superturk

Preparation strategy I signed up for Kaplan's online course. I went through ~60% of the material. I skimmed very quickly through the course content, stopping only if I ran into something that looked unfamiliar. 80% of my time was spent solving practicequestions. About 30% of that was quiz questions, the rest was full length practice tests. Of the quiz questions, about 75% was math. (Don't you feel like this is the set up for an annoying percentage question?). I almost never did essays until a week before the test. The last week, whenever I took practice tests, I spent 10-15 minutes preparing drafts for the essays. I only wrote the outline and the first two paragraphs to make sure I could get to that point in a reasonable amount of time. I spent a total of 6 weeks preparing, spending ~8-10 hours/week the first three weeks and 10-15 hours for the last 3. Material I used: Kaplan online Tests I took: Kaplan Diagnostic: 700 Kaplan CAT1: 780 Kaplan CAT2: 730 Kaplan CAT3: 780 Kaplan CAT4: 780 Kaplan Ultimate Practice Test: 780 MBA.com Test 1: 750 MBA.com Test 2: 770 GMAT: 790 Test Day My test was at 8. I woke up at 6:30, picked up my WSJ and walked to the nearby Starbucks. There was a crazy homeless person in the Starbucks trying to get the baristas to dance with him, so they had to call the police, which made for an interesting morning. I had a triple grande latte, and was kindly offered a 4th shot as a courtesy. That might have been the extra kick I needed, I felt great on the way to the test. I took the test at the Pearson center on Wacker Drive in Chicago. Staff were kind but occasionally there was a lot of noise right in front of the door of the testing room, which was very annoying. It helped that I had been there the week before for the Kaplan UPT -- I knew this would happen and I did not get as pissed of as I could have. When I was waiting or the test, there was a group of 6-7 people (I think they were doing an online university degree together or something) who knew each other just well enough to make a LOT of loud small talk. At 7:30 in the morning. I realized that bringing an iPod would have been a great idea. The last thing you want to hear just before an important test is a bunch of ladies exchanging christmas decoration tips. I drank a lot of water before the test, and went to the bathroom just before the test, after the essays and after the quant. Washing your face and rubbing cold water on your neck and hair is a great refresher. Also during the breaks, I chatted with the test center person. It makes you feel like you are still living and is a great way to calm down. Difference between Kaplan UPT and the actual test: I thought the Kaplan UPT was more difficult than the previous Kaplan CATs- I started running out of time in quant and take a few guesses towards the end. The verbal was full of vague questions and I did not feel good about it at all. How I ended up with a 780 is still a mystery to me. The mba.com tests were more difficult, a lot of the math questoins were tricky. The actual test itself was closer to the Kaplan CATs. If I had to grade the difficulty on a 0-100 scale: Kaplan CATs: 70 Kaplan UPT: 80 Mba.com: 85 Actual test: 78 What I did for verbal Not much really. I did practice the few things in verbal you can practice: e.g. parallel structures, subject-verb agreement, idioms. For reading comp., Kaplan suggests all sorts of detailed strategies like writing down the topic, scope etc. but I don't really believe in much of that. I read in detail and try to understand the passage as best I can. Also, I found that some of Kaplan's simple tips (e.g. "answer choices with extreme wording are usually wrong") can be very helpful. I think what matters most in verbal is really how much of a reader you are. This is not something you can just get better at in 3 weeks but especially if you are planning to take the test a few months from now, I would start reading the Economist and McKinsey Quarterly. Not because they are about business but because they are excellent publications. The ~$100 you pay for the Economist is more than worth it when you consider how much you are paying for this test and how for business school prep in general. I also read newspapers religiously. Reading fiction or other things you like may help you speed up mechanically, but it's really things like the Economist that help improve the kind of comprehension skills you need for GMAT. One other trick I discovered during the test: I realized that in sentence correction my mind kept wondering in between the choices. Especially it the sentence was very wrong, I would read choice B, decide there was something very wrong with it, but by the time I read choice D, I would forget what was very wrong about A and go back to compare it to D. So I did something very simple- I started using the notepad. At the beginning of each question, I wrote down A, B, C, D, E and whenever I decided a choice was wrong I put a cross next to it and never looked at that option again -- unless I went through all of them and thought all had something wrong. It's simple enough but I never did this before test day and it is amazing how much it can help you speed up. If you are not a messy writer, you only need to write A, B, C, D, E once and you can use that as the first column in your table and keep expanding horizontally with each question. A final word of advice: know your holding capacity for water. I really had to pee in the last half hour of verbal and was faced with the impossible dilemma of whether the relief that would come from going to the bathroom would be worth the 5-6 minutes I would lose. I chose to stay, but it might have cost me one or two questions. I also probably did not look very attractive wriggling in my chair and squeezing my thighs (etc.).

Hi all, Just took GMAT for the first time yesterday and got a 790. I didn't know 780+ was so hard to get until a colleague expressed his amazement ("Holy shit!") and I started Googling around just to see how uncommon my score was and ended up in this forum. A few words of encouragement: I am reading all these posts from 790 people and I am surprised to see them treated like they were the first to land on Mars. I really don't mean to be condescending but it is not that hard. I am not even a native English speaker (started learning when I was 12). I am good at Math but definitely got a few B's in Math classes in college. Please realize that these high scores are not that uncommon - there are tons of people who get 790s but just don't feel the need to go around posting in the internet about it. With that being said, here are my top three tips: 1) I signed for Kaplan's online course, which lets you take a practice test at an actual test center. I think for most people, this would be tremendously helpful - it was for me. 2) Be strategic about how you use your time at the beginning at the test, especially for Math. I tried to spend about 2.5 minutes per question until I got past question 15 and was sure that I was on the high track. I double checked and triple checked every answer. After that, I tried to speed up. If I got to an answer in 50 seconds and it was one of the answer choices, I moved on - especially if it was "3+sqrt2" or something. If you are on question 30 and it looks like the question is going to take you 5 minutes, spend 1 minute to eliminate 2 answer choices and just take a guess. 3) For verbal: I avoided Kaplan's tip about "not reading the details" for the passage questions. I am guessing that for most people time is not such a big issue in Verbal. I read every passage, slowly and making sure I remember as much as possible. After that, each passage question took me Hope this helps. Good luck to all,