GMAT Prep Plan

Question

This is my first post on the forum! :-D

I'm in the fourth year of my Engineering degree and plan to do a Masters in Management from a great school. (HEC Paris, ESADE are my dream!) I have a 80% aggregate in undergrad until now.. I've taken the GRE recently and scored a 307 - 154Q,153V (mostly because I fell sick on the day of the exam

). I have a BEC Vantage certification of C1 according to the CEFR. Yet to take the TOEFL, though. I plan to give the GMAT for the first time towards the end of December. Most deadlines are in Feb/March and my finals would be in Feb/March as well, so it'll give me the whole of January to focus on applications. Here's my plan: I have the following material at my disposal- The Official Guide 2016, The verbal review 2016, The quantitative review 2016, all 9 Manhattan GMAT books(pdfs), the GMATprep and the GMATclub free tests. I am better at verbal than in quant, so I plan to first master the quant books of the MGMAT by the end of September. Then, go through the verbal books as fast as I can - that should happen by the first week of November.. (2nd week of Nov, semester finals

) And then, I'll give my first mock - one of the GMATprep ones. Then start off on the 3 OGs. I plan to complete it by the 3rd/4th week of November. The following weeks, I'll do the rest of the mocks, and review the books whenever I go wrong.. and re-do the questions from the OG as fast as I can. Right now, I'm brushing up on my basic problem solving. Doing too much calculus has weakened my PS-ability

I've also seen this 60-day study schedule by Beat The Gmat.. is that a good schedule to follow? Or is my idea better? I'd appreciate all the help I can get!

AjiteshArun · Answer

I'm a big fan of taking a mock early on. It doesn't have to be one of your best tests, or one of your adaptive tests (even the OG diagnostic test will do). At least that's what helps me when I sit down with students to discuss the way forward. Students  can  have a pretty accurate idea of their strengths and weaknesses, but more often than not, they end up underestimating the amount of effort required. Why don't you go through some of the basic concepts and then take the OG diagnostic one or two weeks from now?

aditisharmak · Answer

Thank you for your reply! 
I'll take the diagnostic tests for quant and verbal from the OG next week and report back here!

AjiteshArun · Answer

Keep building your plan and putting down any information that you can about your preparation and target score. That'll help others point out the areas in which you could consider doing something else. Once you take that diagnostic, you yourself will be in a better position to evaluate your plan.

aditisharmak · Answer

Thank you! I will.
Could you tell me what the best way to prepare for the math section is? Is the MGMAT enough? Because from what I saw, there weren't a lot of practice questions in them.

AjiteshArun · Answer

I should really ask one of our math instructors to weigh in on this (and you can PM instructors from different prep companies directly), but what I'm saying is that there is no one best way to prepare, no one plan that fits everyone. This is where your diagnostic test comes in. Let's say your (initial) plan is to spend a lot of time on the quantitative section, but then you take a diagnostic and it tells you that you're actually pretty good there, and that maybe you need to focus on verbal. That's not necessarily going to be the case. But having that additional information to base your plan on won't hurt, right

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi aditisharmak,

Before you took the GRE, how much studying did you do? If you know the basic math formulas/rules for Quant and are comfortable with RC and CR (from the GRE), then you should have the basic skills necessary to do okay on the GMAT.

I ask because it's important to take a FULL-LENGTH CAT early on in your GMAT studies and your plan does not account for that. That first CAT is really about establishing a 'baseline' score and defining your personal strengths and weaknesses. Without those results, you'll have no idea if you're actually focused on the proper subjects or how much you might be improving. As such, I highly recommend that you download the 2 free CATs from www.mba.com and plan to take one of them (including the Essay and IR sections) sometime soon. Once you have those score results, you should post back here.

1) What is your goal score?
2) When are you planning on taking the TOEFL?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

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