Here's the promised post about preparation.
After investigating top business schools, I realized that I needed a 700+ score to have any assured chances of getting into the Ultra Elite schools. Since I had recently quit my job I decided not to pick up any new roles till I had finished the GMAT. I also realized that aiming for 750+ is probably not worthwhile, given that I can only survive for a month or so without any income, however 700-750 was realistic.
I got the following books :
Barrons (a really old edition borrowed from a friend)
Kaplan 800
McGraw Hill
Princeton Review
OG 11th Edition
OG Maths (Green one)
OG Verbal (Purple one)
This was all BEFORE I discovered the Gmat club. After discovering the GMAT club, I got the following :
-All the notes from "sergey_is_cool" (thanks sergey they were extremely useful).
-A software called GMatter.
Initially, I found the maths very easy. The first 100 or so questions in the
OG were not even worth doing. The data sufficiency questions were slightly trickier since it is easy to make silly errors in those.
The CR and RC were so so, but I was absolutely hopeless at sentence correction. I knew I had to improve in several areas if I were to achieve a 700+ score.
A note to any aspiring GMAT taker. You do not have to be very smart to be good at GMAT. I would consider myself in the 70th percentile as far as general intelligence is concerned. I only did 3 things that helped me get a good score : practice, practice and more practice.
I worked though Barrons (which is not the best book IMHO). Then I worked through Kaplan 800. It is a surprisingly useful book, when compared to all the other rubbish that Kaplan has produced. My first trial test on a Kaplan CAT was 590 which I thought was utter rubbish.
Then finally I worked through the OGs . I must have gone through 4000+ questions in the first month, and by about the 3rd of that month, I started recognizing sentence correction patterns. Generally an elimination strategy works really well.
I also found marking SC questions that I got incorrect initially, then reading the grammatical concept behind it and then revisiting the question and trying to solve it correctly in 2 weeks time, very useful.
I was doing all this work on my laptop. Two weeks into my preparation, my laptop got stolen. That was the absolute low point of my preparation. I lost a lot of preparation material that I had conjured. I was extremely unmotivated to do the test, thereafter. But thanks to encouragement of my friends and people on this forum, I persevered.
Then I ran through the OGs and eventually took the GmatPrep test 1. Scored 680. Close but no cigar. This was the first time that I took the test simulating real conditions (i.e. 9am start , full AWAs , only 5 minute breaks). This was when it occurred to me that GMAT is as much a test of mental endurance as it is of your Maths and verbal abilities.
Being a programmer and an avid runner, mental marathons are not new to me, so I was able to get used to a 3.5 hour test fairly quickly and did all my future CATs in "full" mode. Those who are not used to staring at the screen and providing focused concentration at a long stretch, better get used to doing so before taking the test.
After the first GmatPrep test, I discovered that my biggest problems lay in Sentence correction and Data sufficiency. This was strange to me, as by this time I was able to answer 80% of SC's correctly on average, while practicing from books.
I realized that taking the test while looking at the computer screen is different from doing the same question from a book. For some reason, I am more "comfortable" reading out of a book. For this reason, GMatter software was invaluable, since it helped me run through an enormous number of verbal question on the screen.
By this time I was actively participating in the forum as well. Then with 2 weeks left to go for the test, I decided to do GmatPrep2. I scored 710 in that. I knew I was close to being ready. The next few days I just did CATs and eventually scored 740 in GmatPrep1. This was just one week before the actual test. Of course I knew that my actual ability was a little less, since I could identify several questions especially in the Verbal section straight from the
OG.
I knew that I was nearly there. The last week was spent just relaxing, posting on the forum and just reading up on some of the really advanced concepts (like modulus maths, probabilities and combinatorics). Although, I did not need to utilize any of these concepts on the test, because I did not do the maths part of the test quite so well (refer to my earlier posts for details on that).
What happened after that can be found on my earlier post about today
.