GMAT Preparation

Question

Hi Folks,

My name is Vivek Singh and I am from India.
I may be asking the most boring and most common question "How to prepare For GMAT".
I will just give some background information about myself.
I am a software developer, spending 9+ hours in office.I have done Engineering, but still i feel my quant is not that great.
I have zero idea about the GMAT exam like how many questions are asked in quant or in verbal basically I am at zero level.

I am looking for the advice on below points
1. How much time it will take on average for me to prepare for GMAT exam?
2. What should be the starting point for my preparation.
3. How much initial hour should i Invest so that I can score 700+ in my first attempt?
4. Which study material should I use to start my preparation?
5. Any site or links that I can use throughout my preparation to ask and clarify my doubt?
6. Apart form Official Guide, what will be the other resources that i will require during my preparation,
7. I am planning to take GMAT first attempt in the month of August.Is it possible for me being a beginner starting from April can achieve 700+ marks in GMAT?

Please help me out in finding the answer. I request the community to guide me so that I can achieve the score of 700+

Gmatsaiyan · Answer

Follow the following study plan:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-study-p ... ml?fl=menu
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-self-pr ... tml?f=menu

Courses that can help with your prep:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-co ... ml?fl=menu

Best books for Quants:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-ma ... ml?fl=menu
Best books for Verbal:-
https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-ve ... ml?fl=menu

AkshdeepS · Answer

I am looking for the advice on below points 1. How much time it will take on average for me to prepare for GMAT exam? Few people crack GMAT in 2 months and few take years to crack this exam. But IMO it takes around 4 to 6 months with disciplined practice to crack GMAT. Otherwise it may take eternity cross the line. 2. What should be the starting point for my preparation. Start by giving a free GMAT prep diagnostic test from mba.com. Two free and four paid tests are available on that site with time reset option available. This simply means you have 12 official tests available for you to practice. But you may see some repeat questions after reset. mba.com is the official GMAC site. Use these tests sensibly and don't waste them. 3. How much initial hour should i Invest so that I can score 700+ in my first attempt? You may need 3 to 4 hours of consistent studies for 6 months with proper study plan. Haphazard way of studying will only dent your confidence. 4. Which study material should I use to start my preparation? Start from OGs along with MGMAT guides to understand the concepts and what GMAT tests. 5. Any site or links that I can use throughout my preparation to ask and clarify my doubt? Links are available below. 6. Apart form Official Guide, what will be the other resources that i will require during my preparation. OGs, MGMAT guides, GMAT club questions, and some online course if you feel the need only. 7. I am planning to take GMAT first attempt in the month of August.Is it possible for me being a beginner starting from April can achieve 700+ marks in GMAT? There is no reason that it can't be done. But remember, NO practice is much better than wrong practice while preparing for GMAT. Here are few helpful links : 1. What is GMAT : https://studyabroad.shiksha.com/exams/gmat 2. https://blog.targettestprep.com/how-to- ... -on-gmat/# 3. https://www.gmatclub.com/forum/veritas-prep-resource-links-no-longer-available-399979.html#/tag/qu ... -wisdom-2/ 4. https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-definiti ... 69705.html 5. https://gmatclub.com/forum/abhimahna-s- ... 57054.html 6. https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-best-rea ... 53849.html These all are very useful links. Please go through them peoperly. Few tips : 1. Do not avoid revisions during preps. Avoiding revision is the worse thing that you can do with your preps. 2. Don't avoid Reading Comprehension to the end of preps. 3. Quality is better than quantity. 4. Stay motivated and healthy. 5. Be prepared for initial hiccups. Akshdeep

rohan2345 · Answer

Hi Vivek, Welcome to GMATCLUB. You should study for around 3-4 months to improve your score. You should start by taking a GMAT Mock once. You can then now know your weaknesses and cab work on them. If you are willing to study dedicatedly for that period, you are sure to achieve your goal. I think you need to solidify you base and adopt a proper technique to answer the questions. I believe you may benefit from taking a GMATPREP course. If you are willing, there are some great GMAT prep companies that can help you with your preparation. In order to make an informed decision I would highly encourage you to go to their websites and try on their free trial and decide for yourself which one do you like better. You try out free access to EmpowerGMAT, Magoosh and TTP as they have great reviews on GMATCLUB. If you are looking for a good course in verbal, I would highly encourage you to consider e-gmat verbal online or the e-gmat verbal live course. They are both amazing courses especially designed for non-natives. They offer almost 25% of their courses for free so you can try out their free trial to decide which one you want to go for. Plus the e-gmat Scholaranium which is included in both the courses is one of the best verbal practice tools in the market. You can easily track your progress in that you can identify your strengths and analyze and improve on your weak areas. I must add that if you are particularly looking to discover and improve on your weak areas in Quant; a subscription to GMATCLUB tests is the best way to do that. They are indeed phenomenal and will not only pinpoint your weak areas but also help you improve on them. Further taking multiple mocks might help. Apart from the GMATPREP, Manhattan GMAT tests and Veritas Prep Tests in my experience have good verbal and Quant section and will certainly help you point out and improve your weak areas. Further another advantage of taking many mocks is to build up your stamina. Apart from the GMATPREP tests, taking practise tests of any major GMATPREP company ought to do that. I would also encourage you to purchase GMATPREP QP 1 for some great additional practice. Lastly, you can check out a very interesting article by Mike McGarry from Magoosh detailing a 3 month study plan https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/3-month-g ... beginners/ . You will find it very helpful as it gives out a study plan as per your needs. Hope this helps. All the best.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi kvps1908,

Since it sounds like you're just beginning your studies, then it would be a good idea to take a FULL-LENGTH practice CAT Test; you can take 2 for free at www.mba.com (and they come with some additional practice materials). If you want to do a little studying first, so that you can familiarize yourself with the basic content and question types, then that's okay - but you shouldn't wait too long to take that initial CAT. That score will give us a good sense of your natural strengths and weaknesses and will help provide a basis for comparison as you continue to study. A FULL CAT takes about 3.5 hours to complete, so make sure that you've set aside enough time to take it in one sitting. Once you have those scores, you should report back here and we can come up with a study plan.

You've already defined your Goal Score and general timeline, so here is some additional information to consider. Many Test Takers spend 3 months (or more) of consistent study time before they hit their 'peak' scores, but there's no way to know exactly how much time YOU would need to get to the point that you could consistently Score 700+ on the Official GMAT. Statistically-speaking, about 90% of Test Takers never score that high on Test Day (regardless of how long they study or the number of times that they take the Exam), so you will likely have to put in more time and effort into your studies than you initially think you might need. Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level.

I'd like to know a bit more about your timeline and goals:

1) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
2) What Schools are you planning to apply to?
3) Going forward, how many hours do you think you can consistently study each week?

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

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi Vivek,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. I see that you have many questions about how you should study for the GMAT, so rather than answering all of your questions one by one, I’m going to give you some general advice on how to prepare.

Since you are just starting out with the GMAT, you should first  familiarize yourself with the GMAT  and then take an  official GMAT practice exam . Your experience taking that test will give you a good idea of what to expect on the GMAT, and the results will serve as a baseline GMAT score. Once you see how far you are from your score goal, you can more easily predict how much time you may need to study. I also wrote a detailed article about  how long to study for the GMAT , which you may find helpful.

After completing your initial practice test, you need to devise a solid preparation plan. Since you’re starting from scratch, you should follow a study plan that allows you to learn linearly, such that you can slowly build mastery of one GMAT topic prior to moving on to the next. Within each topic, begin with the foundations and progress toward more advanced concepts. Following such a plan will allow you to methodically build your GMAT quant and verbal skills and ensure that no stone is left unturned.

Let’s say, for example, you are learning about Number Properties. First, you should develop as much conceptual knowledge about Number Properties as possible. In other words, your goal will be to completely understand properties of factorials, perfect squares, quadratic patterns, LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, and remainders, to name a few concepts. After carefully reviewing the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions, practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills.

Follow a similar routine for verbal. For example, let’s say you start by learning about Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to fully master the individual Critical Reasoning topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you learn about each question type, do focused practice so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you get a weakening question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. Keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to analyze such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. 
 
Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, it is likely that you will have to work on all three of those aspects.
 
Regarding what you know, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not just a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.
 
This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending under two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.
 
There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and those reasons are not that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answer were always the one that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.
 
As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey meanings that make sense. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice repeatedly until you start to see the differences between the choices that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. It may take time for you to see what you have to see. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to be determined to see the differences and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.
 
To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did that resulted in your arriving at that answer and what you could do differently in order to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could have done differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your skills improve, you will then want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple Sentence Correction topics.

In order to follow the path described above, you may consider using an online self-study course, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant  and  verbal courses . You also may find it helpful to read this article about
 how to score a 700+ on the GMAT .

Feel free to reach out with any further questions. Good luck!

DavidTutorexamPAL · Answer

Hey  kvps1908 
Great questions! 
Before directly answering it, it’s important to ask ourselves : what exactly is the GMAT testing, and why is it difficult?
 What is the GMAT?
 Let’s start with the basics:  The Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) is a standardized test which many MBA programs around the world require as part of their application process. It measures skills in the fields of English, Mathematics and analytical writing and takes 3.5 hours to complete.
 Why the GMAT is Different
 
The GMAT is sometimes referred to as the GMAT CAT. CAT stands for Computer Adaptive Test. Two of the exam’s four sections (Quantitative and Verbal) are computer-adaptive. This means that during those sections the test adapts to your level of ability as you go.
What does it mean that the test is adaptive? Well, it means the GMAT is no ordinary test. It doesn’t measure your knowledge, it measures your “mind flexibility”. Therefore, if you wish to excel in the GMAT, it’s essential you work on sharpening this cognitive capability. By breaking down the GMAT experience, we can better understand what “mind flexibility” is. GMAT asks us to provide quick answers to unfamiliar questions.
Each question serves up a different twist: a different level, uses a different set of tools, has a different length, tells a different story, can take from a few seconds to a few minutes to solve. But, most importantly, it presents us with questions that can be solved in many different ways. Unlike your high school teacher, the GMAT is not interested in learning how you solved each question.
You just have to be fast enough and answer correctly if you want to have a chance to solve as many hard questions as you can in the limited time you have (hard questions generate higher scores!). You must be fast and correct.
Studying Right - for you
All that being said, what counts in acing the GMAT is finding the tools that work best for YOU. The most common mistake is doing things the other way around, that is, starting test prep without looking for the solution tools that work best for you.
The point is, if you haven’t studied all the possible question-solution tools and researched all questions to learn more about how to figure out which tools can be used in which questions, you cannot accurately choose the right tool.
There’s no choice when there aren’t any options. You’ll find yourself doing only what you are used to doing or what you’ve been doing since high school. So how to do that? One approach would be turning to online computer assisted customized learning. This is a new format, developed by examPAL. Instead of reproducing the teacher-in-a-classroom experience online, the site uses personalized machine learning to bring the best out of each student.
 Study Plan
 So how to start? I suggest starting off with making yourself a study plan, consisting of these steps:
 1) Familiarize yourself with the exam – What is the test structure? What are the formats of the questions?
2) Focus extra practice time on your areas of weakness – What matters is getting to the correct solution, fast: the problem is that just solving lots of questions (with practice tests or coaching) is not sufficient in terms of improving mental flexibility. Actually, the opposite is true. Solving thousands of questions without improving your mind’s flexibility will only cement the wrong thinking patterns.
3) Train yourself to find YOUR best solution approach to answering GMAT questions – The GMAT measures your ability to flex your mind. There is often more than one way to get to the correct answer - the trick is figuring out which is that way that is FASTEST for you.
4) Researching your errors is even more important than solving new questions – Which tools am I using betters than others? What are the main reasons for my mistakes? Which other tools should I learn to apply better? And when it comes to verbal questions, it is also crucial to analyze the answers: why is the correct answer correct? What is wrong with the wrong answers?
5) Practice test should be used as tools for improvement, not just to see “where I stand,” which means that you should allow 4 hours of research for every test, and not take two tests in one day, one after another, so as to allow yourself some time to strengthen your weaknesses and prepare for your next opportunity to improve.

Bottom Line - how Long to actually study?  
 Depending on your level of English, 100 to 120 hours of effective learning should suffice.The optimal time is between 6 to 8 weeks, but this amount of hours can alternately be spread out over a longer amount of time. Less is not sufficient, and, on the other hand, if you give yourself too long, like 3 to 4 months, you’ll start forgetting what you learned at the beginning. This is important, because all the knowledge is interconnected.
2 months is the study plan I would suggest - if that's what you decide to go for, you may want to  check this out

Hope this helps! Good luck ..
That’s my answer in a nutshell, but I’d be happy to go further into it with you and answer any follow-up questions you may have.  Talk to me here  (in the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner). Waiting to hear from you!

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