Study Plan- 770

8/3/2019 Study Plan- 770

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I feel I owe a quick gmat debrief as I used the site extensively and certainly owe some ofmy success to the tools made available to me through this website.

I took the test about a month ago and I received my final score report 2 weeks ago.

Results:Quant: 50Verbal: 46Overall: 770

AWA: 6

I am certainly happy with my score and I hope it will help me in whatever direction Ichoose to go from here!

BACKGROUND

I received my undergrad in mechanical engineering from a smallish liberal arts school inthe USA and I have been working in a design firm for the past 3 years. I have alwaysconsidered an MBA and spending the past 3 years working as an engineer has pushed metowards preparing to make a career shift sometime in the next few years. I don·t find theday to day of an engineering job to be very interesting. With that being said I have justaccepted a new job which will combine a bit of marketing and engineering type work. I amhoping this position will aid me in a career transition in the next 5 years. Though, perhapsI will love the position and my gmat score will simply fall of the record books.

Since I was going to be in a time of transition I figured I may as well study a bit for thegmat and get a score that I could use sometime in the next 5 years if I do decide to go thebusiness school route.

STUDY PLAN

My preparation for the gmat started very unfocused as I wasn·t really sure of when or evenif I would take the test. About 6 months ago I started with a Kaplan GMAT 2010 . I basicallyjust paged through it from time to time. I focused mostly on verbal. I assumed myengineering background would assure me a decent quant score which didn·t end up beingas true as I had assumed.

About this same time I started to look online at the best ways to prepare for the test and I

discovered the gmatclub. At this point I took a bit of a hiatus from any preparation withthe exception being that I subscribed to the daily gmat question from the gmatclub. I didboth the verbal and quant question everyday. Right or wrong I always reviewed the forumfor each question to see how my problem solving strategy might be improved and also todiscover what areas of test knowledge I lacked. I think there is a very important point tobe made here. Acquiring all of the actual knowledge required for the test will only get youso far. Approaching problems in a quick and precise manner is just as if not moreimportant.

8/3/2019 Study Plan- 770


I believe the daily questions ended after 120 days. After the questions ended there wasprobably one month of time where I didn·t even touch any gmat material. During thismonth I purchased an OG 11th Ed when I found it on sale at a local bookseller. After amonth of doing nothing I decided it was time to set a date so I had something to worktowards. I set a date about 2 months out. I didn·t have a particular number I was shootingfor. I wanted something in the 700·s that would keep my options open at least from thegmat score perspective.

So with a date set I decided I needed to start an actual prep plan. I took my first fullpractice test with the free GMATPrep software. Result

GMATPrep approx 2 months out...

Quant: 49Verbal: 44Overall: 760

I was surprised. I play a bit of poker so I instantly saw this score as a simple upswing invariance I certainly didn·t think I was at a 760 score level. However, I still found thetest valuable as I found my two areas needing the most improvement were sentencecorrection (expected) & problem solving (unexpected). At this point I purchaseda Manhattan sentence correction book not only for the SC review but also for access totheir online CATs.

With these results in hand I put together a study schedule. I set aside a week for Sentencecorrection and then a week for quant with a focus on problem solving. Followed by a halfweek each for CR and RC. I then put in a week for a few practice tests. Followed by aweek for review of still weak subjects. Finally, I figured the last week I would review AWAstrat and take the second GMATPrep exam.

Things in my life over the next two weeks went normally meaning, the unexpected andunplanned happened and I wasn·t able to get as much time in as I hoped but I did more orless stick to this schedule.

For my SC review I went through every page of the Manhattan guide with a highlighter. Ihighlighted bits that I thought were particularly important or that I didn·t understand verywell. This would be important later in the process.

For my quant review I went through the kaplan and OG sections on quant strat. I againused a highlighter in the OG quant section to highlight things I needed to know that Ihadn·t previously. This included diff number properties, geometry and some stats. Ifollowed this up by doing every quant question in the OG and reviewing each problem thatI took too long on or got incorrect.

My proposed half week each for CR and RC turned into doing the hardest 20 ?·s in the OGfor each topic. I was satisfied with how I did so I actually didn·t do any further review for

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these 2 subjects.

Next I embarked on two practice tests....I used Manhattan GMAT ·s online CAT exams.

#1Quant: 47Verbal: 41Overall: 720

I was a bit disappointed at the drop from my first test but this was also more along thelines of what I was expecting. I ran out of time in the quant and had to guess 2 of the final3 and actually didn·t get a guess in for the last which I am sure hurt my score. I was againweak on SC in the verbal and based on what I reviewed should have gotten a few moreright.

#2cntrl-V :DQuant: 47Verbal: 41Overall: 720

Again, I ran out of time on the quant. I had two PS ?·s on this test that I spent over 4minutes on each. I needed to learn to ditch these ?·s quick when I saw that they wouldtake far too long for me. Save story on the verbal.

At this point I will say that my focus for both of these tests was poor. I took them both onbeautiful Saturdays with plans of doing things with friends immediately after. This is not arecipe for success.

At this point I was 6 days out. I decided to delay the AWA review until the day before andfocus on SC and quant for the next 5 days. I reviewed all of the highlighted portions frommy previous studies which was very valuable as it allowed me to focus on previouslydetermined weak areas.

I also decided to take the quant section on 2 more man CATs to try to hone my timing.

#3 Quant: 47#4 Quant: 48

While my timing improved my score did only slightly on the second. I was a bitdissapointed but I also was feeling more confident. I felt I was capable of scoring betterthan a 48 on my actual test day.

The day before I read up on AWA strategies. Everyone says take the day before completelyoff but I didn·t really have time to since I hadn·t touched AWA yet I needed to do a quickreview. I spent about 4 or 5 hours the day before preparing. During that time I also wrote4 full responses. 2 each of issue and argument. This was strictly to make sure I was clear

8/3/2019 Study Plan- 770


on timing and knew what length I should shoot for on my responses.

The night before I again strolled through some of the highlighted material just for a lastsecond brush up on a few SC concepts.

TEST DAY

My test was scheduled for 10:30.

I was up around 7 and ate a good breakfast and had some coffee. Another hour or so ofhighlighted material then off to the test center. I had a bit of a drive but I arrived atabout 10.

On the way I picked up another coffee along with a cliff bar and a 5 hour energy. Thesewere to be my test fuel :D

AWA

I didn·t find either prompt too difficult and I had an outlined response to eachdocumented about 3 or 4 minutes into the 30 minutes. I am not slow at typing but I endedup only having about 1 minute to review each of my far too long essays. I did what I couldfocusing on the first and last paragraph of each for review.

I took the first break. I took a small swig of 5 hour energy and ate about a of my cliffbar.

QUANT

The section seemed to go well. I found the actual GMAT questions to be less timeconsuming than the manhattan test problems (or perhaps I was just better prepared atthat point). Whatever the case I never had a problem I didn·t feel I had a chance at. Iremember having one problem that I knew would take me too long but I narrowed it downand guessed between two options. I arrived on the final question with 2 minutesremaining. I was bummed when I had he question solved in 30 seconds and thought I wasending on a 500-600 level question. I literally stared at the question for a minutewondering what I was missing. I thought I had been doing well why was this so easy!

Again, I took the second break. I followed the same exact routine.

VERBAL

This section again went pretty smoothly. Nothing stands out in my mind except a fewtouch RC·s and CR·s. I thought I had a perfect answer in mind after reading each ? only tofind two choices that seemed to say very similar things. Again, my timing was great as Ihad about 1:30 left for my final question which ended up being a SC I believe. I felt goodafter taking the section but I really didn·t have a guess at that point for my results.

8/3/2019 Study Plan- 770


EXPERIMENTAL SECTION

Instead of receiving my score at this point I was lucky enough to participate in 30 moreminutes of GMAT heaven

I was mentally exhausted at this point. I certainly gave my best effort on the ?·s but I amsure that if it had been graded my score would not have been very good. The ?·s wereunique. They never seemed to be conceptually difficult as much as just being able to siftthrough large amounts of information to find relevant specifics.

When I came to the point of choosing to report my score I didn·t really think twice exceptto make sure I was clicking the right selection. My score popped up and I was certainlysatisfied.

A Few Hints for prep and test day...

1. Pick a date! This is key to being motivated.2. Focus on how problems are solved not the specifics of a given problem. Overarchingconcepts are most important.3. Memorize useful shortcuts esp for quant section...divisibility rules, triangle types,algebraic identities4. For RC I chose to read quickly first trying to understand overall theme of a section.When asked specific questions re-read the relevant area of the given passage.5. Use the earplugs at the test center if you are at all prone to being distracted.6. Purchase practice marker board to gain familiarity with your only note taking toolduring the exam.7. Focus on improving weak areas most. Give quick review to strengths...don·t wasteprecious study time with areas you are already proficient in. For instance, doing 100 easyRC problems where you get 95% right is probably not a good use of time if you lack inunderstanding some grammatical rules like I did.8. During the test don·t even think about your results. An experimental problem or yourparticular strengths could easily have you distracted by the lack of difficulty with aproblem. I was lucky to only have this once at the end of a section though I shouldn·t havelet it bother me at all.9. Go into the test confident of your ability to reach whatever goal you might have. If youaren·t confident you can reach your goal perhaps you need a bit more time to prepare.

Well I am not sure where I will go or what I will do with my score in the future but a bigthanks to the gmatclub founder and all of its contributing members. Best of luck to allfuture test takers!

I wrote this quick and didn·t have time to proofread so sorry about the grammatical andspelling mistakes that I am sure exist.

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Study Plan- 770