities because these had given me the most trouble on the Magoosh questions. I felt like Manhattan generally helped with all of those topics, but I also didn't feel totally comfortable with them.

I ordered the GMAT OG from Amazon, and it arrived in early January. I went through the quant questions in the OG, and I was encouraged. I was working these MUCH faster than the Manhattan questions, and I was getting most of them correct. I also looked back at the Verbal section from my first Manhattan CAT (from mid December) and noticed that almost all of the ones I was missing were sentence completion. I read the explanations for the Verbal questions from that first Manhattan CAT, and I found them to be very useful. There were several simple errors that I was making, and the concepts really helped me feel more comfortable with sentence correction. For example, "Mozart's father" doesn't establish "Mozart" in a sentence...just his father. Knowing that single concept cut down on my errors significantly.

I took my first GMATPrep practice test on 1/8, and I scored Q50 V44 760. I was pretty excited about the score, but I also didn't really believe it. My quant was significantly higher than it was on the other tests, and there were still several concepts that I didn't feel comfortable with. I still missed mostly sentence correction questions on verbal. Over the next 3 weeks, I went through (most) of the sentence correction questions in the OG. I thought they were pretty tough. I'm a native English speaker, and I majored in history in college, but I was still running into issues with idioms. I didn't always understand the explanations in the OG. I looked on the GMATClub forum, but I thought some of those discussions got confusing as well. I think that Manhattan CAT discussions were most helpful with sentence correction, but I also consider myself not very good at sentence correction (still).

Over that same 3 weeks (early to late Jan), I started reading the GMAT Club forum's quant PS section. I found Bunuel 's explanations to be extraordinarily useful, and I'm very grateful to him for putting those together. I mostly focused on the areas that I still felt weak. I was missing a lot of word problems (especially work/rate). I found sriharimurthy 's Word Problems Made Easy (as well as work & Distance/Speed/Time) post to be invaluable, and I felt much more comfortable with those problems after reading the post. They can be found in the "ALL YOU NEED FOR QUANT" post.

I took CAT 6 on 1/18 and made Q48 (again, just did quant). Since I'd only done one verbal section on Manhattan, I reset the pool and did two CATs with only Verbal. I got V45 on 1/23 and V44 on 1/24. I was pretty happy with the scores. I took GMATPrep 2 1/28 and made Q50 V46 770. Again, I was very happy with that score, but I was worried that my verbal score could be anywhere on the actual test day. I was pretty confident that I'd make at least a 680 on the test, but I also thought that my chance of making 750 wasn't great. I still hadn't taken a test under real conditions, and I hadn't written an AWA at all. I'm pretty bad when it comes to sustained concentration, so that was a concern of mine.

I didn't study much the last week. Part of that was by design (felt like I needed to get away from it) and part was by social/work necessity. I did some more sentence correction questions in the official guide, and I read up on a few more issues on the forum.

V. Test Day

I went to sleep the night before around 11pm and slept great. I woke around 7:30am and felt well rested. I'd signed up for a noon slot because I didn't want to risk not getting a good night's sleep.

I went for a mile and a half jog then got some coffee and ate breakfast. I did some last minute sentence corrections (looked at the last 10 questions in the official gmat verbal review book). I literally missed 7-8 of them. It didn't freak me out or anything, but it definitely made me feel less optimistic. I also read through a few AWA examples on the GMATClub forum to get a sense of what they looked like.

I got to the test center building and found the suite without much trouble. I showed up around 11:30, and they went ahead and let me check in because a computer was available. I took the first section, and I thought the AWA went well. It's still pending, but we'll see. I was really excited about the IR, though. I'd done one with GMATPrep and a couple with Manhattan, but I felt 99% sure that I got all of them correct on the real thing. I took a break to use the bathroom.

I returned for Quant, and the first question kind of threw me. I can't even remember the subject matter, but it took me a little longer than I wanted (like 3:30-4:30). I went ahead and decided to work it and make up time later. I don't even think it was that hard, I just had trouble readjusting after the break. Fortunately, the next several questions weren't bad, and I actually got ahead of the clock pretty quickly. I ran into one in the teens that I hadn't seen anything like before. I was pretty sure that it was in the 700-800 range. I wasn't able to figure it out, but I narrowed it down to 2 and took my best guess. After that, I didn't have much trouble, but I was never 100% on all the data sufficiency questions. I felt like I was missing something with them. I encountered a couple of clearly 700-800 range questions at the very end, but I figured out a trap for each of them, and I think I got those right. I left the section feeling very good. I took another break.

I think during that break I got too excited about how well the test had gone so far. I got back in the room and couldn't concentrate whatsoever. It wasn't test fatigue... we have to take 8 hour standardized tests during med school (and I find the GMAT stuff WAY more fun than med school stuff). It was more of me being so excited about how I was doing and thinking ahead to my score that I wasn't able to get anything done. That hasn't happened to me before (except maybe in poker), but it got me significantly behind. I was reading the words and they just weren't making sense. It's entirely possible that the passages were harder on the real thing than the practice material, but I think it was mostly my mindset. I also wasn't feeling great about the sentence completions. With about 1/3 of the verbal section to go, I was like "OK, your score is going to suck if you don't chill out." I was able to pull it together more or less, but I still felt pretty bad about that section. I was counting on verbal to bring my score up, and I knew that this section wasn't going as well as my practice tests had.

I finished the test and got my score. It was Q51/V42 770 with IR 8. I was pretty excited about that. My verbal score is lower, and I would have expected my overall score to be more like a 750 based on those numbers, but the quant must have really boosted me. I think that I missed at most 3 math, but I think I probably missed 0 or 1. I probably missed 10 verbal questions (for comparison, I missed 3 on my last GMAT Prep test). Anyway, I was really excited about the outcome. I would have loved for my verbal to have been better, but I'm not going to be greedy.


VI. Recommendations

General
-take a diagnostic test early and identify which questions you're missing. I didn't do this, but I'd recommend it.
-continue to identify what you're struggling with throughout your studying process. If you're missing the same type of question over and over again, I'd go back to the basics and look at 500-700 level questions on the forum or read about the concept in the OG, Manhattan books, or GMAT Club math book
-review the questions missed on the GMATPrep test. The test itself doesn't offer explanations, but I just googled the questions that I missed and I found discussions either on the GMATClub forum or the Manhattan forum

Quant Specific
-I strongly recommend doing the Manhattan CATs. I was terrible at them, but they helped tremendously. I would make sure to read the explanations for all of the questions that you don't completely understand. I got questions correct sometimes but I didn't always understand the concepts.
-I'd also strongly recommend reading through the GMAT club forum. Look at the 700-800 questions and read Bunuel's explanations. I probably did this for 30-40 questions, and it was very helpful to see how he thinks through problems.
-read the questions carefully. Pay particular attention to whether the word "integer" is in the question. Always question whether the numbers you're working with have to be integers or whether than can be any real numbers
-sometimes when I read questions I don't see a clear path to the answer. In these cases, pay attention to the structure of the numbers in front of you because you've probably seen similar structures before. Just do some sort of operation on the numbers to see if things get cleared up... factor numbers, add or subtract numbers from both side of the equations, get common denominators... I wouldn't waste too much time on these things, but I found that just moving things around often created numbers that were more friendly to work with. Once the numbers were in a more "friendly" form, the path to the answer usually clicked.

I think the biggest thing for me was going ahead and setting the test date...if I didn't set the test date, I think I could have casually studied forever. I think at some point you have to just take the thing with the understanding that you're not going to be 100% confident about everything. There were tons of things that I wasn't confident on going into the test, but I did well. It's extremely important to prepare for the test, but I think it's also important to come to peace with the fact that you're not going to know it all. Don't let that overwhelm you going into test day.

I hope this was helpful!