melvyn_udall

GMATBong, I want to apply to London Business School's FT MBA program. Can you please evaluate my profile. I have got a GMAT score of 750. WE: 7 years Age: 31 Industry: IT Nationality: Indian(Currently settled in London) I started as a programmer and have moved into leading software development teams of 3-12 people. Have worked in India, US and have been working for various organizations throughout the UK for the last 3 years. I want to move into Investment Banking after finishing my MBA. Apart from work, basketball, football, bike rides, supporting various charities by running half marathons and climbing arduous mountains keep me away from mischief. Is that information enough for you to evaluate my chances of getting into LBS? Thanks in advance.

I'll upload the maths and verbal notes I made during preparation shortly. You all probably everything that is in those notes already but it is worth a read probably.

Thanks a lot. Found out today that you've done even better :) Well done and good luck with the applications.

Got back after watching a 52 year old Bruce Willis kick ar***. Before I begin the debrief I would like to say a big THANK YOU to Erin for starting this forum and to the numerous members namely 800Bob, Erin,Ravindra_iit,Surya,DJValentino,meghago, abhijit_s,check.stone,clintonn and twinsplitter whose posts have helped a moron like me achieve 750 on the GMAT. Hats off to all the members of this forum. I am an IT consultant with 7 years experience across various domains. I used to be an MBA aspirant once but because I was doing extremely well in my line of work my focus shifted from getting an MBA. Around January I was suddenly reminded of my original goal by a friend and I decided to take the GMAT. Got the Kaplan 800 book and started brushing up on the concepts. I also read somewhere that GMAT is about how you practice rather than how much you practice. The article also mentioned that 1 hour per day if spent properly would get you ready for GMAT. In all fairness, the writer probably meant that if you can manage to spend only 1 hour per day then it should be spent properly diagnosing and correcting your weaknesses rather than trying to maximize the number of questions that you solve.However, I took this advice as an excuse not to work for more than an hour every day. To be fair to myself I spent 90 minutes every day;) My original plan was to take the GMAT in April and I had already finished doing Princeton Review(except the hardest bins which I had preserved for the end) and Kaplan 800 twice. However a social event in my family forced me to postpone the GMAT. I was quite frustrated initially because I thought that I was prepared for the GMAT and would have to gain momentum again after the holiday. One day when I was browsing my gmail account I saw this sponsored link called www.urch.com(our dear forum) and just clicked on it and started to browse around. First post that caught my eye was Clintonn's excellent debrief which made me think "I want to be in this guys shoes one day(at least in terms of GMAT score)". Then slowly I discovered numerous other excellent posts which had the same tacit message as had Clintonn's post, "The GMAT score is a reflection of how much effort you put in and the way you have addressed your weak areas". Needless to say I was thanking my stars for the family function which made me postpone the GMAT. Preparation: I am going to confess to a heresy. I never gave the diagnostic test, just started brushing up the concepts. Maths: Over the course of my preparation I discovered that DS was my weak area. The mistakes in DS were both conceptual and silly. Hence I decided to read every post in the DS sub forum till D-Day and diagnose the reasons why the errors were occurring. I discovered that the silly mistakes were occurring because I was neglecting information given in the question. For example , if the question says x is a positive integer the integers less than 0 shouldn't be considered. It sounds stupid but I had to pay extra attention to the information mentioned in the question. In PS I was able to solve most of the questions provided I remained calm. The silly mistakes in PS occurred because the question asked something and I calculated something else. For e.g if a question mentioned 2 items x and y and the discount price on y was to be calculated I would just calculate discount for x and look at the answer choices. I am just trying to give you an example of the kind of thinking that leads to silly mistakes. The materials I used for Maths,in the increasing order of importance, were Kaplan 800, Princeton Review ,Set21-30, OG11. Others have said this before: please do not be fooled by the easy nature of the maths questions early on in OG. The questions towards the end are truly representative of actual GMAT. Verbal: This was a different kettle of fish. Sentence correction: This is probably the area where I worked the hardest. Went through almost all the posts in the sub forum since I joined. The Manhattan SC guide is like a god send if you want to improve your SC. Gives you a good grounding of the rules you need to look out for GMAT. Please go through all the post made by 800Bob in Sentence correction forum. He is the Yoda of Grammar and we padwans better listen to what he says. Same goes for Erin's post. My initial mistakes in SC occurred because of ignorance of rules and towards the end it was because of trying to guess the answer rather than use POE. If properly studied SC can save you a lot of time that you could invest in other areas. Critical Reasoning: This was probably my greatest challenge in verbal. No matter how much I tried there were some questions that just stumped me. Nevertheless, the Critical Reasoning in Princeton Review is pretty decent. My mistakes in this area occurred because I used to go out of the scope of the argument and because some questions were just out of my reach. Reading Comprehension: I am a voracious reader and around the time I started my preparation interest in Gene theory,biology and general science started to increase as well. Hence, although I did not understand each and every word mentioned in those convoluted science passages I remained unfazed by them and towards the very end almost attained a 100% accuracy in RC. The materials I used for verbal were Kaplan 800, Princeton Review,1000 SC, 1000 CR,OG11 and Verbal sets 21-30. My scores in full length tests were Kaplan1- 640 Kaplan2 - 670 PR1 - 670 PR2 - 710 PR2 - 730 GmatPrep1 - 710 GmatPrep2 - 770 The degree of relevance of all the prep materials has already been mentioned by numerous other members and hence I would skip it. During the last 2 months my schedule was PS on Monday, DS on Tuesday, SC-Wed,CR-Thur, RC-Friday and a full length test on the weekends if I could manage it. Strategy: My final strategies for every section were PS: 1) Read the question stem calmly and don't put pen to paper unless you have read the question fully. 2) After calculating the answer verify whether what you have calculated matches what the question is asking. 3) Perform step 1 just in case you've missed something 4) If all the above takes more than 4 minutes(extreme circumstances) either use POE or wild guess to choose an answer and move on. Luckily didn't have to perform this step in GMAT DS: 1) Assimilate the information in the question stem such as "x is a positive integer". 2) Try to rephrase the question. e.g rephrase x - y > 0 as x > y. 3) Try to eliminate the answer choice rather than trying to select it. For e.g if the question is "is x > y" then try to prove that both a "yes" and a "no" can be obtained from stmt1/2. This strategy eliminates the errors when you find stmt1 sufficient when it is not 4) If all the above takes more than 4 minutes(extreme circumstances) either use POE or wild guess to choose an answer and move on. Had to do this on one question during GMAT and hence the 50 SC: 1) Read the full sentence. Even if certain parts of the underlined part appear erroneous do not try to guess the answer. 2) Use POE to find the answer After you've found the answer plug it in the sentence and read it in your mind.If you don't find any errors mark and move on These 2 strategies eliminated problems where I would concentrate on a missing "that" and would pick a choice which had the "that" but then it would contain a wrong idiom further along the clause. The above 2 steps are sometimes iterative since you're trying to find the answer choice that stinks the least. For e.g if choice A has a missing "that" but wrong idiomatic usage and choice B has the correct idiom but doesn't have "that" you would choose option B if the "that" is trying to modify a noun which is the object of the preceding clause since in this case the "that" isn't mandatory. CR: 1) Read the question stem. 2) Read the paragraph with a very narrow mind. This allows you to stick to the scope which is the most important rule in CR. 3) Use POE RC: 1) Read the passage carefully 2) Read with the author rather than being a disinterested observer. Why has he or she written the passage? I used to imagine that I was having a conversation with the author and (s)he was reading the passage to me. This helped me read dense passages. Guys, if it helps imagine a supermodel telling you about the genetic structure of a bacteria.:D 3) Stick to the scope especially in inference questions. Final days: During the last month off my preparation I was looking for a new job and a new house as well. Nice planning, eh? Got a job 20 days before D-Day and a house a week before. So it was only in the last week when I had nothing to think about except GMAT. Anyways had a good sleep the night before. Caught a train to the test center. My food strategy was to eat an apple just before the test so that the sugar in the fruit slowly gets absorbed by my body unlike that in a chocolate and to eat a chocolate before verbal to get that explosive burst of energy. I reached the center 45 minutes before the appointment and the lady told me that I could start right away. Told myself "Melvyn you can do this;do it well so that you don't have to come back ever again". Put my stuff in the locker, got my photograph and fingerprint taken and sat down to take the test. The AWA section helped calm my nerves. Wrote around 4 short paragraphs. Will be worried till I get to know how much I scored. Didn't take any break and dive head first into maths. For some reason the questions I got were extremely easy. This frustrated me since I thought I wasn't doing well. I kept re-checking my answers. There was just one DS question towards the end for which I had no clue and I used wild guessing. Anyway I finished with 2 minutes to spare. Took the 10 minute break a wolfed down a swiss chocolate. The girl putting her things in the locker beside me must have thought I was an animal. Sat down to do the verbal and the first few questions were tough CRs followed by easy SCs. Took a lot of time following my strategy on each section to the letter. Out of 3 RCs 2 were easy and the third one was extremely tough. It dealt with natural science but luckily my recent interest in such matters and the strategy of reading with the author helped me. For some reason I was beginning to get bored but managed to force myself to concentrate. Towards the end I got a boldface and I started celebrating prematurely. This might have caused me some grief in the verbal score. After a few more questions I got my second boldface question. I finished with 15 seconds to spare. The BIQs after the test could be a torture for those who are impatient to get the score and I expected myself to be in such a mood. But somehow I was very calm and read through each and every word of those questions. Made sure I selected "Report Score" and not "Cancel Score" and hit the button. First number I saw was Q50 followed by 750 overall and I silently started pumping my fist in the air. The admin lady smiled and asked me to come out silently. Got the print out and was about to leave when saw this gorgeous babe waiting for the test and smiling at my child like enthusiasm. Maybe I should have spoken to her. Would have been a double whammy for me but hey, 750 would do for now.:grad: Looking back I think, I would have preferred 770 which was my score in GmatPrep 2. Could have concentrated more on the verbal section. Thanks again, everybody, for reading this. I am tired of typing if you are not tired of reading Please tell me if I can be of any help. I owe you guys so much.

Just got back from the test center. Am off to see Diehard 4.0 now. Will post a debrief once I finish consuming all the alcohol in town.

IMHO E. Since std deviation is the "variation" around the average for a set of number neither the absolute value of the average nor the median by itself is sufficient to answer the question

Stmt 1: x = 7. x - 4 = z. Hence sufficient Stmt 2: t = 5 8 - z = t. Hence sufficient

I think it is A. If x1 + x2+....x50 is the revenue from new books and y1+y2+.....y100 is that from used books, stmt 2 tells us (x1 + x2+....x50)/50 > (y1+y2+.....y100)/100 which doesn't yield (x1 + x2+....x50) > (y1+y2+.....y100)

See Erin's explanation http://www.www.urch.com/forums/gmat-sentence-correction/12444-two-sentence-corrections-wikigrammar-com.html?highlight=drive-ins

Amit, Slope of -1/6 would mean that the line k makes an angle which is greater than 90 degrees with the y axis in the anticlockwise direction. If you draw that on a piece of paper you'll find that sooner or later line k will intersect quadrant II. Hope that helps.

I agree with vappana. Answer to the first should be E

IMHO its E

Can confirm that 1 is correct. Don't know about 2

Since the "ratio" is 5:2:7 these values can be multiplied by a common number to arrive at the actual values. Let's say it is x. Hence actual values are 5x, 2x and 7x and the total is 14x Statement 1: women+children = 12 This means 5x+7x = 12 which can be solved for x. Sufficient Statement 2: 2x hence, x Since x cannot be 0, x=1. Sufficient. Hope that helps

Imho C