Oh, GMAT! How I loved thee....
Originally I intended this blog to be a way for me to stay motivated during GMAT preparation, but when I got into the thick of it, maintaining a blog whilst studying for the GMAT, working 40 hours, and participating in Toastmasters got to be overwhelming. To that end, I only have five posts that are GMAT specific, and I'll include them here.
As I reflect on last summer, I have a few tidibits of advice for the taking:
The test is hard but it is conquerable. My first practice CAT score was a 590. I believe the breakdown was something like 39Q and a 30 something V. I wound up scoring a 730 with a 47Q and a 44V. How did I get to that point? Hard work, dedication, and an expensive Manhattan GMAT course. Salaries are paltry here in this publishing world, so it was hard for me to shell out the dough for it, but I'm glad I did.
If you don't know your basics, refresh, reacquaint, and review. It had been a while since I had taken a proper math course so I was rusty to say the least. I spent a good two weeks getting back up to speed on simple things that I just hadn't used in a while. MGMAt offers a Fundamentals of Math course (online) free with the purchase of the 9-week course. Take advantage of it.
Work on your weaknesses until they became your strengths, but don't neglect the strengths you already have. Verbal is my strength and always has been. I didn't have to spend any time relearning the verbal concepts tested, but I definitely benefited from practicing those concepts, pacing myself on that section, and developing a strategy for answering each question type. When I started studying, I missed a lot of Reading Comprehension questions. Once I slowed down and started taking notes, I began getting most of them right. Also, brush up on your idiomatic expressions and specific GMAT grammar. The Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction guide is good for that purpose. There are certain things that the GMAT regards as improper grammar that may be different than what you're used to. For instance, the GMAT says it's incorrect to say
Michael Jordan is considered to be the greatest basketball player of all time.It should be:
Michael Jordan is considered the greatest basketball player of all time.
Always practice your OG questions timed. Practicing them without constraints is a waste of time and energy. You have on average 2 minutes per question on the test. Start working under test conditions asap. Also, once you've done a stretch of OG problems, don't just check to see if you got the answers right. You need to do an extensive review of those questions. You might have just gotten lucky on a few or there might be another more efficient way of solving the problem. There were a few questions that showed up on the real test that looked identical to the problems I studied with in the OG. The only thing that had changed were the values. Since I had already beaten that question to death in review, I was able to answer the question without trepidation.
Have a guessing strategy for all question types. This comes in very handy for Data Sufficiency Questions. There were times that I couldn't answer the question but I could whittle down the answer choices to improve the probability of me guessing correctly.
Word problems are a time drain so get accustomed to doing them and doing them quickly. You'll likely see overlapping set problems, work-rate problems, and rate-time-distance problems alot. I saw probability once and no combinatorics questions.
Rote memorization does not help. Or at least it didn't in my case. Number properties for whatever reason was a hurdle for me. I overcame that hurdle by doing lots of problems until the rules became intuitive.
The geometry looks more intimidating than it actually is. Once you start doing lots of the geometry problems you'll recognize a pattern in the way the questions are written (lots of triangles inscribed in circles, lots of similar triangles, transverse angles, applications of formulas).
Your GMAT tutor or Teacher can only get you so far. You have to practice a lot on your own.
Take all of your practice tests with the AWA essays. Remember you want to simulate the testing conditions. Doing so will also help you develop a template for the AWAs once you get to the real day. Taking practice tests is also beneficial to your overall gmat study strategy. I posted about a cool article on the benefit of taking practice tests (http://californiacassiopeia.blogspot.com/2011/01/gmat-tip.html).
Try your best to relax on G-day. I kept thinking I was bombing the test. I got hung up on one of the early questions in Quant and wound up wasting some time. After that my confidence level went down, but I psyched myself out by telling myself that I could take it again if necessary. The Verbal section was harder than I remembered any of my practice tests being. I got to a very long passage and seriously couldn't remember a thing I read and wound up guessing on all four of the questions that came along with it. I was ready to see a 590 when I hit report score, but I got a 730. Others have reported feeling the same way when taking the GMAT only to see that they got a great score when it was all said and done. The funny thing about this test is that the better you do, the harder the questions get. And when you take the real test, the "experimental question" element comes into play. We mere mortals (by mere mortals I mean folks who don't work for GMAC) can speculate all we want about where these questions fall, but as it stands, we really don't know. So just do your best, keep your spirits up, and do not cancel your score.
Alright here are my gmat specific blog posts:
http://californiacassiopeia.blogspot.com/2010/07/day-0-of-manhattan-gmat.html
http://californiacassiopeia.blogspot.com/2010/07/day-2.html
http://californiacassiopeia.blogspot.com/2010/07/beginning-of-week-2.html
http://californiacassiopeia.blogspot.com/2010/07/quiet-week-in-office.html
