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29 Aug 2018, 12:16
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My GMAT Experience
I've been lurking here since I started my journey 3 months ago. I felt like I owed a debrief because of how much value and inspiration that these forums gave me. I'm a CS recent grad and American-Born Indian. I work for a startup in a product role and am looking towards business school in 3-4 years. I had about an hour or so each day and about 6-7 hours each weekend.
My Journey:
I started at the beginning of June, I read over the intro mgmat book but didn't really understand what I was getting myself into.
I took a manhattan Gmat exam as a diagnostic feeling fairly confident and got a 640 (Q38, V38, IR6.6) on 6/2/18
I buckled down and worked through the gmat books in about 2.5 weeks
Took another MGMAT practice exam and got a 670 (Q44, V37, IR6.6) on 6/15/18. Unhappy with that. I thought it might be because I was not used to the exam.
So I took another one after going through problems in the official guide. Got a 670 again (Q42,V39, IR5.9) on 6/30/18
Took my last manhattan gmat practice exam on 7/13/18 and got a 710 (Q44,V42, IR6.6) which made me feel better and felt like I was improving.
In Mid to late July, I had 3-4 weekend trips in a row which really slowed me down on my gmat prep studying. At the same time, it might have been necessary to stop myself from burning out and it seems like it might have improved my score anyway.
I moved over to Gmatclub and tried the quant and verbal cats a day apart and got Q47 and V39. This made me feel like my quant was in a good place even though I felt like Iw as still getting the same amount of questions wrong. So I still did a good amount of questions but I went in on the verbal questions on gmatclub (really wish there were more though i know that the focus for gmatclub is quant)
Took my first gmatprep exam and got a 730 (Q49, V41) on 8/4/18. I thought the online was broken so downloaded it then found out that the online was working fine and wanting to take the shorter version i switched over (big mistake).
I saw a few repeats that I didn't remember the answer for but mostly clean got a 760 (Q50, V44) on 8/17/18. That felt great but I really wanted to improve that verbal
I took the 2nd gmatprep exam on 8/25/18 expecting it to be fully clean. Did the quant and then the software broke and it pushed me past the verbal but I got a Q49 then reset it so that I could take the verbal properly but it made ti so all the questions I had seen during the first verbal came back up again which meant that I got a V45 but it was really not earned and I still got 3-4 of the same problems wrong! In hindsight, the smartest choice would have been to bite the bullet and buy the 3rd+4th exams after seeing all the repeats in the previous exam)
Test Day
I went in on August 29th, Was feeling pretty bad, woke up at 4am and was having some diarrhea. Started with quant, I started worrying that the questions were too easy. When I went to take my break, I lost track of time on the toilet and lost 3 minutes. Verbal was also easier than I expected and I got worried because I kept seeing really short SC sentences.
IR was very easy (esp. compared to manhattan prep) and the essay was a little stressful as I did not prep much.
I got 740 (Q46, V45, IR8). I was immediately unhappy because I knew I could have done much better on quant. At the same time, I realize that this is a good score. It just feels like I left a few points on the table.
I'm debating whether or not to take the gmat again. 740 is a good score, but I plan to apply to GSB/HBS in 3-4 years and my quant score left a bad taste in my mouth.
If I take the gmat again, I plan to do very little prep. I will do enough verbal to keep my score up and drill myself only on gmatclub problems and get myself used to answering harder questions. I bought the ESR as I just can't not know and I'll update as soon as its available.
Study Materials Advice:
ManhattanPrep is great especially for building that foundation of subject material. However, the tests will make you feel like you're not improving a lot because of how difficult the quant is.
GMATClub Tests - The verbal questions could use some work and it would be nice if there were 100-200 more. The quant is gold.
BRUTAL SC is a great sc question pack.
All GMATPrep Questions, useful but don't do it until you finish the gmatprep exams.
GMATClub Grammar Book - it was valuable in giving me confidence that I knew the rules for SC but its really meant for bringing your verbal score from 20 to 40. To go further requires way more nuance and focus on meaning
This forum has so much value and I owe everyone here for being a part of it. Every time I got something wrong, I would check the official answer and then I would check GmatClub because I knew that Bunuel or BB had a shortcut or a different way to understand it.
In hindsight, I went overboard on doing questions. At the beginning, I felt like I didn't have enough datapoint to know what to focus on but that meant that I really didn't review my wrong ones as intensely as I should have. I would give a cursory view at the wrong answers (and say in my head, oh I get it) and move on. In reality, the is more efficient to focus on the mistakes you have in front of you rather than go through a ton of fodder material to build up your mistake pile and then go through to learn from your mistakes.
Subject Based Advice
1. Critical Reasoning - Find one framework such as how ManhattanGmat does it and work with it for a while to get used to questions. Do a ton of CR problems and for each problem that you get wrong, look at the explanation for each answer choice so that you get used to understanding when to discount answer choices. CR is all about narrowing down the options to what makes sense and what is relevant to the problem at hand.
2. Reading Comprehension - Not too much advice to give as I am a big reader which helps a lot. I would say to make sure that any answer you give has a direct match in the passage. What might help someone struggling here is speed read an article while timing yourself, write a summary, and then go back and read the passage fully to see what you comprehended right.
3. Sentence Correction - I went through manhattangmat and I just couldn't get the grammar rules to stick. I went the the gmatclub grammar book with all the exercises as well. I also did the Brutal SC set. I think I had a generally good grasp of most of the common issues except for modfiers/logical predication. For that, I had to force myself to slow down and reread my answer before moving on to the next question.
4. Problem Solving - Really struggled to improve here. Just drilled through tons of questions and tried to focus on mistakes I made over and over again. Really take advantage of GMATClub tests and forum conversations
5. Data Sufficiency - There is tons of strategy here. At first, I would tackle these like PS problems but that tends to be really slow. One thing that helped me speed up and learn strategies was doing GMATClub 500-level data sufficiency questions without using a notebook. This forced me to rely on the logic of the question and what was given to me to figure out the answer rather than letting me brute force solve the problem.
I've been lurking here since I started my journey 3 months ago. I felt like I owed a debrief because of how much value and inspiration that these forums gave me. I'm a CS recent grad and American-Born Indian. I work for a startup in a product role and am looking towards business school in 3-4 years. I had about an hour or so each day and about 6-7 hours each weekend.
My Journey:
I started at the beginning of June, I read over the intro mgmat book but didn't really understand what I was getting myself into.
I took a manhattan Gmat exam as a diagnostic feeling fairly confident and got a 640 (Q38, V38, IR6.6) on 6/2/18
I buckled down and worked through the gmat books in about 2.5 weeks
Took another MGMAT practice exam and got a 670 (Q44, V37, IR6.6) on 6/15/18. Unhappy with that. I thought it might be because I was not used to the exam.
So I took another one after going through problems in the official guide. Got a 670 again (Q42,V39, IR5.9) on 6/30/18
Took my last manhattan gmat practice exam on 7/13/18 and got a 710 (Q44,V42, IR6.6) which made me feel better and felt like I was improving.
In Mid to late July, I had 3-4 weekend trips in a row which really slowed me down on my gmat prep studying. At the same time, it might have been necessary to stop myself from burning out and it seems like it might have improved my score anyway.
I moved over to Gmatclub and tried the quant and verbal cats a day apart and got Q47 and V39. This made me feel like my quant was in a good place even though I felt like Iw as still getting the same amount of questions wrong. So I still did a good amount of questions but I went in on the verbal questions on gmatclub (really wish there were more though i know that the focus for gmatclub is quant)
Took my first gmatprep exam and got a 730 (Q49, V41) on 8/4/18. I thought the online was broken so downloaded it then found out that the online was working fine and wanting to take the shorter version i switched over (big mistake).
I saw a few repeats that I didn't remember the answer for but mostly clean got a 760 (Q50, V44) on 8/17/18. That felt great but I really wanted to improve that verbal
I took the 2nd gmatprep exam on 8/25/18 expecting it to be fully clean. Did the quant and then the software broke and it pushed me past the verbal but I got a Q49 then reset it so that I could take the verbal properly but it made ti so all the questions I had seen during the first verbal came back up again which meant that I got a V45 but it was really not earned and I still got 3-4 of the same problems wrong! In hindsight, the smartest choice would have been to bite the bullet and buy the 3rd+4th exams after seeing all the repeats in the previous exam)
Test Day
I went in on August 29th, Was feeling pretty bad, woke up at 4am and was having some diarrhea. Started with quant, I started worrying that the questions were too easy. When I went to take my break, I lost track of time on the toilet and lost 3 minutes. Verbal was also easier than I expected and I got worried because I kept seeing really short SC sentences.
IR was very easy (esp. compared to manhattan prep) and the essay was a little stressful as I did not prep much.
I got 740 (Q46, V45, IR8). I was immediately unhappy because I knew I could have done much better on quant. At the same time, I realize that this is a good score. It just feels like I left a few points on the table.
I'm debating whether or not to take the gmat again. 740 is a good score, but I plan to apply to GSB/HBS in 3-4 years and my quant score left a bad taste in my mouth.
If I take the gmat again, I plan to do very little prep. I will do enough verbal to keep my score up and drill myself only on gmatclub problems and get myself used to answering harder questions. I bought the ESR as I just can't not know and I'll update as soon as its available.
Study Materials Advice:
ManhattanPrep is great especially for building that foundation of subject material. However, the tests will make you feel like you're not improving a lot because of how difficult the quant is.
GMATClub Tests - The verbal questions could use some work and it would be nice if there were 100-200 more. The quant is gold.
BRUTAL SC is a great sc question pack.
All GMATPrep Questions, useful but don't do it until you finish the gmatprep exams.
GMATClub Grammar Book - it was valuable in giving me confidence that I knew the rules for SC but its really meant for bringing your verbal score from 20 to 40. To go further requires way more nuance and focus on meaning
This forum has so much value and I owe everyone here for being a part of it. Every time I got something wrong, I would check the official answer and then I would check GmatClub because I knew that Bunuel or BB had a shortcut or a different way to understand it.
In hindsight, I went overboard on doing questions. At the beginning, I felt like I didn't have enough datapoint to know what to focus on but that meant that I really didn't review my wrong ones as intensely as I should have. I would give a cursory view at the wrong answers (and say in my head, oh I get it) and move on. In reality, the is more efficient to focus on the mistakes you have in front of you rather than go through a ton of fodder material to build up your mistake pile and then go through to learn from your mistakes.
Subject Based Advice
1. Critical Reasoning - Find one framework such as how ManhattanGmat does it and work with it for a while to get used to questions. Do a ton of CR problems and for each problem that you get wrong, look at the explanation for each answer choice so that you get used to understanding when to discount answer choices. CR is all about narrowing down the options to what makes sense and what is relevant to the problem at hand.
2. Reading Comprehension - Not too much advice to give as I am a big reader which helps a lot. I would say to make sure that any answer you give has a direct match in the passage. What might help someone struggling here is speed read an article while timing yourself, write a summary, and then go back and read the passage fully to see what you comprehended right.
3. Sentence Correction - I went through manhattangmat and I just couldn't get the grammar rules to stick. I went the the gmatclub grammar book with all the exercises as well. I also did the Brutal SC set. I think I had a generally good grasp of most of the common issues except for modfiers/logical predication. For that, I had to force myself to slow down and reread my answer before moving on to the next question.
4. Problem Solving - Really struggled to improve here. Just drilled through tons of questions and tried to focus on mistakes I made over and over again. Really take advantage of GMATClub tests and forum conversations
5. Data Sufficiency - There is tons of strategy here. At first, I would tackle these like PS problems but that tends to be really slow. One thing that helped me speed up and learn strategies was doing GMATClub 500-level data sufficiency questions without using a notebook. This forced me to rely on the logic of the question and what was given to me to figure out the answer rather than letting me brute force solve the problem.
29 Aug 2018, 16:32
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Scoopdewoop
First of all congratulations for the stellar score. V45 is truly amazing.
Can you please throw some light on Timing strategies that you followed for Quant/Verbal.
Regards
Akadiyan
Posted from my mobile device
First of all congratulations for the stellar score. V45 is truly amazing.
Can you please throw some light on Timing strategies that you followed for Quant/Verbal.
Regards
Akadiyan
Posted from my mobile device
31 Aug 2018, 10:54
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Bookmarks
Congrats Scoopdewoop on this wonderful score. Also, welcome to GMATClub!
I am certain it must be difficult to accept a score of Q46 and IMO, the Quant section is probably
the easiest section to improve as far as GMAT is concerned. I think your plan of taking the exam
again is perfect, especially since you plan to apply to business school in the next 3-4 years.
If you bump your Quant score to a Q49, this will help you push your overall score to around 770
which is a 99th percentile overall. This is a post which I think you should look at when you begin
your preparation for Quant - https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-impro ... 41670.html
All the best and do post your ESR on this thread once you have it.
I am certain it must be difficult to accept a score of Q46 and IMO, the Quant section is probably
the easiest section to improve as far as GMAT is concerned. I think your plan of taking the exam
again is perfect, especially since you plan to apply to business school in the next 3-4 years.
If you bump your Quant score to a Q49, this will help you push your overall score to around 770
which is a 99th percentile overall. This is a post which I think you should look at when you begin
your preparation for Quant - https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-impro ... 41670.html
All the best and do post your ESR on this thread once you have it.
