Hi, I just passed the GMAT last Saturday and got 780. Since feedbacks and posts I read here were really useful in my training I wanted to give back a little bit and give my own feedback
.
First about the GMAT's day experience :
- I passed the exam in the UK and I really found that the people at the test center were really professional. I was a little bit concerned because I had some feedbacks from people who had bad experiences with test centers but there was really nothing to complain about, no noise or disturbance and everything was clearly explained.
- Concerning the AWA part (for which I don't have the result yet, I thought they would give me the computer's grade but no) I was not well prepared at all. I had just learnt the Chineseburned template and built something out of it. I knew the time was quite of a challenge and it was hard to finish within 30 min but in the test day it was even harder than what I imagined and I barely finished on time. I should probably have worked harder on this one, especially concerning the time management which would have put me in a better position during the test. I don't think I really did a good performance on this one, but it is hard to tell because of the format of this part.
- The IR part was yet another challenge. I was pretty confident before the test because as with the quant part, I use to be good at it. I found some questions quite harder than what I expected. Especially the sets of 3 series of 3 Yes/No questions (I got two of those...). Sometimes I just felt that the question was not really relevant and both Y or no answers were possible depending on how the references were understood.
Ok, after IR and AWA I was not really happy about my performance but whatever, now let the serious business begins !
- For the quant part I was both very confident (always scored 51 in every prep test) and also a little bit scared because I knew that missing a couple of answers could screw your score heavily. I was particularly careful about the small words in the questions that can make a HUGE difference. It is always so frustrating to answer a question wrong because you assumed x was integer/positive when in fact it is not stipulated. Also be careful about the time, at the beginning of the quant part I got blocked at one question (which was not particularly difficult but it involved ratio such as 2:3:2:1 and I was not really confident about how to understand it) and I spent quite a huge amount of time on it to the point that I was almost 5 minutes late on the timing. Hopefully I managed to answer some questions quickly and finished with almost 10 minutes left on the clock but it is always hard to decide what to do when it happens at the beginning of the trial (if it happens in the end you know whether you have spare time or not) because if you decide to use a lot of time on one particular question and the rest of the test is not any easier : you can't get this time back and you are kinda screwed with no time for the last questions.
- The verbal part is by far the part I worked the most and as a non-native speaker the hardest part. For the sentence correction the questions were hard and I got numerous "all-underlined" sentences but luckily for me I got no idiom questions (I am not sure if it is still necessary to learn a lot of idioms for the future test takers). The reading comprehension texts were really difficult and I had some issues with understanding some part of the texts. Finally for the critical reasoning part I got at least 3 questions when I had to complete a sentence whereas I thought this kind of questions were not frequent (maybe these questions are becoming more frequent in the GMAT ?)
Ok now about my training :
I began preparing early of January and worked with the
MGMAT books (especially the one on sentence correction which is very good) as well as
OG verbal 2nd edition. I also used the sentence correction forum of this site to look at new questions and raise some questions for the expert to answer
. Finally I got the additional question pack from official GMAT prep which is also VERY GOOD.
For the quant part I trained with the gmat club CAT tests as well as other CAT tests. I already had the sufficient math level to answer the question. I just tried to answer the greater number of questions in order to be comfortable with the time and with the format of this part. Gmat club CAT tests are very good but maybe they are even too hard and I would not advise somebody to train with them unless they already have a very good math level. The questions from these CAT are way above the level required for the GMAT.
I did the CAT test of
MGMAT and got the following results :
MGMAT 1 : 740
MGMAT 2 : 750
MGMAT 3 : 740
MGMAT 4 : 760
MGMAT 5 : 750
MGMAT 6 : 750
MGMAT quant is probably harder than the real test whereas
MGMAT verbal is probably easier. In overall, they seem to gauge very well the score, just underestimating it a little bit. Of course I also did the 2 GMAT official prep test :
GMAT prep 1 : 760
GMAT prep 2 : 770
The verbal questions seem easier than the real tests but they grade it probably harder than real GMAT (got only 3 mistakes on verbal on the second one and still got 45)
If I had to train again I would probably train a little bit more on the AWA part. Yes it is not that important but still it is better to perform well in order to be in a good mindset for the rest of the test and also it is not hard to do something correct.
Ok that's it, I will maybe try to give more details about my post and edit it later on
close
Updated on: 04 Mar 2013, 12:17
