Hi. My 2 cents on getting a decent score. First the GMAT expericne & then the prep process.
I took my GMAT in Bangalore on 25th Oct in the morning session. Not being a native Banglalorean, I checked out my center about 3 days back which turned out to be good coz I had to spend about 30 mins locating it the 1st time. Anyway, i reached the center pretty early around 7:45 & was one of the first people to be admited inside. All I had with me was my passport. I did not even have the printout for the GMAT confirmation. How careless can one get? But on the mba.com site, all they mention was that on test day, that is all you need.
But, I was lucky not to face ay probs & things went through fine. They make you sign a confidentiality agreement & all. After this, you are supposed to be put ALL your stuff into a locker. Then one by one you go inside & are photographed before you start the test. The essays are run of the mill & nothing worthwhile to say on that. The Quant section - Overall difficulty level - below average BUT there are atleast 5-7 questions where one can very easily make silly mistakes if one is not really alert ; especially the data sufficiency. So let your mind be really aware of all that's asked in the question & all the implications of the question. Quant overall should be fine. The Verbal section - Here too, the overall difficulty level is average. You need to be extra careful in the Critical Reasoning questions. Some options which, at first sight. seem outside the scope turn out to be the right answers!
So, just ebe careful there & you should be ok. After the Verbal section, you have to answer numerous general info questions about urself & ur plans for MBA which are asked by those guys. This is slightly irritating because having finished the test, you badly wanna see your score. Finally, after you confirm that you do NOT want to cancel your score, it appears!
Prep - My prep frankly was not really intense. Iknew guys who had subscribed to sites like scoretop.com and solved questions daily for months. I started off with a power prep test downloaded from the site. Got 740 on it. Then moved on to Kaplan 800 for Critical Reasoning & Reading Comprehension. The questions are quite tough but feel the good thing of doing them is that everything else seems much easier later. Anyhow, I plpoughed through CR & RC from K800. The reason I didnt do any other sections from that book was I found that Princeton Review had explained things quite well. Also, most of the times on areas like Sentence Correction ,I ended up disagreeing with the correct answer in K800
. But for CR & RC I feel that if you can get a grip on what K800 is trying to tell you, it should see you through in these 2 areas. As for Math prep, I just looked at some very basic formulae & did OG. Having prepared for CAT in the past, GMAT maths is a breezer. You only need to be very careful not to make silly mistakes. (be very alerts as i;ve said above). Now, coming to OG. This was 1 thing I did well. I solved each & every questin in OG in DS, RC, SC & about 70% of PS questions too. In case you dont have much time, be sure to solve about the last 50 questions of DS & PS - they're educative.
As for solving tests, I solved the 4 tests in Preinceton Review ( scores - 770, 760, 770 & 680
) & then the 4 tests of the Kaplan cd. ( scores 680, 650, 640, 650). As I was working all this time, I really did not have time to look for more tests or to take more tests. But the imp thing I would like to mention here is that review your tests thoroughly even question that you hav got correct. Cannot stress the imp of this enough. I spent the last week giving 2 Kaplan tests ( Ppl say that one should not give Kaplan tests in the nd bcoz it might break your confidence sicne they're usually low scoring affairs - I felt that donig tough tests, I would not as it is expect a great score so no trouble of doing an easy test & not scoring well on that & hence getting workd up!
Also, I would know that on G-Day, my score would definitely be above my Kaplan scores), reviewing mistakes on about the 5 lowest scoring tests out of the total 8 I took & yes, reading through the Analysis of an issue & Analysis of an argument tips on Princeton Review - the tips here are simple & effctive. It was only in the last test I solved that I actually wrote the essays just to get a feel of things.
So, all in all, get your basics in place, review your tests very well, & keep cool so as not to mak silly mistakes. ALl the best , y'all!
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