So I took the GMATs yesterday and scored a 730 (Q48/V41/IR7). Still waiting for the official score. I’m going to keep this debrief fairly brief, because honestly I don’t feel like I have much insight that hasn’t already been said here. But in case any of this is helpful to anyone else….
I started studying in late February, so I ended up studying for about 3 months. I had originally been planning on taking the GMATs in the end of July, but I realized relatively last minute that I would have to take a couple classes over the summer for pre-reqs for the Masters in Accounting programs I’m interested in, and I started worrying that I wouldn’t be able to devote as much time to GMAT-studying over the summer on top of courses, especially courses that I needed good grades in. So I decided to take them in May before my summer classes started, figuring I could always retake them in July if I had to. I definitely wouldn’t recommend freaking out about your schedule and moving up when you’re taking the GMAT by months if you can manage to plan your life better than I did. I was hoping for something a little higher, but 730 is good enough that I think the GMATs and I are done for a little while. I’m a female American in my early 30s with a humanities background, so it’s not a particularly competitive demographic.
MATERIALS USED: My main study source was
Magoosh. I’d made it through all the videos already, but not all the questions and supplemental materials I’d planned on using. I used
Manhattan Prep books for CR, Number Properties, IR/Essay, , Fractions/Decimals/Percent, and Sentence Correction. I did some GC tests. My scores for verbal there were all over the place and seemed to have very little to do with my actual ability. My scores for math ranged around the low to mid 40s. I had started working on the
MGMAT advanced quant book, but I was only two chapters in when I took the test.
My practice CAT scores:
GMAT Prep 1 2/25 (diagnostic/before I started studying): 600 (Q42/V31)
Veritas Prep CAT 3/09: 670 (Q45/V37)
GMAT Prep 2 4/07: 750 (Q 48/V45)
Economist CAT 4/20: 710 (Q50/V38)
Veritas Prep CAT 4/26: 710 (Q 48/V40)
MGMAT Cat 5/2: 700 (Q46/V40)
General advice/things that helped me:
I used the
Magoosh 6 month study plan. Well, and then gave up on it halfway through. But Having a concrete list of things I was supposed to get done every week really helped me stay on track with GMAT studying on top of my everyday life/work. I made my own flashcards for math and for idioms. My current work schedule is pretty flexible, so I was able to fit in studying during the middle of the day most days of the week. I found myself frequently studying the math at those times, and leaving the verbal studying for later at night. That was a poor idea, because I found myself making more silly mistakes or not retaining the material as much when I was tired at the end of the day.
For SC,
Magoosh emphasizes that it’s not ONLY a test of grammar but also meaning. You want to make sure that whatever answer you picked doesn’t leave out anything that the original sentence meant. The other thing they emphasize is that “GMAT grammar” is not real grammar; it’s its own thing and you just have to learn it as such. That was really helpful for me as someone who literally teaches writing for a living. I have very strong feelings about grammar. GMAT grammar is like stuck in a Strunk and White style guide book from the 1970s, and I really strongly believe that some of the idioms the GMATs prefer are NOT actually the only correct way to express certain things. Grammar is always evolving and grammaticians constantly revise what they consider stylistically appropriate English. So for me (and I realize I may be in the minority here), thinking of “GMAT idioms” as a list of phrasings that I had to memorize the same way I would memorize math formulas or prime numbers, as something that had only a tangential relationship to real, lived grammar, helped immensely.
For Math, I’m just going to say preemptively in case people ask: No, I don’t think I did anything special to improve my math from Q42 on my first GMAT Prep to Q48 for the real thing. Again, I’m in my early 30s and it’s been literally 15 years since I’ve done the kind of math tested on the GMATs. I’ve always considered myself fairly good at math, so for me I think it was just an issue of re-learning stuff I’d forgotten over a decade ago. Do I think with a couple more months of studying I could push my quant score up to a 49 or 50? Maybe. But at this point I have no plans to retake/keep studying.
-V.