Hello everyone!
Although I didn’t participate actively on this forum during my preparation, I took the time to write this debrief as a way to thank you for providing help with well thought solutions for questions I had doubts and for being a place where I could find answers for any other types of uncertainty I had during the GMAT study.
So let’s go through it!
I’m a 25-year-old Brazilian who just earned a bachelor’s degree of mechanical engineering. After a one-year internship on a consulting firm that ended in June of 2020, I accepted the offer to return to the firm at the beginning of 2021. Having only my undergraduate thesis as a “obligation” in the last semester and restricted by the pandemic situation, I had much time to focus on some personal projects. After receiving an advice from a colleague, I decided that it would be a good time for me to practice for the GMAT exam, even though I only intend to apply to a MBA two to three years from now.
So, I started the preparation on September. The first move was a quick research on how I could do that (which took me to websites like this one), and with that I concluded that my first step was to take a practice exam from mba website in order to evaluate my current situation.
My first practice exam was taken on Sep 28, and I scored 710 (47 Q, 40 V, IR 8).
After that, I realized that I was in good shape, but I could improve my score by being more familiar with the test. The section I was less used to was sentence correction, since I do not master English grammar and is a section that I never saw on the gmat-like exams most consulting firms apply on their recruitment processes here in Brazil.
Then, I thought that the best way to become more familiar was to simulate the exam recurrently. So I bought
the Official Guide (along with Verbal and Quant reviews) to do as many questions as I could.
At the beginning, my selection of questions was a little random, but after a few weeks I standardized my practice by always choosing 30 random quants questions and then 40 random verbal questions in the question builder of the Wiley website. Although it does not accurately simulate the exam, since the Verbal and Quant sections are adaptive, the randomized questions were the better model for it.
Since I had much time, at the beginning I just practiced by doing either a Quant or a Verbal simulation a day, and then I reviewed the incorrect questions. That usually took over just 1 hour to 1 hour and a half (exam plus review process). In my first tries, I usually went over all questions to see the solutions, even the ones I got right. After a while, I decided to just review the ones that I got wrong and those I thought I got by lucky. My reviewing process become more and more relaxed as the time went by and as I got more familiar with the questions, being that in the end I just quickly passed through even the ones I got wrong. So, I think
it could be a good idea to not be overly concerned about understanding all the solutions of all the questions, but instead just trying to improve your overall efficiency. For the quant section, I did read the
OG review, but as I already had a strong quant background, I thought it did not help much. Instead, I think the better way to go through the math concepts is by doing the exercises, then writing down those in which you forgot a simple math concept that undermined your capacity to answer the question quickly (do these notes on flashcards if it could help you). After many questions, you will not forget those concepts anymore. Regarding those hard questions where some creativity may be involved, some of them you will become better as more and more of the same will come, but some of them will still be hard. I think you should
not concern much about those few questions that you could not answer, they probably will not undermine much your score. I didn’t ever manage to get 51 during my practice, even when I just got 2 questions wrong on a practice exam (I don’t know if there must be a perfect 31/31 in order to get a 51, but I got 50 with a range of 2 to 5 wrong answers).
As I practice more and more, I became instinctively better at jumping to the correct answer on DS questions (I tended to resolve them entirely at the beginning), and at selecting those questions I could just test the results or the questions I was in trouble and it would be better doing a selected guess. I think the same will occur for every one of you who practice though several questions.
Just remember to always keep track of the time on your practices! Otherwise I think you could undermine your capacity to raise these test-specific skills. The same occurred for the Verbal section, as with the more time I practice, more I learned the patterns of SC, RC and CR. I still have a lot to improve on my grammar, but I manage to be better at noticing the patterns of SC.
As of December, I finished my undergraduate thesis and chose the date for the GMAT exam. With the target set, I ramp up my studies. First I took my second practice, which I scored 750 (49 Q, 42 V, 8 IR). After that, I started to take Quant and Verbal “simulations” at the same day, to build up stamina, as well as doing the IR questions of the
OG in some days. I also bought practice exams 3 through 6 on mba website. Switching the days of practicing with the
OG and with the practice exams, these were my results on the last 4 practice exams:
Jan - 2: 780 (50 Q, 49 V, 8 IR)
Jan – 6: 760 (50 Q, 42 V, 6 IR)
Jan – 9: 740 (50 Q, 39 V, 8 IR)
Jan – 11: 740 (49 Q, 41 V, 8 IR)
My exam date was January 15. I intentionally
left some days between my last day of practice and my exam in order to recover energy, as I was a little exhausted on my last days of practice (which could have contributed to the drop in the last two scores, or not).
At January 15, I took the official exam, and I scored 770 (50 Q, 45 V, 5 IR, 5 AWA).
By far, the biggest letdown of this role process for me was may IR score. As I managed to score 8 on 5 of 6 occasions during my practice exams (on 4 of those I had only 1 wrong answer), I had my worst day in this section on the official exam. I practiced for this sections with the 6 practice exams and the 74 questions on
OG. For the
OG practice, I approached in a similar way of what I was doing with verbal and quant, and selected random questions. From what I know, the IR section isn’t adaptive, but it must have a balance of hard/medium/questions and of the 4 types of questions it has. Looking back in my
OG practices (I took 1 of 14 questions and 5 of 12 questions), I also poorly performed in some of them (13/14, 7/12, 8/12, 8/12, 11/12, 9/12). So, my evaluation is that, despite of having a greater chance of scoring good on IR, the potential to lost the track in this section and having a major drop on my score was bigger than in the quant and verbal sections. Unfortunately, I had my worst performance of all in the official exam, which is leaving me in doubt of whether I should retake the exam or not. In case you notice a similar problem during your preparation,
I strongly advise to keep an extra attention of the time during this section.
For the AWA, I just practice by taking the 6 practice exams. I’m not a native english speaker and I’m not used to write a lot in english. As you can probably will notice by the many possible errors in this debrief, my AWA probably had some of them too. For those who, like me, are not so fluent on the language, I strong suggest to
take the practice exams AWA questions serious, in order to practice a little bit. The other recommendation I took was to
write as many as possible during the 30 minutes of this section. For those who are used to write in english, this could not be the case, but for me, who has to overthink a little bit in every sentence, much of the time is depleted in worrying of the grammar. So the only thing to do is overcompensate with a strong logic. I can’t be 100% sure, but I think that, if my AWA was evaluated concerning only the grammar aspects, it should be scored below 5.
That’s all my colleagues. I hope this could help some of you in achieving a better preparation. Best of luck for you all!
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Updated on: 21 Jan 2021, 18:27
