GMAT! July 31, 2009
Posted by admin in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farWow just been in a crazy study and exam period that took me back a few years. I have been attempting to get into a decent business school and had to take a GMAT. First time up I disrespected the exam and got my just desserts; the kind business school folks gave me a chance to retake on a conditional offer and I figured second time up I had better put the effort in!
Managed to clean my plate, get the grade I wanted and just scrape above the 700 mark… thought I would share a duffers guide to getting there…
1. I have a reasonable maths background from being a physics grad and thought I could swing the maths – WRONG – these questions have a certain style that you need to learn and there are shortcuts that significantly reduce the time taken per question. Please get a GMAT maths workbook and trawl through it. I used the Kaplan GMAT workbook – it gave an excellent grounding. I also used the Manhattan GMAT site quite a lot. On it are an excellent set of free maths flashcards.
2. The best insight I got that helped me leap in marks was an understanding that a category of questions known as ‘VICs’ or Variables In answer Choices – I had struggled to do some questions using algebra and found that this is simply the long way around. When you find questions with variable expressions in answer choices simply start using the picking numbers technique for the equation expressed in the words of the question stem then run the same numbers through the answer options to find which lead to a match. Sometimes you may get to 2 options and have to refine your choices. I also found that when stuck on certain other questions I could also use this method nicely. Could not recommend this more!
3. General practice – many of the kaplan and manhattan questions simulate the exam but the GMAT books themselves are the best simulation of what the exam questions will be like. I came to be familiar with the 12th edition of the GMAT review… I catalogued the questions into ‘types’ and the nuances of many question types were repeated in the exam.
4. Verbal practice…. in context my background involves reading proposals and reasonably complex docs quite a lot so my reading comprehension needed less work than other areas. Here I focused on sentence correction which I was no better than chance at selecting the right answer when I started… Using the GMAT review I came to be familiar with the style of these questions and I also got the Kaplan Verbal Workbook and Princeton GMAT book to help me along here. All gave good guidance around spotting the familiar mistakes and eventually I coudl spot what the question was asking me to look for.
5. Research. It was very good to understand other people were struggling as I was to crack this and I enjoyed looking into various community sites such as Beat the GMAT.
6. Prep – I tried the first time around to study for an hour a day 6 weeks out from the exam and with a lot of the ‘hour per day’ slots being on aircraft or trains – this is simply not a great environment for getting the methods into your head. Second time up I tried to use environments such as libaries or company meeting rooms early in the morning or evening – much better.
7. Testing – the exam is nearly 4 hours long – you need to build your endurance. I would take at least one full test per week and also try to take individual area tests 2 or 3 times per week.
8. Its not just about testing – first time up I relied mainly upon taking test questions to infer the body of knowledge I was supposed to learn, big mistake. The best route without a doubt is to learn about the question types first and then test yourself on those types. Otherwise your ego gets a true panning as you continually bump into errors that are simple to avoid should you know the method.
Think that is about it for now… got to go secure that funding and make sure my conditional offer still stands!