My GMAT journey (2 months prep) and Result (760, Q50, V44)

Question

I am pleased to share my GMAT experience and hopefully somone will find useful information here as I found from a lot of debriefs in this forum.

Background:   33 M Indian, Native language - Hindi, B.Tech. from IT-BHU, 10+ years of IT work ex, PMP certified project manager.

Preparation time:   2 months from May 2012 to Jun 2012 with 4 - 8 hrs a day. I quit my full time and well paying job in April 2012 to pursue MBA from a good institute. It was a tough deision with lots on stake but I just decided to give it a solid try. I am happy that the first step, GMAT, is well done but it is still a long way to go.

Prep material:   GMATClub helped me decide on which books and other resources are good and how people in general plan for the prep. My prep included:

SC - Manhattan, Powerscore, SC Grail, GMAT Club Grammar book
CR - Powerscore
RC - No book, but practised questions from RC99 and OG13.

Ron Purewal's free video lessons - great resource. I saw only few of these videos as I found them only in the last week of my prep but if you have time, go through all of them.

Quant - Manhattan, Abhijit Guha (Few topics), Jeff Sackman Extreme challenge

IR - Manhattan Book, free workshop video, and mba.com & OG 13 online questions.

OG 13, Verbal and Quant OGs V2.

Test Results:   dates are in dd/mm/yyyy format

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT1 03/05/2012 Q45 (18 wrong) V32 (12 wrong) 640 - It was before I started the prep to get the feel and judge my level.

MGMAT CAT1 12/06/2012 Q47 (15 wrong) V38 (14 wrong) 700 - IR (4-6)

MGMAT CAT2 15/06/2012 Q47 (17 wrong) V40 (14 wrong) 710 - No IR

MGMAT CAT3 21/06/2012 Q49 (8 wrong) V40 (11 wrong) 730 - IR (3-5)

Powerprep CAT1 date ??? Q50 V44 770 - lot of overlap from OG, but still a good test

Powerprep CAT2 date ??? Q51 V44 770 - lot of overlap from OG, but still a good test

Veritasprep CAT 24/06/2012 Q49 (6 wrong) V46 (5 wrong) 730 - No IR

Princeton CAT 27/06/2012 Q51 (4 wrong) V47 (10 wrongs) 780 - IR-16 (this IR score does not make sense!)

Kaplan CAT 26/06/2012 Q?? V?? 740 - IR 7 (I do not recall and cannot access the breakup now)

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT2 28/06/2012 Q50 (8 wrong) V38 (13 wrong) 730

GMATPrep 2.0 CAT1 01/07/2012 Q51 (4 wrong) V47 (5 wrong) - 780 repeat test with some repeat questions

GMATPrep 1.0 CAT1 date??? Q?? V?? 770 - some repeats from GMATPrep 2.0

MGMAT CAT4 02/07/2012 Q47 (15 wrong) V45 (10 wrong) 740 - IR (1-2)

MGMAT CAT5 06/07/2012 Q51 (5 wrong) V45 (8 wrong) 780 - IR (2-4)

MGMAT CAT6 07/07/2012 Q51 (2 wrong) V42 (8 wrong) 760 - IR (4-5)

Actual GMAT 09/07/2012 Q50 V44 760 - IR - 8, AWA - 5.5 (IR, AWA rcvd. on 25-Jul)

I also tried free tests from GMAT club and they were good help.

MGMAT IR in general is not representative of actual GMAT IR. Actual GMAT IR is not as time consuming as MGMAT IR, otherwise MGMAT CATs are very good for quant and verbal. My last MGMAT CAT score is same as my real GMAT score.

Reflections on and lessons from the prep and tests:

I have good quant skills but after after 10 years of job, I needed to put some effort to prepare for GMAT quant. The GMAT quant is a pretty good test of concepts, application, accuracy and speed. I went through all the Manhattan quant guides completely once and these books are good. I used Abhijit's Guha quant book for Permutation, Combination and some Geometry stuff. I solved all OG 13 and Qunat OG problems with time constraint.

Unlike some other guys, I never found extra time on a quant section of a test. At best, I found the 75 mins adequate to finish the section on time. 
MGMAT CAT quant is tough to complete in 75 mins.

I am not a native English speaker, so I needed to put extra effort in Verbal. I started with Sentence Correction and spent most of my verbal prep time in SC. I had 80 - 90 % accuracy in OG, SC Grail problems, MGMAT CATs but to my horror I had 60 % SC accuracy in GMAT prep test, Kaplan test and Princeton test. I learnt my lesson and started to focus on RC and CR as well and I found my holy grail of verbal. After improving on these two areas, I was able to raise my verbal score to 45 in last 3 MGMAT CATs and 44 in the actual GMAT. I am a slow reader but I kind of memorize the passage after one read and it worked well for me. Even if I took 4 - 5 mins for long passages, I needed only 30 t0 40 secs to answer each question. Contrary to popular opinion, I benifited much more from RC and CR with little effort than from SC with lot of effort. My advice to prospective test takers is to analyse your trade offs well. For RC please pay attention to the twisted sentences, because they are good targets to frame a question from. Even if you need to read these sentences twice, do so to understand exactly what the heck they mean. For CR, powerscore book is awesome ! Learn and use the techniques such as , reverse causality, assumption negation, variance test on evaluate, etc.

Some advice for prospective test takers:   Understanding timing consideration in GMAT is very important. Learning to quit and guess after a time limit (say 3 mins on a question) is very important. Also focus on the question at hand, do not think about the past question or the remaining questions or anything else for that matter. If you are not focused, you can mistake precent by for percent to, overlook or assume number properties ( interger, odd, even, positive etc.), miss important words in CR like some, most, never, etc. I limited my liquid intake during test not to be distracted by an urge to go to rest room during a section as I had this issue during practise tests. Some people advise drinking glucose, etc but pay attention to how it affects you during the pratice tests and see what works for you. The test does take a toll on your mind when you reach verbal, so build your stamina of enduring this test for 4 hours.

IR experience on real GMAT: As I am a slow reader, I had issues of timing on this section in GMAT Prep or MGMAT but the real GMAT IR was easy. Unfortunately I had 2 MSR prompts ( 6 questions in total from MSR) and the second MSR had big passages on two tabs so I had to guess on the second MSR prompt but I had a good attempt on the rest of the 9 questions.

Finally, thanks to the GMAT Club and other forum members to be a great source of inspiration, information and fun. I hope that I can contribute more here now. I have attached a basic spreadsheet with my plan of study.

Viru · Answer

Congrats Kaps !!!

I plan to write GMAT in next 2-3 months ..thanks for the study plan ..!! Will be very helpful

Cheers ..

anordinaryguy · Answer

Congratulations Kaps07 !!!, You are surely on your way (pursue MBA from a good institute)....

Kaps07 · Answer

Thank you guys for the wishes ! I thought to add few more details: Pearson Test Center in Delhi: This is near AIIMS and I visited the place one day before the exam. There is no parking place around the center. I had to park my car about 600 mtrs away from the center on roadside because there was no other option. The test center is small, has about 10 seats and just one toilet :shock:

. This center should have better facilities. Staff at the center was good. I am still not sure about the overall process of taking breaks and resuming tests, because as soon as the PC is unlocked after the break the next session starts. I am sure that I returned in less than 5 minutes to my seat in each break but still found the next session running as soon as the PC was unlocked. I did not bother to ask but it is worth checking if you want to utilise all 8 mins of your break time. Selecting 5 schools to report score on the GMAT day: It is a simple select from the drop downs and fairly easy. You can check the samething on mba.com. Decide on these schools before the GMAT day. Stupidly enough, I forgot one of the 5 schools I wanted to send the scores and selected 1 different school

, which was lower on my priority. Anyway it is not the end of the world and I will have to pay a fee to send that extra score now. Report or cancel score screen: Do not cancel you score unless you have very very good idea that you screwed up. Strangely, the report or cancel score screen says that your score will be canceled if you do not make a selection in 2 mins. I think the default should be to report the score. So be careful not to loose your score after all the hardwork because of pondering over what to do at that time. AWA: I owe it to chineseburned on GMATclub to know exactly what to do with AWA. Simply follow the template and write essay in each of your practise test. Decorate your sentences with modifiers, adjectives, etc. Aim to write no less than 350 words. I think I managed to write about 400 words with 20 words per sentence on average .

anuragbytes · Answer

This is amazing, congrats !!
How do you rate the GMAT CRs with the OGs were they comparable or GMAT's were tougher?
For SC, were you able to identify the pattern , which lot of people claim to do?

Kaps07 · Answer

Anurag, I think the OG CR is very good representation of the CR questions that I got in the real exam. I cannot say the same for SC. I thought the SC questions that I got in the exam were more about style than meaning or grammar because at least couple of choices on each question were alright in grammar and meaning to me. There were patterns and splits but not good enough to narrow down the right answer only with the known splits. For example, initial contrasting modifier should be followed with the parallel thing but couple of choices will have that fixed and then you have to find something else more obscure to find the final answer. In OG problems there are blantant errors most of the times in the wrong choices, but I could not find the same in the real exam. Perhaps, a native English speaker would know better.

For CR what worked well for me was - reading stimulus first, understanding the conclusion, reading the question stem, prephrasing the answer in the scope of the stimulus and then reading answer choices one by one to match my prephrasing or find better answer choice. The OG covers good number of examples of all possible types of questions. Unlike some mock tests, real exam does not contain a mere spin off of OG questions, but the techiques and the question types are standard. For example, if the argument claims that lower level of a harmone causes a disease, you can expect to see the revesre causality in the answer choices of a weaken the argument question.

M23A · Answer

Congratulation on a great score! Can you talk a little bit about the RC that you saw on the real test? Are they comparable to the RC that you did during the mock tests and OG? Thanks.

Kaps07 · Answer

Yes, RC passages on my real exam were similar to the mock ones or OG ones. I got 3 short passages (2 paras) and one long ( 4 paras). There were passages about social science, ecology, business and science. All passages were easy read but the questions had closely contesting answer choices that needed careful selection; they were very close to MGMAT CAT ones. During my early days of prep, I found a difference in OG RC and MGMAT CAT RC that MGMAT RC answer choices were hard to eliminate ,i.e., very minute and subtle difference among correct and worng choices, while the OG answer choices were clear cut.

As I said in my original post, RC is a good area to score. You have everything given to you in the passage to answer correctly. All you need to do is read and infer. To pick the right answer on RC, you need to exactly match the answer choice with the passage. If the answer choice says that author has contrasted one new theory with an old controversial theory with help of two examples, you must find something in the passage saying or sugeesting that there are two theroies discussed, one is new and other one is old, they contrast each other, the older one is controversial and there are exactly two examples given. If any of this is not true, the answer choice is not correct. For example, the passage says people in general believe bla bla bla.... the right answer choice will have a keyword "popular belief".

anuragbytes · Answer

Thanks Kaps for the reply.What about quant.Were they comparable to MGMAT cats or more tougher?

Posted from my mobile device

Kaps07 · Answer

Quant was comparable to MGMAT CAT 5 and 6 with mix of easy and tough questions. MGMAT CAT 1 - 4 quant is skewed on the tougher side. Though experimental question (as I guessed them to be) on the real exam can be real tough. There were couple of really twisted questions. I got lured into spending about 4 -5 mins on one to solve but on the next one I just guessed in few seconds because it was a geometry question which required 3D imagination of an object unravelling in 2D; I strongly believe that it was an experimental one, even if it wasn't I was never going to solve it in time limit.

kblade · Answer

Thanks for sharing, I'm also planning to study about 2 months although I will be working full time and not quitting my job. That took some guts !

pawanchopra · Answer

Hi Guys,

I have just started preparing for GMAT, hopefully planning to give in 3 months time. I have enrolled myself into Magoosh course. Any advice as to how to improve on CR section as I am really struggling with it even after having completed 2 rounds of online lessons.

Thanks and good luck to everyone.

Zynga · Answer

Congrats on that fantastic score!!

Kaps07 · Answer

Good luck. If you plan to study while having a full time job, you may want to increase the prep time from 2 to 3 months. Your choice but I found 2 months adequate even with 4 - 8 hrs daily study. Perhaps, I took too many CATs but they did help a lot.

I found Powerscore CR bible to be of great help. Read slowly and carefully and deconstruct the argument into different pieces among which the most important is the conclusion. Take a moment to fit all pieces into logical sequence and relationship. While studying do not think about time limit until you are clear with the concept. Speed will come later but the accuracy is more important initially.

Thanks Zynga, I saw your blog and it is great. You have put together some very good information such as idiom table in your blog. Bravo !

mneeti · Answer

Hey, thanks alot for sharing your experience and building our courage !!

jerembo · Answer

Great post, Kaps! Thanks for sharing your experiences and congrats on the great score! Where are you applying?

Kaps07 · Answer

Thanks. I am still doing ground work on the complete list of schools to apply. On the day of GMAT, I selected 1 year executive MBAs from Indian Institue of Managements (IIM) and Indian Scool of Business (ISB) to send scores to. I am now finding more about my prospects at Top US schools. My more than normal average work ex and age, and program costs are some of the concerns that I need to sort out.

ghaint · Answer

Great debrief!!! Congrats and best of luck for the application process...

AbhiJ · Answer

Can you suggest how you analysed the tests and what you studied in between.

Kaps07 · Answer

After the 1st diagnostic test, I took 5 weeks to complete the study guides and many of the OG problems. Later after each CAT, I looked into details of the explanations of all the questions regardless of whether I was right or wrong on that question. I wrote down few notes from new learnings such as grow up to is not right, grow to is right, by 1945 (or any time reference) + past perfect is alright, etc. MGMAT provides a great option of exporting your CAT details into an excel sheet. It helped me analyse in detail by applying excel filters on question type, difficulty, time taken etc. I paid attention to how I paced myself in a CAT by looking at Cumm Time and Target Cumm Time columns and resolved to improve any glaring overruns. I completed reaming OG problems, or other sources in between CATs. If I found errors concentration in a particular area, I tried to improve that before attempting next CAT.

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My GMAT journey (2 months prep) and Result (760, Q50, V44)

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