loginricha wrote:
The Executive assessment has been in market for a year now and yet there is no new information available anywhere since its release last year.
Can anyone who has either taken EA or is preparing for EA share their strategies?
I am in particular curious about Integrated Reasoning section as it is counted towards final score or for deciding the difficulty level of the next section. It is impossible, at least as far as I know, to finish all 12 questions in 30 minutes so how are people approaching this section? Any insights on this will be greatly appreciated.
Richa
Further to my earlier post, I took my Executive Assessment today. I scored 160 with following breakdown - IR 14, Verbal 13, and Quant 13. I am not sure if the score is good or bad. I am applying to LBS EMBA London programme - September, 2017 intake. I was told their last intake had an average EA score of 150.
As for the exam itself, here is my experience.
Preparation: I have been preparing for GMAT for about a year but due to new job responsibilities, I decided to take the EA instead. As I always intend to apply for EMBA, it does not make a difference to the admission eligibility. However, I was worried as the EA score calculation includes the IR section. During my GMAT preparation, I never paid close attention to this section and had been consistently scoring low during my practice test. In EA, it not only is included as it is the first section of the test, but also decides the difficulty level of the next section. So it was important to do well in this section.
I took
Manhattan GMAT prep course during the initial phase to preparation (back when I was preparing for GMAT). While the course is quite good to prepare for Verbal and quant section, their Integrated reasoning section is not much help. I used
eGMAT Integrated Reasoning online course. It is a great course. The IR section uses the same concept as quant and verbal section, however the questions are phrased very differently. At beginning, it was quite hard for me to finish 12 IR questions in 30 minutes.
Manhattan prep course advise you to skip 2-3 questions (to be fair, the section is not counted towards final score in GMAT). The
eGMAT course takes you through each question type very slowly which is very useful. The IR questions usually have a lot of information. The trick to get better in IR is to calm down, read the information and the question properly and understand what is being asked - Slow down to be fast and accurate. Getting used to different question types also helped.
Test:The test is structured in 3 sections of 30 minutes each. The last two sections, Verbal and Quant, are further divided into 2 subsections each (7 question in each subs ection). There are no breaks. You can go back to questions and change your answer within the subsection. You can flag the questions for review later. At the end of each subsection, you will see a review screen. You can navigate to the flagged questions at that time. If you choose to end the review session for a particular subsection, you will not be able to go back to the subsection again. The adaptive scoring works differently for EA: the difficulty level of the subsection (not question) is decided upon the result of previous subsection.
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Section 1: Integrated Reasoning. It consists of 12 questions to be done in 30 minutes. It is identical to the GMAT IR section.
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Section 2: Verbal. The first subsection has 7 questions. I got hard subsection during the test. As I am not a native English speaker, I think I did poorly in this one. After I finished the first subsection, I got the review screen and I tried going back to the questions I had flagged only to realize that I am borrowing time from the next verbal subsection. So I made a choice to let go and end the subsection (which is done by ending the review section). I was presented with second subsection consisting of 7 more verbal questions. The second subsection was easier so I could still finish in time.
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Section 3: Quant. Quant section again had two subsections with 7 questions in each subsetion. I learnt from my past mistake and did not flag any questions in the first subsection. Quant is my strength (too bad it was not the second section of the test). The questions were fairly easy. I finished the first section (7 questions) in 10 minutes. The second subsection was slightly more tricky. I flagged few questions and went back to them at the end.
Tips: Here are my lessons learnt:
- Invest the time in the question upfront. Even though you are allowed to go back to the question later, it does not help. You would have limited time in the end to go back to the question but you would need to re-acquaint yourself with the question and the choices. In the time pressure environment, you will not get any new brain wave in few seconds afterwards. Make a choice and move on.
- Spending slightly more time in first subsection might be beneficial but make sure you have enough time to finish both subsection.
- I tried going back to the previous screen using the previous button on the screen. It ended up giving me error during the test. I lost an entire minute by the time the examiner came down (try scrolling up and down the whole screen, if you get an error).
Good luck!
18 Feb 2017, 10:40
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