Hi Guys/Gals,

I'm taking the GMAT in exactly a month's time and I was wondering if you guys had any tips to offer if you have taken. I'll update this post with things I find around. I have heard that the Original guides for math, verbal and the official review are the best to hit along with giving many tests. It'd be awesome if you could share your experiences.

Cheers.

Ludrik

Australia523 Posts

March 28 2011 14:37 GMT

A mate of mine just took hit. From what I gathered he said his biggest issue was not working through it fast enough.

drag_

England425 Posts

March 28 2011 14:38 GMT

I personally haven't taken the GMAT, but I have taken many standardized tests in my life and generally these tests are all about grinding out practice tests to familiarize yourself with the style of questions and the areas that come up the most.

meegrean

Thailand7699 Posts

March 28 2011 14:49 GMT

Buy a GMAT practice test book and study it hardcore.

HopLight

Sweden999 Posts

March 28 2011 15:42 GMT

One critical piece of advice, if you run out of time make sure you guess your way through all the last questions, you get penalized doubly for not finishing. (i.e. incorrect answer = -100, no answer = -200).

JayMunger

United States30 Posts

March 28 2011 16:42 GMT

Hi there.

I took the gmat about 6 months ago and did pretty well (attending B-school in August YAY!). I bought the Kaplan books, and did 20 of each problem every day until I finished the books. I then went to manhattangmat.com and bought their online problems and practice tests. Once I had exhausted the new problems and tests I took the real gmat. I found that the kaplan books were a little easier than the actual gmat, and the Manhattan gmat problems were much harder. I believe both were helpful in preparing, they were just a little different from each other.

One of the biggest pieces of advice I have is to stay on task. Set a daily goal for how many problems/practice tests you're going to do, and do that every day, and never skip. Falling out of the routine is really tempting, but will really hurt your chances. Repetition is key to the gmat because the problems aren't "difficult," but they are tricky. If you're reasonably well educated (most people that take the gmat are) you won't have any problems with the concepts of the gmat, but the problems are often presented in a very tricky way. When you see these tricks over and over doing practice problems, you get really good at recognizing them. I'm a math/science guy (B.S. in Chemistry), but the quantitative section was still tricky (particularly the geometry). Don't assume the quantitative section will be easy just because you're good at math.

I'll make an assumption: If you're Indian, maybe your command of the English language isn't perfect. Unfortunately I don't have good advice for you here because I'm a native english speaker and breezed through the gmat English pretty easily. If you have access to a native english speaker or teacher it might be helpful.

Set realistic goals. Sure, everyone wants to go to Chicago, but few will make it. I'm smart, but I'm not a genius or anything, so I set a goal of getting a 700 on my gmat. My grades were OK in college, but they didn't stand out. I suggest you pick a gmat score goal that fits with a school you think is reasonable to get into. Don't kill yourself to get a 750 if your resume and extra curricular activities aren't impressive enough to get you into a top 5 school. I ended up scoring a little below my goal, but got into the school I wanted to go to, so it all worked out for me.

If you have any specific questions about my experience or want any advice let me know!

Kage

India788 Posts

March 28 2011 19:40 GMT

On March 29 2011 01:42 JayMunger wrote:
If you have any specific questions about my experience or want any advice let me know!

That was really helpful Jay. Thanks for it! Can I hit you up on skype to ask you more questions?

kzn

United States1218 Posts

March 28 2011 19:52 GMT

There are two methods to prepare for it in my view, and which one is best depends on your starting point and how long you have.

Firstly, preparation for verbal is frankly impossible. If you don't have a tremendous command of the english vocabulary, familiarity with academic writing in general, and a good understanding of formal logic, I don't think any amount of preparation that takes less than like half a year will produce much in the way of improvement.

Based purely off of the fact you have only a month, what I'd suggest is doing problems with the aim of being able to look at a problem and go "ok, thats a number properties question" (or similar), and then having the generalized method for a problem of that type memorized. I'd think the Kaplan books or similar guides would have explanations of how to do the problems and problem categories that will be helpful.

If you're quite good at math already I'd avoid that method and focus on your understanding of the root concepts the GMAT is testing. The problem with memorized methods for questions is that you will encounter a question that looks like type X and is actually type Y, but there will be the precise answer that a type X method gives you just to fuck with you, because the GMAT is written by bastards.

There are profitable guessing strategies which could improve your score if you consistently run out of time early and have to guess, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

mintiefresh

Canada52 Posts

March 28 2011 20:37 GMT

Hey my sister just passed the GMAT a few months ago and she said this website/forum helped her a great deal:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/

hope this helps.

kakaman

United States1576 Posts

March 28 2011 20:46 GMT

#10

I took the GMAT, let me know if you have any more specific questions.

1) Easier than SAT, much shorter and the questions are more "solvable" rather than needing a huge vocabulary or math knowledge
2) The test being computer based took a little longer to get used to, I suggest you to take as many practice problems on the computer as possible to familiarize yourself with the format
3) Buy the "official" review book with past practice exams, as well as the verbal/math supplement. The questions from the other non official sources are slightly off, and so its harder to grasp the style of the questions

You have to remember, in the end the GMAT is just a piece of the puzzle. Undergrad institution, grades, work experience, recs and extracurriculars make up the whole package.

Zorkmid

4410 Posts

April 04 2011 15:42 GMT

#11

There are these courses that you can take via Kaplan. That is one option. Kaplan offers to give you the test free to see what your score would be also. What I did was take Kaplan's method, and just sort of did it on my own.

The practice test is great, the toughest thing IMO about the test is the time constraint, so it really helped with the rhythm of the test. If you can get a free practice test, do it.

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