Dear Fellow GMATClub Members,
Shubho Nobo Borsho [
in Bangla], Happy New Year! New Year's (Bangla) Greetings to all of you!
A little background about me: I want to enroll myself into a top-30 b-school. My professional experience might not talk about me that much highly compared to theirs who have work-experiences in, for instance, Fortune500 companies. Yet, I want to give my MBA application package (in 2013) the best combo possible for me. So, I want to compensate, at least, that gap with my GMAT score.
What's going on between GMAT and Me: I have been prepping for GMAT with my '
best' effort, so far, for last 4 months. I am going to have REAL '
cage-fight' with the GMAT on May 27th, 2012. As my signature below suggests, I have been fortunate enough to push my GMAT Score from 490 to a steady 640-650 up until now (please, see my signature below for a detailed listing of my CAT scores. Just so you know, in last grockit CAT I got - Q48, V32, 650). As with everybody in this forum, I also want to put myself outside my
comfort zone to get an even higher score in GMAT. I am shooting for 700; at least, an extrapolation from my existing scoring data will not rule out (I hope) such an aim.
I study for 5-6 hours daily with one day-off each week. I give more time in reading/understanding the answer explanation of a GMAT question than I give time in actually attempting them. Till now, I focused on one area (quant or verbal) before moving to another; from now on, as I have completed both, I will juggle between them on and off. I keep track of all my answers. I used to use
Error Log at the beginning of my prep, but stopped using it as I used
OG Archer from
MGMAT. I took notes from all the video lessons I have watched. I haven't prepared my own flashcards. I time myself every time I attempt a GMAT question. I follow experts advises from GMATClub.com, BeatTheGMAT.com, and
MGMAT fourms on different topics/issues. I love to read the debriefs from successful GMAT fighters.
Resources I have been using for last 4 months:
Official Resources:
OG12e [completed except for RC part, which will be done in 3 days]; QR2e [completed once]; VR2e [completed except for RC part, which will be done in 3 days]; OG10e [completed the quant part; not using that much as I suspect most of the questions can also found in the GMATPrep]
GMATPrep (new) [have not gave a shot yet]; GMATPrep (old) [have taken only the 1st test to find my baseline before I began prepping for GMAT]
Extracted question sets from GMATPrep (around 1400 questions) [will complete after I take my 2 tests using GMATPrep and before I go for the 'cage-fight']
GMAT Question Pack # 1 [yet to start]
GMAT Paper Tests (9 tests) [completed all the math questions; yet to begin the verbal part]
Third Party Resources:
MGMAT Strategy guides (8-book set) 4th edition [went through quant books at least twice and verbal books once]
Kaplan Premier 2011 [used only to get overall idea about GMAT]
Princeton Review 1,012 questions [only SC question sets are attempted]
Grockit GMAT (Online test banks) [using very occasionally, mostly when lying down; used for their CATs where I scored around 640-650]
GMATClub Tests [completed 2 tests yet; one with 53th %-ile and the other with 80th %-ile]
MGMAT OG Archer
MGMAT Advanced GMAT Quant [yet to start]
GMAT Hacks Total GMAT Math [completed twice]
PowerPrep CR Bible [1st 8 chapters; answered half of the exercises wrong; not follow the "read the stimulus first then question stem" instruction]
Doing Grammar [not yet started; maybe, no time will be left for it]
Video Resources:
Thursdays With Ron [watched all the episodes till date except for the RC related ones]
HorseGMAT Clips (Horacio Quiroga of
MGMAT) [not yet watched]
GMAT Prep Now Clips [watched all the free videos]
Non-GMAT Resources:
Articles from TheEconomist, NYTimes, LATimes, ScientificAmerican, HarvardMagazine, UChicagoMagazine, ScienceMagazine [to read monotonous yet GMAT-like reads]
Grapes of Wrath [reading as pastime and to increase reading speed]
What's going OK: Average quant raw score is between 47 and 50, inclusive.
Overall timing strategy.
4-hour long GMAT-CAT stamina.
Not yet gone
INSANE.
Major problems/concerns:
Quant:
Combinatorics, Probability, XY-plane, and Word problems are my areas of concern.
Verbal:
RC [timing issues. Although I understand that details of a passage are are be skimmed, yet regularly finding myself in drilling trough them. When I give 5-6 minutes to grasp a 300-word passage, my score rises and vice-versa.]
CR [Major issues in Assumption and Weakening problems. Big-size, I mean 300 words including the answer options, problems take me 2.5 minutes on average and never below 2 minutes. Inverse relations between time and score.]
SC [Sometimes doing well, I mean 80%< correct, and sometimes doing bad, 60%> correct. Trouble in verb, pronoun, and modifiers. Become afraid whenever see a fully underlined questions that are usually big in size]
AWA+Q+V:
I do better, comparatively speaking, when I do specific attacks on different topics of CR/SC However, when I juggle between them, specially as in CATs, I happen to score lower.
Often times, I feel that I involve myself 'too seriously' with the questions when taking CATs. I seldom remember to keep a 'fake' smile during the CATs.
Why I wrote this post/message?: With roughly more than 1 month in hand, I request to the experts or to whom have already experienced a
real cage-fight with GMAT to share some handy-advices/strategies that will help me break the 700-barrier. I see that although my GMAT score increased from 490 to 640-650, my verbal raw score has been improved very marginally (what I contribute mostly to lack of strategic approach). I believe that my potential in verbal is still less utilized by me .
Hence, I am will be really grateful if you folks come up with some sort of advises on the following queries --
What can I do more to give another push to my score from 650 to lower 700s?
Which part of my preparation is not going right? How can I get it right?
Which part of my preparation is going OK and you suggest me to stick with till the end?
I am also open to any other constructive suggestions/advises that will help me pave a road to 700s.
Wish me luck!Shubhechchha (regards),
Schawjibb