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10 Dec 2014, 05:49
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Hello everyone,
I've been lurking this forum for a few weeks now and I thought that after my finally taking the GMAT, it was time to share my experience with you guys.
I'm a 21 year-old male from Yurop, currently enrolled in a top-tier business-school. For some reason, taking the GMAT is required in order to get into a double degree with an American top-tier business school, so when I decided in October that I wanted to apply to this double degree, I knew I had approx. three months to get a decent GMAT score (mean GMAT score is around 710, I think). English is not my first language, so please forgive the numerous mistakes that I will make over the course of this debrief.
I have a decent math background and I master all the general math on the GMAT (which is basically junior high school level, I believe). My English is pretty good for a foreigner, I love reading and learning trivia about grammar, spelling, etc. So there was nothing I really needed to catch up on before taking the GMAT.
I spent around a month (October to November) doing absolutely nothing for the GMAT. Then I decided it was time to do it and I made my GMAT appointment. The deadline by which to submit a GMAT score (not necessarily official) is January 15th, so I thought taking the test before December 15th would leave me enough time to take a second go at it, should I fail my first time.
Since I had no idea where to begin, I simply googled "GMAT" and stumbled upon this forum, which is, as you all know, a real gold mine when it comes to GMAT - study, tips, techniques, resources, questions, you name it. The first topic I remember reading is the GMAT Study Plan (can't post URLs, sorry) which stroke me as a very thoughtfully written piece of advice. Most of it I did not use, but the general information provided in it made it very worthwhile.
Study schedule
I logged in approx. 20 study sessions in a month ranging from half an hour to two hours. I am currently working 50+ hrs/week, so I just studied whenever I could, when I got home at 10 pm, and sometimes during the week-ends.
Study material
A friend of mine gave me all the books he used to take the GMAT a few months ago. He scored 750 thanks to them so I thought it would be more than enough for me. Here are the ones I used.
Books:
- Kaplan (the big book with everything in it, can't remember the name): the general advice I thought was very useful. I did not however have time to read through all of the book, so I read everything about critical reasoning, then skipped straight to quant, then got bored when I saw how much left there was to dig through and ditched the book altogether.
- Princeton (Math review) : read all of it, did all the questions, took notes which I never read. The advice and some of the techniques are pretty good but the questions are way too easy (it took me 20 minutes to get 19-20 correct answers ; the questions were really not challenging. At all).
- Princeton (Verbal review) : read some of it (different types of mistakes in SC), thought it was not worth it, ditched it.
Mock-ups:
- GMATPrep (2 free tests): I believe those are the two tests that everyone always takes. I took the first one two weeks before the actual test, then got bored halfway through and cancelled the test after quant, hoping to at least get my quant and IR scores. The software decided not to give me any data on my performance. Two hours and a test well wasted. I took the second test the day before the real GMAT (only quant and verbal) and got 770 (can't remember the score but the percentiles were 90% in maths, 99% in verbal), which was a huge surprise considering how little I had trained and that I aimed at a 720-ish score.
I'm not gonna bore you to death here by describing everything that happened to me. I slept 7 hours, got to the test center in time (come early, just in case, but you probably don't need me to tell you that). They took my watch, gave me a notepad and an erasable pen (honestly, I felt slightly retarded taking notes on this pad, especially given that I'm left-handed and that I sometimes smeared ink all over the sheet), earplugs, tissues, took a picture of me, my palmprint, and I was good to go. I had not had time to eat and I'm not a morning person (my peak efficiency is around 11pm and the test was at 9:30am) so the conditions were slightly suboptimal. However, one of my strengths is my ability to focus on hours at a time on any particular exam, without being distracted easily. Honestly, I have trouble studying for more than 10 minutes straight, but when the real exam comes, I'm all in. So the conditions were okay in the end. Plus, you can eat whatever food you brought with you during the (very short) breaks.
- Essay : I don't know how much I got, but it was very easy, there were things to be said about the argument made, so I don't believe I blew it. Any score above 5 is fine by me. Even 4 would be all right, I guess.
- IR (8) : everything was very straightforward. Things about means, medians, graphs, charts, nothing fancy.
- Quant (47) : This was not a disaster, but not very good either. I mismanaged my time, sometimes spending up to 3 minutes on a question before having to guess randomly ; I did complicated calculations which ended up being wrong (the answer I found was not on the list). Had I studied more that I probably would have fared better: I knew almost no technique other than the very basic Princeton ones, didn't know how to find shortcuts to avoid calculations, was not familiar enough with the various types of questions... To get a very high quant score, I therefore think that nothing replaces training with a **** of real, hard GMAT questions. So I was very frustrated, but at the same time I knew that nothing was lost.
- Verbal (49) : I sailed through the verbal section, ending the test with 20 minutes left. It is fairly easy to eliminate 2-3 obvious wrong answers and then to decide which of the remaining answer is right by reading everything carefully, looking for mistakes, decomposing the sentences, etc. Honestly, I have trouble understanding how native English speakers can make mistakes in this section. But then again, maybe some of them make mistakes because it is their native language and they do not explicitly its rules?
Total : 760 (99%). I am very happy with it, although I wish I had done better in the quant section.
You can get a fairly good grade without too much of studying if you have got the background necessary : a good understanding of basic mathematical principles that only comes, I think, with regular training (either specifically for the GMAT or because you study math) and a decent mastery of the English language. This actually makes me wonder what business schools think of applicants with several scores that keep improving (e.g. 590 for the first try, 650 for the second, 730 for the third test): it shows that these applicants do not have the necessary background and also that they are either inconsistent and therefore unreliable or that they took the GMAT without being ready - both very negative signals IMO. It could also mean that they are hard-working and persistent, of course, but not necessarily more so than those who get 700+ on their first try and never look back.
Cheers,
Ambage
I've been lurking this forum for a few weeks now and I thought that after my finally taking the GMAT, it was time to share my experience with you guys.
My Background
I'm a 21 year-old male from Yurop, currently enrolled in a top-tier business-school. For some reason, taking the GMAT is required in order to get into a double degree with an American top-tier business school, so when I decided in October that I wanted to apply to this double degree, I knew I had approx. three months to get a decent GMAT score (mean GMAT score is around 710, I think). English is not my first language, so please forgive the numerous mistakes that I will make over the course of this debrief.
I have a decent math background and I master all the general math on the GMAT (which is basically junior high school level, I believe). My English is pretty good for a foreigner, I love reading and learning trivia about grammar, spelling, etc. So there was nothing I really needed to catch up on before taking the GMAT.
How I studied
I spent around a month (October to November) doing absolutely nothing for the GMAT. Then I decided it was time to do it and I made my GMAT appointment. The deadline by which to submit a GMAT score (not necessarily official) is January 15th, so I thought taking the test before December 15th would leave me enough time to take a second go at it, should I fail my first time.
Since I had no idea where to begin, I simply googled "GMAT" and stumbled upon this forum, which is, as you all know, a real gold mine when it comes to GMAT - study, tips, techniques, resources, questions, you name it. The first topic I remember reading is the GMAT Study Plan (can't post URLs, sorry) which stroke me as a very thoughtfully written piece of advice. Most of it I did not use, but the general information provided in it made it very worthwhile.
Study schedule
I logged in approx. 20 study sessions in a month ranging from half an hour to two hours. I am currently working 50+ hrs/week, so I just studied whenever I could, when I got home at 10 pm, and sometimes during the week-ends.
Study material
A friend of mine gave me all the books he used to take the GMAT a few months ago. He scored 750 thanks to them so I thought it would be more than enough for me. Here are the ones I used.
Books:
- Kaplan (the big book with everything in it, can't remember the name): the general advice I thought was very useful. I did not however have time to read through all of the book, so I read everything about critical reasoning, then skipped straight to quant, then got bored when I saw how much left there was to dig through and ditched the book altogether.
- Princeton (Math review) : read all of it, did all the questions, took notes which I never read. The advice and some of the techniques are pretty good but the questions are way too easy (it took me 20 minutes to get 19-20 correct answers ; the questions were really not challenging. At all).
- Princeton (Verbal review) : read some of it (different types of mistakes in SC), thought it was not worth it, ditched it.
Mock-ups:
- GMATPrep (2 free tests): I believe those are the two tests that everyone always takes. I took the first one two weeks before the actual test, then got bored halfway through and cancelled the test after quant, hoping to at least get my quant and IR scores. The software decided not to give me any data on my performance. Two hours and a test well wasted. I took the second test the day before the real GMAT (only quant and verbal) and got 770 (can't remember the score but the percentiles were 90% in maths, 99% in verbal), which was a huge surprise considering how little I had trained and that I aimed at a 720-ish score.
Test day (December 9th)
I'm not gonna bore you to death here by describing everything that happened to me. I slept 7 hours, got to the test center in time (come early, just in case, but you probably don't need me to tell you that). They took my watch, gave me a notepad and an erasable pen (honestly, I felt slightly retarded taking notes on this pad, especially given that I'm left-handed and that I sometimes smeared ink all over the sheet), earplugs, tissues, took a picture of me, my palmprint, and I was good to go. I had not had time to eat and I'm not a morning person (my peak efficiency is around 11pm and the test was at 9:30am) so the conditions were slightly suboptimal. However, one of my strengths is my ability to focus on hours at a time on any particular exam, without being distracted easily. Honestly, I have trouble studying for more than 10 minutes straight, but when the real exam comes, I'm all in. So the conditions were okay in the end. Plus, you can eat whatever food you brought with you during the (very short) breaks.
- Essay : I don't know how much I got, but it was very easy, there were things to be said about the argument made, so I don't believe I blew it. Any score above 5 is fine by me. Even 4 would be all right, I guess.
- IR (8) : everything was very straightforward. Things about means, medians, graphs, charts, nothing fancy.
- Quant (47) : This was not a disaster, but not very good either. I mismanaged my time, sometimes spending up to 3 minutes on a question before having to guess randomly ; I did complicated calculations which ended up being wrong (the answer I found was not on the list). Had I studied more that I probably would have fared better: I knew almost no technique other than the very basic Princeton ones, didn't know how to find shortcuts to avoid calculations, was not familiar enough with the various types of questions... To get a very high quant score, I therefore think that nothing replaces training with a **** of real, hard GMAT questions. So I was very frustrated, but at the same time I knew that nothing was lost.
- Verbal (49) : I sailed through the verbal section, ending the test with 20 minutes left. It is fairly easy to eliminate 2-3 obvious wrong answers and then to decide which of the remaining answer is right by reading everything carefully, looking for mistakes, decomposing the sentences, etc. Honestly, I have trouble understanding how native English speakers can make mistakes in this section. But then again, maybe some of them make mistakes because it is their native language and they do not explicitly its rules?
Total : 760 (99%). I am very happy with it, although I wish I had done better in the quant section.
Conclusion
You can get a fairly good grade without too much of studying if you have got the background necessary : a good understanding of basic mathematical principles that only comes, I think, with regular training (either specifically for the GMAT or because you study math) and a decent mastery of the English language. This actually makes me wonder what business schools think of applicants with several scores that keep improving (e.g. 590 for the first try, 650 for the second, 730 for the third test): it shows that these applicants do not have the necessary background and also that they are either inconsistent and therefore unreliable or that they took the GMAT without being ready - both very negative signals IMO. It could also mean that they are hard-working and persistent, of course, but not necessarily more so than those who get 700+ on their first try and never look back.
Cheers,
Ambage
16 Apr 2015, 15:16
Kudos
Bookmarks
This is a horrible write up. Your conclusion was particularly bad. Honestly, it seems like you wrote this to validate yourself...
17 Apr 2015, 11:57
Kudos
Bookmarks
Ambage
There are many reasons that someone might have taken the GMAT without being ''ready'' as you say.First of all maybe someone was in a rush because of a deadline.And just went for it.Or maybe someone did study a lot but wasn't in top form on the day of the exam.Also maybe someone got high scores on mock exams which aren't always accurate and thought he would do well.
Fortunately,adcoms know what they are doing much better than someone who just posts on a forum.
Congrats anyway though,it's a really high score!
