770 Q50, V47, in 3 months, debrief

[timur.ivannikov]

Here's my story:

For all my practice tests, I started with the 2 required essays. I feel that it was very important because it takes 1 hour to write them and I definitely felt more tired than I would have been if I hadn't written the essays. Also, on the practice tests, I did not take any breaks and took my tests whenever I had time, so at times I was actually tired and not in the best shape. On the actual exam, I did take almost full breaks after essays and after math. During the breaks, I drank some water and ate part of an apple.

I took my first practice test without any preparation just to see where I stand. Since I have a full time job, I could study only about 10 hrs a week, including the 3+ hour practice exam.

Official GMAT PREP 1 = 660
1 month of studying all 8 volumes of Manhattan GMAT and completing most of the questions in the Official GMAT Guide (except easy math) as directed by the Manhattan GMAT guides...
Manhattan GMAT 1 = 640
2 weeks of reviewing mistakes from MGMAT 1. This test is probably the most difficult of all the tests I've taken. I have a very strong engineering math background and truly feel that you have to be a genius to finish the quant section on time; a genius I am not. Also, this test had some very fishy/subliminal CR questions. I understand that they are very close to the official CR questions but the logic was not 100% clear.

Manhattan GMAT 2 = 690
1 week of review
Manhattan GMAT 3 = 700
2 weeks of review
Manhattan GMAT 4 = 730
2 weeks of review
GMAT Prep 2 = 730
I was actually a little disappointed with this result but found that more than half of my verbal mistakes were on very doable sentence correction questions, so I hit sentence correction hard for 2 more weeks.

official GMAT = 770, Q50, V47. During the test, I got 3 long passages and 1 short but for some reason they seemed easier than the ones I saw in GMAT Prep 2. It is possible that I was simpy more interested in the topics or maybe I wasn't as tired as I was during the prep test.

Advice:

1) The Manhattan GMAT guides were excellent but I had to read them once, absorb the information by taking the practice tests, and then come back to review in order to truly understand the subtleties of the GMAT.
- While I was reading the guides, I made my own Cliffs Notes for all the topics I did not know or was making mistakes on.
- Throughout my taking the practice exams, I made additional notes.
- I used the official guide, 12th edition, for practice questions and went through the sentence correction question bank twice, 2 months apart, because it was my weakest area.

2) Do not put too much pressure on yourself; if something goes wrong you can always take the test again.

3) To all the international students who say "I gave a test" when you really mean "I took a test", I love you guys, thanks for all the SC posts that helped me; but I believe that "I gave a test" would not be the correct idiom on GMAT, because someone who gives a test must be giving it to another person not to him/herself.

[gmatdelhi]

Hey...
congrats on the fantastic score!

question for u: when u say u spent 1-2 weeks reviewing your MGMAT practice test, what does that mean? what did u do in that time?

[timur.ivannikov]

thanks, I can suggest several things for review based on my experience.

1) For math, study the questions that you got wrong and questions you got right but were not exactly sure about. Make sure you can answer the questions correctly after reviewing them and can also answer similar questions. It's especially easy to modify a combinatorics problem yourself and see whether you can solve it. For data sufficiency questions, definitely make sure you know what general topic is being tested and what "trick" the authors used to make a particular question more difficult. The GMAT guides have whole chapters on paraphrasing DS questions but I didn't really read them because I was already good at math.

I did however have to come back to the GMAT math study guides to review certain topics and redo some of the end of chapter exercises. When I was working on the exercises I had done before, I only picked the ones that seemed difficult on first read so the review was pretty subjective.

Also, official GMAT prep software has an excellent review of math concepts - I did not know about it at first but it's very thorough.

2) Most importantly for me, verbal was the problem. I had the most trouble with sentence correction and with critical reasoning. I had trouble with critical reasoning not because I was somehow dumber than I am now but because I didn't realize how subtle each question is. In some of the questions, one word, even one article "a" vs. "'the", can make an answer choice wrong.
Once again, I would suggest studying all the incorrectly answered questions from the practice exams. Make sure that you know what type of question each question is, strengthen/weaken conclusion and etc... . Then re-read the relevant chapters in GMAT guides, making any notes that would help you answer those particular questions correctly next time.

For sentence correction, which was the hardest portion of the exam for me, I reviewed each question I got wrong and made my own notes under each relevant topic: idioms, subject/verb agreement, parallelism, and etc... By the way, I made my own list of idioms based on SC guide's list and any other idioms I wasn't sure about from practice exams. I suggest being very honest with yourself here and writing down any less familiar idioms even if you got the corresponding practice questions right.

At the end of my preparation, I knew most of the rules but was still not applying them efficiently, so I practiced as much as I could and was finally able to recognize the question types almost immediately. I also found that on some very hard questions, I got lost because I was looking for mistakes that weren’t there. Eventually I was able to trust my instincts without making up non-existent mistakes but it took a lot of practice using the verbal/OG guides and GMAT verbal forum and of course it helps that I’ve lived in the US for 15 years.

In some cases, the preparation was fairly easy. For example, I was making mistakes on "if" vs. "whether" usage so I just looked in the guide and made sure I understood what’s going on. Occasionally, the SC guide’s explanation was not good enough and I "googled" the web for additional explanations of a particular topic but one has to be careful using the internet because there is a lot of questionable information out there.

For verbal, the official GMAT prep software and the OG/verbal guides do have some review of verbal concepts. Although the reviews are insufficient, they are the best, so make sure to read them.