Hello All,
I am feeling much more relieved now that I am done with my GMAT. I got a 760 total score, IR 8 and AWA 5
Would like to share my experience with y'all hoping that it helps one or more of you!
My prep time was 10 weeks. Although, I feel 7-8 weeks of prep is good enough if you have a more directed prep. I think the first 2-3 weeks I did not go about it the right way. I scored a 620 on my very first practice exam (without any prep). From there on I only improved. Here is my strategy:
Go through the basics of sentence correction. This was the only section that really troubled me but once I understood the basics (which took a very long time), it was also what strengthened my Verbal score. Watch the Veritas prep video on sentence correction!!!!!! Practice all the
OG questions. While I would stress you to go through the mistakes, it is equally important to understand what you got correct and why!
If you are good at Math already, practicing a lot of GMAT style math questions is all you need. You will also get better at CR And RC questions with practice. Practice the GMAT clubs hardest Math questions to beat up on yourself. After practicing those, a normal question will look like a joke.
I can not stress this more. Practice the full exam every weekend without fail. If you can practice on both Saturday and Sunday, even better. By the end of my prep, taking a full GMAT exam seemed normal to me. While taking the actual exam, I had no anxiety. Time was no issue. It felt like just another practice exam.
1) Use Chineseburned's template which is on here on GMAT club. Just google this: chineseburned gmat club.
2) Do not waste too much time on practicing the IR section. You will get enough practice with the practice exams.
3) For Quant, I felt that the practice exams out there were much harder. The actual GMAT seemed so easy that I finished 25 minutes early. I was super scared that I was doing poorly since I expected the questions to get much harder as I got more and more questions correct.
4) For Verbal, the exam seemed pretty similar to other practice exams that I had taken. Like the practice exams, I finished 10 minutes early.
If you have not already, buy the Veritas Prep (7 exams),
Manhattan Prep (6 exams),
GMAT club tests and the extra official GMAT tests. If you are smart about buying the exams through discount codes, you will spend not more than $200 on all. This is totally worth it.
The GMAT club math tests are very good but much much harder than the actual exam while the Verbal tests are very poor. Not only did I feel that some of the questions are plain wrong, but also felt that the scoring is just horrendous. While in Quant my score fluctuated between 50 and 51, in Verbal it fluctuated between 29 - 46. These exams are perfect for practicing on week days. I took 1 a day for my last four weeks of prep and went through the mistakes carefully. I also practiced 30 SCs every day either from
OG or from gmat club forums for 700 level questions.
The Veritas Prep and
Manhattan Prep exams are really good but the scoring is biased to slightly lower than the official exam. I took the official GMAT exams the last. These exams are pretty accurate. I scored a 740, 760, 760 and a 770.
Good luck to you all,
Adi