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10 Oct 2014, 13:32
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Hi folks,
I took GMAT today and scored 710 (IR 5/Q49/V37) and wish to share my experience with all.
My first attempt at GMAT was one year back and I scored 650 (Q50/V27). Due to professional and personal reasons I could not prepare for long. I started preparing for retake, full fledgedly, around third week of Aug 2014. As I am not a self motivated person and need a push all the time, I wanted to enrol myself in a program which could pace up my studies. I was speculating to take either egmat or @EconomistGMATTutor. I decided on GMAT Tutor as I had already taken the e-GMAT SC and CR course for my last attempt.
My weak area was verbal as I was above average with quant. I started going through the Economist GMAT Tutor course and initially I really liked the UI of the website. It is adaptive and very systematic. I was faring very well as far the study material was concerned, so I decided to take GMAT Prep. I took the first GMAT Prep on 5th Sep and scored a 650. I was devastated and asked GMAT Tutor for my stats in their course. I was shocked to see that I was faring very well with a 85% accuracy in the verbal section. Then I realized that this course is not enough and analysed the level of questions I was seeing in the GMAT Tutor. When I compared the questions with GMAT Prep I realized that what I was doing was far from the real world. I had not touched the OG as it was clearly recommended in the course that you do not need to use any other study material. The issues with GMAT Tutor were as follows:
1. SC questions are not really up to the mark. Most of the questions, more than 80%, are the ones which are based on simple grammar rules and not really meaning based.
2. Quant question bank is good but some of the strategies are a little strange, like relying only on the accuracy of the diagram for solving geometry question.
3. RC question bank is very very good, but the problem is that when a RC question comes on screen only one of the four question will be presented to you pertaining to the topic of learning and the whole passage will appear again after some time with a different question. SO basically, you are never able to develop strategy for solving a full RC with 4 questions in 7-9 mins.
4. One drawback of adaptive nature of the course is that if you want to revisit a certain type of problems, you cannot! For example, 5 days before GMAT if I want to solve only SC questions, there is no option for that! The course will throw only the questions where you have made maximum errors.
5. If you have not taken a test until 50% of course completion, you will start seeing the same RC passages in the test as the ones you have already solved during study session.
Inspite of all of the above cons, GMAT Tutor gave me a headstart in my preparation. Value for money- NO, but a decent means of preparation.
After first GMAT Prep debacle, I purchased Exam Pack 1 and Question Pack from mba.com. I believe this was the best decision I made during my preparation. I must say that official questions are THE best source of preparation. I started practicing with these questions and my accuracy started improving. I took second GMAT Prep on Spetember 13 and scored 730. I was happy but realistic as some of the questions were familiar and were fresh in my memory from last year's preparation. I took a lot of other tests such as Veritas Free test (700), MGMAT (650/680/700), GMAT Tutor Sim Tests (650/680/680). I can say with immense confidence that none of the tests come close to the real GMAT, other than GMAT Prep. I took GMAT Prep 4 days before my real GMAT and scored 710 (Q50/V35) and my real GMAT score 710(Q49/V37).
D-Day:
I reached at the centre one hour earlier than schedule at Marine Lines, Mumbai. The centre was similar to the one I saw in the video from GMAC. Though the schedule was at 5 pm, I started at 4:30 pm.
First AWA - Chinese burned templates.
IR - I scored a 5. Though this score doesn't matter much, but I have a piece of advice for everyone. I was very confident with IR after going through this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBl7jO0kac
The best strategy to follow is the same as other sections, guess the long and ackward questions and save time for the easy ones. I missed two very easy questions at the end because I did not have much time.
Quant - There quite a few surprises which are relevant to all. The questions were on the same lines as GMAT Prep and Question Pack but the biggest surprise was close to 6-7 probability questions. Probability is my weak area and there was rumor floating around that not many probability questions appear on GMAT these days. I had quite few questions from P&C and Probability. Some very typical questions from geometry. I feel that I underscored by a huge margin in this section as I was always scoring a 50 in Quant. One issue was timing issue, the toughest of the questions appeared in my first 10 and in an attempt to get them right I spent a lot of time. So much so that for last 15 questions I was left with 22 mins. My above average skills in quant allowed me to finish the section just in time (10 seconds to spare).
I have a very genuine suggestion to make to all fellow members who are preparing for GMAT. IMO, there is no better course available in the world than Bunuel 's teaching. I know a lot others are his fan, but I believe that if one want to score a 49-51 in Quant, all he needs to do is study the basics from any book (preferably GMAT Club Math book) and follow Bunuel . He has on average 10-15 posts a day, if you start learning from his solutions, GMAT Quant is a piece of cake.
Bunuel, wherever you are, I want to meet you and thank you in person. You are helping so many people that kudos are not enough.
Verbal - I must share that from all my prep tests, I figured out that in every test one new area will prop up as a weak one. Sometime RC, other time SC or CR! I actually did not have any strong area in the verbal section. The test started with an easy SC question and I just went with the flow. I have always had timing issues in verbal as I could never get a CR question is 1:30 mins. I saw the longest passages ever, 5 paras and two of them with 4 questions each! I actually cannot comment that how I performed on Verbal as I was facing difficulty with CR questions a lot. Quite a few of them were tricky and not so straight forward, but they were on similar lines as Question Pack 1. There is a lot of hype around SC questions and I must say that the hype is overrated. The SC questions were plain, not much idiomatic, simple diction, parallelism. etc. Not so difficult.
My suggestion for verbal prep is to take e-GMAT course (non natives) as I benefitted a lot from their articles. I took their SC module for last attempt but the mistake I made was that I did not follow their three step process to the core. Another very important piece of advice is that solve ONLY official questions. This is very critical for verbal section as there are a lot of so called tough questions floating on various forums which can shaken your concepts.
For helping in my verbal prep, I must thank pqhai, you CR solutions are great. I learned a lot from your answers.
To conclude, thanks to all and specially to bb, pqhai, Bunuel, egmat and others for amazing posts and solutions! Kudos to all of you!
I am available to answer queries, if any!
I took GMAT today and scored 710 (IR 5/Q49/V37) and wish to share my experience with all.
My first attempt at GMAT was one year back and I scored 650 (Q50/V27). Due to professional and personal reasons I could not prepare for long. I started preparing for retake, full fledgedly, around third week of Aug 2014. As I am not a self motivated person and need a push all the time, I wanted to enrol myself in a program which could pace up my studies. I was speculating to take either egmat or @EconomistGMATTutor. I decided on GMAT Tutor as I had already taken the e-GMAT SC and CR course for my last attempt.
My weak area was verbal as I was above average with quant. I started going through the Economist GMAT Tutor course and initially I really liked the UI of the website. It is adaptive and very systematic. I was faring very well as far the study material was concerned, so I decided to take GMAT Prep. I took the first GMAT Prep on 5th Sep and scored a 650. I was devastated and asked GMAT Tutor for my stats in their course. I was shocked to see that I was faring very well with a 85% accuracy in the verbal section. Then I realized that this course is not enough and analysed the level of questions I was seeing in the GMAT Tutor. When I compared the questions with GMAT Prep I realized that what I was doing was far from the real world. I had not touched the OG as it was clearly recommended in the course that you do not need to use any other study material. The issues with GMAT Tutor were as follows:
1. SC questions are not really up to the mark. Most of the questions, more than 80%, are the ones which are based on simple grammar rules and not really meaning based.
2. Quant question bank is good but some of the strategies are a little strange, like relying only on the accuracy of the diagram for solving geometry question.
3. RC question bank is very very good, but the problem is that when a RC question comes on screen only one of the four question will be presented to you pertaining to the topic of learning and the whole passage will appear again after some time with a different question. SO basically, you are never able to develop strategy for solving a full RC with 4 questions in 7-9 mins.
4. One drawback of adaptive nature of the course is that if you want to revisit a certain type of problems, you cannot! For example, 5 days before GMAT if I want to solve only SC questions, there is no option for that! The course will throw only the questions where you have made maximum errors.
5. If you have not taken a test until 50% of course completion, you will start seeing the same RC passages in the test as the ones you have already solved during study session.
Inspite of all of the above cons, GMAT Tutor gave me a headstart in my preparation. Value for money- NO, but a decent means of preparation.
After first GMAT Prep debacle, I purchased Exam Pack 1 and Question Pack from mba.com. I believe this was the best decision I made during my preparation. I must say that official questions are THE best source of preparation. I started practicing with these questions and my accuracy started improving. I took second GMAT Prep on Spetember 13 and scored 730. I was happy but realistic as some of the questions were familiar and were fresh in my memory from last year's preparation. I took a lot of other tests such as Veritas Free test (700), MGMAT (650/680/700), GMAT Tutor Sim Tests (650/680/680). I can say with immense confidence that none of the tests come close to the real GMAT, other than GMAT Prep. I took GMAT Prep 4 days before my real GMAT and scored 710 (Q50/V35) and my real GMAT score 710(Q49/V37).
D-Day:
I reached at the centre one hour earlier than schedule at Marine Lines, Mumbai. The centre was similar to the one I saw in the video from GMAC. Though the schedule was at 5 pm, I started at 4:30 pm.
First AWA - Chinese burned templates.
IR - I scored a 5. Though this score doesn't matter much, but I have a piece of advice for everyone. I was very confident with IR after going through this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBl7jO0kac
The best strategy to follow is the same as other sections, guess the long and ackward questions and save time for the easy ones. I missed two very easy questions at the end because I did not have much time.
Quant - There quite a few surprises which are relevant to all. The questions were on the same lines as GMAT Prep and Question Pack but the biggest surprise was close to 6-7 probability questions. Probability is my weak area and there was rumor floating around that not many probability questions appear on GMAT these days. I had quite few questions from P&C and Probability. Some very typical questions from geometry. I feel that I underscored by a huge margin in this section as I was always scoring a 50 in Quant. One issue was timing issue, the toughest of the questions appeared in my first 10 and in an attempt to get them right I spent a lot of time. So much so that for last 15 questions I was left with 22 mins. My above average skills in quant allowed me to finish the section just in time (10 seconds to spare).
I have a very genuine suggestion to make to all fellow members who are preparing for GMAT. IMO, there is no better course available in the world than Bunuel 's teaching. I know a lot others are his fan, but I believe that if one want to score a 49-51 in Quant, all he needs to do is study the basics from any book (preferably GMAT Club Math book) and follow Bunuel . He has on average 10-15 posts a day, if you start learning from his solutions, GMAT Quant is a piece of cake.
Bunuel, wherever you are, I want to meet you and thank you in person. You are helping so many people that kudos are not enough.
Verbal - I must share that from all my prep tests, I figured out that in every test one new area will prop up as a weak one. Sometime RC, other time SC or CR! I actually did not have any strong area in the verbal section. The test started with an easy SC question and I just went with the flow. I have always had timing issues in verbal as I could never get a CR question is 1:30 mins. I saw the longest passages ever, 5 paras and two of them with 4 questions each! I actually cannot comment that how I performed on Verbal as I was facing difficulty with CR questions a lot. Quite a few of them were tricky and not so straight forward, but they were on similar lines as Question Pack 1. There is a lot of hype around SC questions and I must say that the hype is overrated. The SC questions were plain, not much idiomatic, simple diction, parallelism. etc. Not so difficult.
My suggestion for verbal prep is to take e-GMAT course (non natives) as I benefitted a lot from their articles. I took their SC module for last attempt but the mistake I made was that I did not follow their three step process to the core. Another very important piece of advice is that solve ONLY official questions. This is very critical for verbal section as there are a lot of so called tough questions floating on various forums which can shaken your concepts.
For helping in my verbal prep, I must thank pqhai, you CR solutions are great. I learned a lot from your answers.
To conclude, thanks to all and specially to bb, pqhai, Bunuel, egmat and others for amazing posts and solutions! Kudos to all of you!
I am available to answer queries, if any!
kushwahanuj28
Joined: 10 Dec 2013
Last visit: 05 Mar 2026
Posts: 92
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 246
Status:Will retake GMAT
Affiliations: GMAT Club
Location: India
Concentration: Technology, General Management
Schools: Great Lakes '15 Jindal '16 Northeastern '17 Rutgers '17 Rotman '17 Ross '17 McDonough '17 LBS '17 ISB '16 Duke '19
WE:Information Technology (Computer Software)
Schools: Great Lakes '15 Jindal '16 Northeastern '17 Rutgers '17 Rotman '17 Ross '17 McDonough '17 LBS '17 ISB '16 Duke '19
Posts: 92
Kudos:
51
11 Oct 2014, 10:46
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Bookmarks
nitin6305
Hi nitin6305
Wow , Many congratulations to you on your remarkable success!
I have a couple of queries . They are as under :-
Firstly , How did you prepare for gmat given that you were working ? I ask this because I find it tough to take out time on daily basis since after a long day of work plus travelling ( from home to office and then back to home ) , I feel so lethargic that I am finding it tough to concentrate ?
Secondly , Did you purchase e-gmat ( since I am also non native ) ? What courses such as egmat , Magoosh , GMAT Pill etc you took ?
Thirdly - How much GMAT Club forum helped , because I see you have used GMAT Club tool kit , Did you use it ? Did you try GMAT Club Tests .
Fourth- Were Bunuel 's questions helpful , did you see any of those in your GMAT ?I ask this because I have read his questions and I found them really tough but illuminating
I ask these questions because I shall be rewriting my GMAT paper and this time I will be spending a lot of money in purchasing e-gmat , Economist GMAT Tutor , Magoosh and Veritas Prep Study material . I will be buying them & all their Tests because I do not want to leave any material possibly available in the market untouched . I am saving money (big time!) for that lofty and crazy expenditure .
Looking forward to hear from you
All the Bests
Regards
12 Oct 2014, 01:07
Kudos
Bookmarks
Hi kushwahanuj28
I am happy to respond.
1) I forgot to mention, I took a sabatical for almost a month. I had to as this year is crucial for me and I must apply in second round. I face the same issue as you that I am not self motivated and self disciplined. So I decided to take a self prep as if not the target atleast the money spent will make the clock tick!
2) I did not take eGmat / Magoosh/ GMAT PILL or any course other than GMAT TUTOR.
3) GMAT CLUB FORUM is the best resource, especially for Quant. I recommend using the forum in a way that you build your concepts and are able to clear stupidest of your doubts. I used this forum primarily to seek solutions to official questions, seek advice from experts such as eGmat and practice quant. I used GMAT CLUB QUANT TESTS for last attempt and did not use this time, but I can say with confidence that they are very good. Unlike MGMAT QUANT which is very lengthy and unrealistic, GMAT CLUB TESTS are tough and tricky but realistic. You must take them but only when you are finished with everything you need for building concepts. If you take them at an early stage of prep you will feel that the tests are out of league if GMAT.
4) hmmmm, I can write an essay on Bunuel if asked to. I can say that his collections such as Baker's Dozen, Tough and Tricky but easy?, etc are so close to real GMAT when you encounter tough problems in real test you cannot stop thanking Bunuel! Don't be intimated by the questions, learn from his solutions and try to adapt the approach. I ll repeat, IMO, he is the best math course available in the market. If you are already decent with math you ll fall in love with his methods.
Finally, IMO, taking two prep courses will be if no use and will be detrimental. I saw Brian's ( Veritsas ) videos as a part of their iOS app and found them to be really good. You can look for some more reviews and take one prep course. If you really want to get hold of everything then get hold of each and every official question.
All the best! I ll be available if you need any other help!
Posted from my mobile device
I am happy to respond.
1) I forgot to mention, I took a sabatical for almost a month. I had to as this year is crucial for me and I must apply in second round. I face the same issue as you that I am not self motivated and self disciplined. So I decided to take a self prep as if not the target atleast the money spent will make the clock tick!
2) I did not take eGmat / Magoosh/ GMAT PILL or any course other than GMAT TUTOR.
3) GMAT CLUB FORUM is the best resource, especially for Quant. I recommend using the forum in a way that you build your concepts and are able to clear stupidest of your doubts. I used this forum primarily to seek solutions to official questions, seek advice from experts such as eGmat and practice quant. I used GMAT CLUB QUANT TESTS for last attempt and did not use this time, but I can say with confidence that they are very good. Unlike MGMAT QUANT which is very lengthy and unrealistic, GMAT CLUB TESTS are tough and tricky but realistic. You must take them but only when you are finished with everything you need for building concepts. If you take them at an early stage of prep you will feel that the tests are out of league if GMAT.
4) hmmmm, I can write an essay on Bunuel if asked to. I can say that his collections such as Baker's Dozen, Tough and Tricky but easy?, etc are so close to real GMAT when you encounter tough problems in real test you cannot stop thanking Bunuel! Don't be intimated by the questions, learn from his solutions and try to adapt the approach. I ll repeat, IMO, he is the best math course available in the market. If you are already decent with math you ll fall in love with his methods.
Finally, IMO, taking two prep courses will be if no use and will be detrimental. I saw Brian's ( Veritsas ) videos as a part of their iOS app and found them to be really good. You can look for some more reviews and take one prep course. If you really want to get hold of everything then get hold of each and every official question.
All the best! I ll be available if you need any other help!
Posted from my mobile device
