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05 Jul 2016, 12:23
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I once had a friend who loved to do triathlons, but hated swimming. For her, the swim was a necessary evil to get to the good part, the bike and run-- all she had to do was "not drown."
I feel about GMAT Quant the way my friend felt about the swim. In prep, Quant was an endless, dreary doggie paddle so that I could get to the fun part, Verbal. Eventually, though, I found a balance that allowed me to play to my Verbal strengths and (relatively painlessly) do well enough in Quant.
So, here's the account of how I perfected my Verbal section and made it across Quant. I recommend it for people who are naturally good at Verbal but will struggle with Quantitative-- a narrative that can sometimes be hard to find among the Quant geniuses here on GMAT Club.
Table of Contents:
As my username indicates, I am a prospective MD/MBA. I'm starting medical school later this summer, and our business school told me that I would have to take the GMAT to be considered for a scholarship on the MBA end. My GPA is pretty far above their median, but since I have no work experience (considered normal for MD/MBA) I knew I would have to make above a 700. For context, our business school is consistently ranked within the top 40, but rarely within the top 20.
I'm usually very good at verbal standardized tests, and slightly above average at quantitative standardized tests. Since I came straight out of school, I knew I wouldn't have to review much basic math, and I also knew that I tend to perform well under pressure. To round the picture out, you should know that I'm a native English speaker whose mother was a stickler for grammar (so grateful now!)
NOTE: If anyone reading this knows anything about prepping for an MD/MBA, getting scholarships for an MD/MBA, or general advice for MD/MBA, I would love to hear from you in the comments!
I started out on Economist GMAT last summer, but when it fell by the wayside I decided to shelf my GMAT prep for a year. I came back to it with about 25% of their Verbal and Quant prep done, but most of it forgotten. This is a major pitfall with the Economist program: it makes it difficult to find old lessons or work through the content on your own. I plodded through the mixed quant/verbal prep program for a while, but I felt like I was going nowhere.
This is when I looked at Magoosh's Score Map (can't post link because I've never posted before-- Google "Magoosh How to Calculate GMAT Scores") and realized that I needed to think in terms of marginal gains on my time: focused Verbal effort could elevate my score much more efficiently than an uphill Quant trudge.
Sentence Correction:
Reading Comprehension:
Critical Reasoning:
So, finally, after about a week of non-stop OG Verbal filling all of my free time, I was consistently getting above 95% on every 30-50 question set of Hard/Medium questions and had almost exhausted that set and GMATPrep Exam 1. Time to work on Quant!
I started by doing a second Manhattan GMAT practice test, which I accessed by buying the Manhattan AWA/IR book. These were a great value, especially as compared with Economist-- one $20 book gets you 6 high-quality practice tests. With two practice tests, I had enough material to run their reports (see their "4 Steps to Get the Most out of Your CATs") and was able to understand my performance in a much more precise way than I had before.
Efficiency was really all about using the best materials. Economist, while it's good at being a survey course, really doesn't allow you to direct your own studies in a meaningful way, and can cause you to waste a lot of time and money. Unless you happen to be evenly bad at everything, a survey is an EXTREMELY inefficient way to approach this. The GMATClub forums pointed me to the Manhattan books.
From then on, I got through with just OG Quant and Manhattan GMAT. When I ran out of things to review from my MGMAT CATs, I would work through Hard/Medium sets of the OG problems and then go over the concepts underlying the questions I had gotten wrong. I ended up buying 1 more Manhattan book, Number Properties, because my performance on the CATs convinced me I needed a more consistent methodology. In the end, I think this might have been overkill-- MGMAT CATs over-focus on Number Properties and Combinatorics/Probability, so I thought I was weaker there than I really was. In general, MGMAT Quant is much tougher and focuses on more obscure topics than the real thing. GMATClub was extremely valuable in telling me how the different brands varied from the real thing.
Whenever there was a very specific concept on which I was fuzzy (i.e., properties of triangles problems, combined rate problems), I would look it up online. Magoosh and other websites have a ton of free blog posts and materials out there!
From all of those sources, I developed a list of things to memorize/know, which I'm attaching to this post. It's specific to what I already knew, but I hope it will be useful for some of you, too!
I turned the subject breakdown reports from my Manhattan GMAT practice tests into an excel sheet, wherein I examined which subtopics were taking me too long, in which ones I was getting too-easy problems wrong (low avg. wrong score), and where I wasn't taking enough time (low time + low % right). I would really recommend you read their blog post on the reports and follow it-- 6 practice CATs is a lot, possibly more than you will need, so don't be afraid to use them early and get an even richer picture of your performance. From there, find easy-to-remember methodologies that you can deploy any time you see a problem of a certain type.
I followed the MGMAT book on IR and AWA, and that was about it. Almost always took practice tests with essay and IR to practice timing. Timing was, to me, the most important thing for IR. I haven't gotten my AWA score back, but in general I felt fine about both.
In general, I found that IR helped me warm up for Quant-- my worst practice test performances were when I did't do IR first.
I really regretted spending so much money on the Economist-- in the end, the course was not nearly flexible enough for what I needed. If I could go back, I would have purchased the whole set of MGMAT books and the two OG books. In the end, though, I think it worked out just buying the MGMAT books that were specific to what I really needed strategies for, and then taking advantage of all the CATs. OG reins supreme, of course.
I think Economist could work really well for some people, especially non-native English speakers or people with absolutely no Quant knowledge. For someone like me, with a varied baseline on Quant and already strong Verbal, it was extremely inefficient.
BEFORE you purchase anything over $100, look around at what people are saying on GMATClub. I came in as a total novice and wish I'd found this forum earlier.
---
Hope this guide was helpful for my fellow Verbal-not-Quant-ers! Good luck, everyone.
I feel about GMAT Quant the way my friend felt about the swim. In prep, Quant was an endless, dreary doggie paddle so that I could get to the fun part, Verbal. Eventually, though, I found a balance that allowed me to play to my Verbal strengths and (relatively painlessly) do well enough in Quant.
So, here's the account of how I perfected my Verbal section and made it across Quant. I recommend it for people who are naturally good at Verbal but will struggle with Quantitative-- a narrative that can sometimes be hard to find among the Quant geniuses here on GMAT Club.
Table of Contents:
- About Me
- Perfecting Verbal
- How can you actually improve your score on high-level GMAT Verbal, instead of improving your score on Practice Test Verbal?
- Sentence Correction
- Reading Comprehension
- Critical Reasoning
- My Verbal Progress
- How can you actually improve your score on high-level GMAT Verbal, instead of improving your score on Practice Test Verbal?
- Doing "Well Enough" on Quant
- The Importance of Materials & Methods
- How to Figure Out What You Should Be Working On
- My Quant Progress
- IR and AWA Exist, Too
- Economist vs. Manhattan vs. OG
- Advice & Test Day Considerations
- Attached: My Quant "Remember These" Sheet
About Me
As my username indicates, I am a prospective MD/MBA. I'm starting medical school later this summer, and our business school told me that I would have to take the GMAT to be considered for a scholarship on the MBA end. My GPA is pretty far above their median, but since I have no work experience (considered normal for MD/MBA) I knew I would have to make above a 700. For context, our business school is consistently ranked within the top 40, but rarely within the top 20.
I'm usually very good at verbal standardized tests, and slightly above average at quantitative standardized tests. Since I came straight out of school, I knew I wouldn't have to review much basic math, and I also knew that I tend to perform well under pressure. To round the picture out, you should know that I'm a native English speaker whose mother was a stickler for grammar (so grateful now!)
NOTE: If anyone reading this knows anything about prepping for an MD/MBA, getting scholarships for an MD/MBA, or general advice for MD/MBA, I would love to hear from you in the comments!
Perfecting Verbal
I started out on Economist GMAT last summer, but when it fell by the wayside I decided to shelf my GMAT prep for a year. I came back to it with about 25% of their Verbal and Quant prep done, but most of it forgotten. This is a major pitfall with the Economist program: it makes it difficult to find old lessons or work through the content on your own. I plodded through the mixed quant/verbal prep program for a while, but I felt like I was going nowhere.
This is when I looked at Magoosh's Score Map (can't post link because I've never posted before-- Google "Magoosh How to Calculate GMAT Scores") and realized that I needed to think in terms of marginal gains on my time: focused Verbal effort could elevate my score much more efficiently than an uphill Quant trudge.
How can you actually improve your score on high-level GMAT Verbal, instead of improving your score on Practice Test Verbal?
Sentence Correction:
- Economist GMAT wasn't all bad, it turned out. I quit using their quant section and exclusively used their verbal section to learn all the SC rules. If I were doing this over again, I probably would have just purchased a few Manhattan GMAT books and gone through them, but the Economist course was adequately comprehensive and I'd already paid for it. It's important to do this because there are some GMAT SC rules that don't necessarily apply in everyday writing and speech (like their rules about "one" vs. "they/themselves")
- Once I'd gone through about 60% of the Economist's verbal material, I went to Half-Price books and purchased an old OG Verbal book that still had the online access code. I did 250 questions in sets of 30-50 depending on how much time I had and saved about 50 questions for the week of the test. I went back through after each set and carefully reviewed both the questions I got right and wrong. Most of these sets should be Hard/Medium sets (double click the "all" button, then uncheck "easy"). This is important because it helped me remember the rules I was getting wrong and reinforced the rules that I was getting right.
- When I used Manhattan or Economist practice tests after my foray through the OG, I didn't pay too much mind to my Verbal scores, because by then I could tell that their practice questions had a very different feel from the official GMAT ones and weren't a great reflection. Economist questions tend to over-focus on mundane rules, and Manhattan questions don't address the GMAT's nuances in style preference. Your scores on those tests will just reflect how well you know the material their guides cover, not how well you'll do on the actual test. MGMAT and Economist tests did, however, provide an idea of how fatigued I'd be on test day and helped me practice focus/timing for Verbal.
Reading Comprehension:
- The devil is in the details here. There will never be an answer that doesn't have a reflection within the passage. I found Economist GMAT's "quick read" method useful to give me some confidence with the timing of these questions-- find a consistent method of attacking the passage that works for you. For me, the most important thing was to not confirm my answer to the question until I was certain I could see its answer referenced in the passage.
- Again, once I had a sense of the rules and timing, the most helpful resource was the OG Verbal. In particular, while you're prepping, focus on nailing the general questions that ask what the passage or a given paragraph is about-- those are the ones that can seem subjective or unclear and can waste a lot of time while you're stuck between answers. The rest is diligence.
- In OG Verbal, oftentimes you don't have to read the RC passage because it's a repeat from a previous set-- don't let yourself fall into the habit of not reading or skimming over the passage, though, because on the real test you won't have seen the passage before.
Critical Reasoning:
- Take these seriously during every practice test and READ THE QUESTION STEM! That's rule number one for the whole GMAT, but it's especially important here. After 3 hours of slogging through a practice test, it's easy to get tripped up. Don't. Take as much time as you need, within reason. This is important because these questions are a gauge of how fatigued you are-- unlike reflexively following grammar rules or plucking an answer from a passage, higher order reasoning takes extensive practice to do while tired even for native English speakers and voracious readers.
- I liked Manhattan GMAT's practice questions here, although of course OG Verbal is the most valuable. Occasionally I would get MGMAT CR questions wrong and even on review disagree with the answer key; don't worry about it too much, because the actual GMAT is usually more clear-cut.
- When you're stuck between two answers, pick the narrower and simpler. This is important because, as I've mentioned, the GMAT itself has relatively clear-cut answer choices for CR, and you need to get in the habit of not overthinking things when you're nervous.
My Verbal Prep Progress
- Baseline Economist GMAT 1, 1 year ago: V36....Their verbal is designed to cut you down at the beginning so you feel like you're improving as you do their course.
- Economist GMAT 2 (5/29): V41...............I'd done about 35% of their verbal by then.
- Manhattan GMAT 1 (5/22): V45...............My first MGMAT test. After I finished 60% of Economist Verbal, Before I started doing OG Verbal.
- GMATPrep 1 (5/29): V47..........................After a week of ONLY doing OG Verbal, going from about 85% per Hard/Medium set to >95%. Once I got here I knew I just needed to maintain this level by doing the last OG questions the few days before the test.
- Manhattan GMAT 2 (6/2): V42..................Note the lack of correlation to OG Verbal improvement.
- Manhattan GMAT 3 (6/25): V45................By now I had finished with Verbal and moved on to Quant focus for the last 2-3 weeks before the test.
- Manhattan GMAT 4 (6/26): V40................I was really GMAT-fatigued at this point and decided to just stop doing practice tests until the test on 7/1.
- Actual GMAT (7/1): V46 ..........................God bless adrenaline.
Doing "Well Enough" on Quant
So, finally, after about a week of non-stop OG Verbal filling all of my free time, I was consistently getting above 95% on every 30-50 question set of Hard/Medium questions and had almost exhausted that set and GMATPrep Exam 1. Time to work on Quant!
I started by doing a second Manhattan GMAT practice test, which I accessed by buying the Manhattan AWA/IR book. These were a great value, especially as compared with Economist-- one $20 book gets you 6 high-quality practice tests. With two practice tests, I had enough material to run their reports (see their "4 Steps to Get the Most out of Your CATs") and was able to understand my performance in a much more precise way than I had before.
The Importance of Materials & Methods
Efficiency was really all about using the best materials. Economist, while it's good at being a survey course, really doesn't allow you to direct your own studies in a meaningful way, and can cause you to waste a lot of time and money. Unless you happen to be evenly bad at everything, a survey is an EXTREMELY inefficient way to approach this. The GMATClub forums pointed me to the Manhattan books.
From then on, I got through with just OG Quant and Manhattan GMAT. When I ran out of things to review from my MGMAT CATs, I would work through Hard/Medium sets of the OG problems and then go over the concepts underlying the questions I had gotten wrong. I ended up buying 1 more Manhattan book, Number Properties, because my performance on the CATs convinced me I needed a more consistent methodology. In the end, I think this might have been overkill-- MGMAT CATs over-focus on Number Properties and Combinatorics/Probability, so I thought I was weaker there than I really was. In general, MGMAT Quant is much tougher and focuses on more obscure topics than the real thing. GMATClub was extremely valuable in telling me how the different brands varied from the real thing.
Whenever there was a very specific concept on which I was fuzzy (i.e., properties of triangles problems, combined rate problems), I would look it up online. Magoosh and other websites have a ton of free blog posts and materials out there!
From all of those sources, I developed a list of things to memorize/know, which I'm attaching to this post. It's specific to what I already knew, but I hope it will be useful for some of you, too!
How to Figure Out What You Should Be Working On
I turned the subject breakdown reports from my Manhattan GMAT practice tests into an excel sheet, wherein I examined which subtopics were taking me too long, in which ones I was getting too-easy problems wrong (low avg. wrong score), and where I wasn't taking enough time (low time + low % right). I would really recommend you read their blog post on the reports and follow it-- 6 practice CATs is a lot, possibly more than you will need, so don't be afraid to use them early and get an even richer picture of your performance. From there, find easy-to-remember methodologies that you can deploy any time you see a problem of a certain type.
My Quant Progress
- Baseline Economist GMAT 1, 1 year ago: Q48
- Economist GMAT 2 (5/29): Q45...............I found my Economist quant scores to be generally unreliable.
- Manhattan GMAT 1 (5/22): Q45
- GMATPrep 1 (5/29): Q44
- Manhattan GMAT 2 (6/2): Q42
- Manhattan GMAT 3 (6/25): Q40...............The weekend before the test. Definitely harder than the real thing.
- Manhattan GMAT 4 (6/26): Q43
- Actual GMAT (7/1): Q49 ..........................Compared to MGMAT, felt way too easy and I thought I was tanking. To extend the "drowning" metaphor, it felt like swimming normally when I'd been practicing swimming with a lead vest on.
IR and AWA Exist, Too
I followed the MGMAT book on IR and AWA, and that was about it. Almost always took practice tests with essay and IR to practice timing. Timing was, to me, the most important thing for IR. I haven't gotten my AWA score back, but in general I felt fine about both.
In general, I found that IR helped me warm up for Quant-- my worst practice test performances were when I did't do IR first.
My Thoughts on Economist vs. Manhattan vs. OG
I really regretted spending so much money on the Economist-- in the end, the course was not nearly flexible enough for what I needed. If I could go back, I would have purchased the whole set of MGMAT books and the two OG books. In the end, though, I think it worked out just buying the MGMAT books that were specific to what I really needed strategies for, and then taking advantage of all the CATs. OG reins supreme, of course.
I think Economist could work really well for some people, especially non-native English speakers or people with absolutely no Quant knowledge. For someone like me, with a varied baseline on Quant and already strong Verbal, it was extremely inefficient.
BEFORE you purchase anything over $100, look around at what people are saying on GMATClub. I came in as a total novice and wish I'd found this forum earlier.
Advice & Test Day Considerations
- Use the Magoosh score chart and think in terms of marginal gains on your time. What is going to help you improve your overall score?
- GMATClub already has quite a few good test-day walkthroughs, so I would recommend that you peruse those.
- Actually get there 30 minutes beforehand-- it took me 20 minutes to get checked in.
- Be careful with timing on your breaks! By the time you get out to where the clock is you probably have wasted at least a minute on palm scanning.
- Practice your food strategy. Literally, practice eating a sandwich or a snack bar in the allotted time without being able to look at a clock.
- If you get overwhelmed, breathe and then figure out what you can solve.
- Slow down and take your time on Verbal questions.
- Thank everyone who supported you through the process!
---
Hope this guide was helpful for my fellow Verbal-not-Quant-ers! Good luck, everyone.
Attachments
File comment: My to-memorize note sheet for GMAT Quant.
GMAT_QuantKnow.pdf [28.79 KiB]
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06 Jul 2016, 20:51
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Wow - amazing formatting skills for the first-time poster. Welcome to GMAT Club! Great to have you and congratulations on your 770! Amazing job!
07 Jul 2016, 05:22
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MDMBA2021
Congrats on your score. It is hard to imagine someone so consistent in verbal for someone like me who isn't native speaker.
Like your Quant to-memorize, do you have anything similar for verbal?
