EEPHDWANNABE

Sorry mods feel free to delete my thread, reposting here. Interested in chances @ HBS/Stanford/Warton: Age: 27, 28 when entering. UG: Texas Tech University, BSEE, GPA=3.86 G: Rice University, MSEE, GPA = 3.5 GMAT: 760(M50, V45, AWA=5.5) --------------------------------- Work: 4.75 years at high tech/telecom as a telecom engineer. --------------------------------- Extras: Lots in college (soccer, powerlifting, engineering clubs, european student society. Pres or VP of 2/3 of clubs I joined) Post college: Still compete in powerlifting, play soccer 1/week, nothing else really. My goal is to break into IB bulge bracket and if not that, top 3 MC with my MBA. (how cliche I know). Thanks in advance.

Interested in chances @ HBS/Stanford/Warton: Age: 27, 28 when entering. UG: Texas Tech University, BSEE, GPA=3.86 G: Rice University, MSEE, GPA = 3.5 GMAT: 760(M50, V45, AWA=5.5) --------------------------------- Work: 4.75 years at high tech/telecom as a telecom engineer. --------------------------------- Extras: Lots in college (soccer, powerlifting, engineering clubs, european student society. Pres or VP of 2/3 of clubs I joined) Post college: Still compete in powerlifting, play soccer 1/week, nothing else really. Thanks in advance.

HBS????? OUTSTANDING ADMIT!!!! HBS hands down. Regardless of what you want to study. Congratulations!!!

Oh yeah you're the guy with a 790 GMAT. Nothing outside the obvious, really: wear a suit, have some prepackaged answers. Please post your story once the interviewer hands you the admission letter. :)

aj, please keep us/me posted on your results. I have a similar background in very similar line of work (though not nearly as experienced as you are) and would like to see how you do. As for your rejection, maybe you have too "quantish" of a profile and the committee might have determined that you were ready to go straight to the industry as you are. Don't give up.

Success story?? I letter of admission to HBS with a full ride is a success story. Even Stanford rejected 800s in the past and it is not even a #1 school. It takes more than a score...

Zero AWA preparation. (maybe that is why I missed out on the 0.5 of a point). Most of my effort went into what was most improvable with further study: SC.

Awa = 5.5

All the technical background in the world does not save one from misreading the question, using an intermidiete answer as a final answer (frequent trap used by GMAC) and many other "silly" mistakes. I have an advanced degree in a technical discipline (quite mathematical one), so constant exposure to math made it easier to handle the Quant section but I still did every quant question in every book/practice problem set/test I came across. Paper GMAT tests that GMAC sells have somewhat easier questions, BUT you can miss a lot fewer of them to get the same score as you could on a CAT test and I found my score to fall within a very narrow range- indication of consistency in question difficulty, quality and test scoring tables. I prepared for 10-11 months, with particular attention paid to SC.

I didn't spend time "studying" the math section, I only studied (memorized rules etc) SCs, but didn't skip any math questions that came my way. Math was not a weakness due to my technical background and did not improve much over the course of the prep. I went through books cover to cover and if math was on the menue that day, then math was what I did. After going through all the books, I did paper tests from GMAC (you can buy them), then CAT tests from GMAC and Kaplan. Finally I redid all the OG11 SCs (after 6 month gap) and re-examined my SC error rate.

This is my second graduation from Tmagic (GRE one being 1st years ago) Happy to see the score is reflective of my practice average. My practice scores (sample size of about 13) ranged from 730 to 780 with 760 being the most frequent. I prepared for a long time, mostly developing an instinct for SC, I am a firm (controversial perphaps) believer that there is little you can do to improve RC or CR, maybe that is because these came easier to me than SCs. I did not do 1000 SC, but did do every single SC in 10 most popular GMAT books (including Manhattan, even though I think it's reputation is a bit overrated). Due to quantity of practice, I soon developped a better eye for SC, quickly spotting the traps. I still get hand-wavy "it- just-sounds-better-that-way" ones wrong every once in awhile, but grammar errors rarely get past me after all the practice. Recommendations? I think there are few shortcuts here. Unless you have a natural ability, you have to grind through the problems. Focus on the problematic area and dig into it. Keep acurate statistics about your error rate (my SC error rate went down from 20% to about 6%). Always practice with a timer, even if it is not a practice test. Good luck. P.S. I should probably change my name now...It is less appropriate.

Could someone please explain to me where in the text the ...... ahhhh never mind I just saw in the first few sentences....sigh costed me 10 points. Still another question: How useful did you guys find the paper tests sold by GMAC? Are these representative of regular GMAT difficulty? I am through 4 of them now and all 4 scores are very consitent with each other, but not sure how they would compare to CAT test. Thanks in advance.

Here how you could do it without ad hoc plugging (Ok I don't like lack of rigor I know I know...). 3x+5y 3(x+y)+2y 3*10+2y 2y y if y5. Ans:B

You are right it is E. I am rushing through these, sorry. Here is the mathematically rigourous eyeballing free solution. As above we square both sides to get X^4+Y^4>Z^4-2*X^2*Y^2. But that only means X^4+Y^4 is greater than something less than Z^4. Which could still put it on either side of Z^4.

C....