GMAT Practice Tests

Undoubtedly, this was one of the most important components of my preparation, and anyone taking any standardized test should invest a significant amount of effort in practice tests. I took a couple of tests when I first started studying, and then realized that I would be making less mistakes if I took these tests after reviewing all study materials. Hence, I stopped doing full tests and concentrated on getting through the essays and the Manhattan GMAT books/problem sets.

As I said in my previous post, after I was through with reviewing everything, I booked the real test for three weeks down the road, and started doing one full 4-hour test each weekday for the next 3 weeks. It's very important to do the 4 hours, including essays - while you don't have to do it for 3 weeks (I was getting very annoyed by the final week and wished I booked the thing for earlier so I could get it over with already :p), I think it's a good idea to do this everyday for at least a week, so it becomes part of your daily routine (like eating and sleeping), and you get used to having to sit through the 4 hours. When I took the first couple of practices before the majority of my revision, I realized that I had a problem with the verbal component, simply because I was getting very tired towards the end and just could not absorb anything I read. Making the test part of my daily routine helped a lot with building the stamina I needed on test day.

The other thing about doing practice tests is that you should take into consideration the time of the day of your real test appointment. My test was at 12:15pm (did not want to do 8am or 6pm, this was the only other option), and I was to arrived 30 minutes prior. I saw a potential problem with the scheduling of my lunch - I needed to either take it at maybe 10:30, or postpone it until after the test. I decided to go with the latter, so for three weeks, I would get up and have a gigantic breakfast. I would then start my 4-hour test at around 12, and have a light meal after that. During my breaks, I would have a sip of water, a 2-minute snack, and use the washroom, just as what I would do on the real test. This is something else that's important to note - you should always try to duplicate real test conditions. Unplug your phones. Come back to the computer a couple of minutes earlier to make sure that you're not late.

A note about AWA: after a couple of practice tests, I stopped writing essays from Kaplan/Princeton Review/Manhattan GMAT/etc. The reason is simple: they're prohibited from using actual GMAT essay topics so they had to make up their own, but we have the real topics. I used a random number generator to randomly pick my topics from the list of real topics, and those would be my essay questions for whatever test I'm taking. I had the PDF file of topics on the top part of my screen, notepad at the bottom, and an online countdown clock on the side. This was a modest duplication of the real split screen for essay questions.

Here's a brief review of the tests that I've taken:

GMATPrep: of course this is a must-have. I took one at the beginning of my preparations and another one three days before the real test. There was a 40-point increase in scores, which gave me a boost of confidence. I would recommend using this software this way, so that you can see how much you've improved, and you have the most accurate estimate of your real score close to the test date.

GMAT past paper exams: these are probably neglected by most test takers, but they're an excellent source of real past GMAT questions. Some of the questions are duplicated in OG, but most are not (or I couldn't tell). They are from a decade ago and tend to be easier than current questions, but I used them mostly for the purpose of practicing more real questions, and building the stamina needed for the 4 hours. The format is also different, so I rearranged the sections so that it was 75 minutes of each of quant and verbal, instead of 6 little sections. I didn't pay much attention to the score, since the questions were easy and scoring mechanism was different (they deduct points for wrong answers, so you're not encouraged to guess).

Princeton Review: I really needed that boost of confidence from GMATPrep, because of other tests that had been giving me really low scores, including some from PR. Their quant sections seemed way too easy (I would finish 20+ minutes before time was up), and some of their verbal answers just didn't feel right, even after I read their explanations (this is where I lost most of my points).

Kaplan: unstable and unpredictable scoring. The quant and verbal questions were okay, with the exception of extremely hard-to-understand reading comprehension passages on one of my tests. They also had the weirdest essay topics - I even had trouble identifying whether one was an argument or an issue. (This was when I decided I wouldn't put up with these topics anymore.)

Manhattan GMAT: definitely has the best questions. The quant questions were MUCH more difficult than those on the real test, nevertheless they were very good practice. I also liked the verbal sections, and even the essay questions were very similar to real GMAT topics. If you do these tests within the time limit, you will get a fairly good prediction of your score. However, for me this required a slightly different strategy for the quant section. I never had issues with timing for any other practice test, and MGMAT were the only tests in which I had to hurry and guess answers at times when I knew I could do them if I had more time. I would recommend top scorers to go through all MGMAT tests - with time constraints if you want a more accurate score, and untimed (for quant) if you want to focus on the contents, which I think is worth doing.

The Real Start and Study Materials

I stopped overworking myself for large consulting companies and started to work for my friend's start-up business, with a very flexible schedule, so that I can devote much of my time to getting into an MBA program. I was serious now, and with the current economic conditions, I believe that going back to school would be a wise step.

After I decided to take the GMAT for real, I spent quite some time deciding on the approach that I should take, while simultaneously doing timed questions from the official guides. I attended free workshops offered by different prep companies, trial classes, etc. Looked up books and reviews on amazon. Browsed the internet for ideas. In the end, I decided not to pay and take a class, because I had a fairly good grasp on the content as a whole, and half the time I would just be sitting in the class waiting for other people to understand.

Having said that, I did want more preparation materials than just the OG, and eventually decided on the set of Manhattan GMAT books (which are thin red booklets - not to be confused with "Manhattan Review", which are blue). I also downloaded the MGMAT syllabus and loosely followed it, so that I was alternating between different verbal and quant topics, not doing too much of anything at once and getting sick of it.

Study Materials

The only books I used were the MGMAT series (all 8 books) and the official guides. By the time I started the MGMAT series, I had already done over half of the official guide problems, in sequence. Here's a brief note on how helpful I found each book, keeping in mind that it only applied to my background:

Official guide: get all 3 books, and do each question at least once. Doing REAL questions are very helpful. Two years ago I never bothered to get the quant book. Then I figured that no matter how well I think I can grasp the concepts, it always helps to go through all official questions. And I was right.

Manhattan GMAT:
Sentence correction: yes, this is a must-have for anyone hoping to improve their sentence correction skills. I did the suggested exercises in the OG/VG after each chapter (including the ones that I had done before), and saw that most of my mistakes were about topics that I had not yet covered. It was also because of this that I decided to hold off doing the majority of my practice exams until after I was completely done with the reviews.

Critical reasoning: personally this was not much help to me. I'm fairly logical to start with, and I found that the best way to improve my CR was to do lots of practice and study each individual question that I did wrong, on a case-by-case basis. This way, I eventually learned to identify some of the things that were more subtle to me at the beginning. My revision of CR was more about doing the problem sets grouped by the type of reasoning (ie, strengthening, weakening, inference, etc) - this grouping may or may not have helped me, but I imagine that it would be more useful to someone who's weaker in CR.

Reading comprehension: since I sucked the most in sentence correction and reading comprehension, and I made an improvement in sentence correction, reading comprehension became my worst area. The guide wasn't completely helpful to me either - I would have no time to "actively" read by outlining the passage as I go along, and I didn't find this particularly useful either. But, I liked some of the points they have summarized at the end, one of them being making sure that you can account for EVERY word in your answer choice.

I knew every single concept in the quant books, but some of these books were still helpful:

Word translation: I really liked this because it gave some neat time-saving strategies that would be very useful for the more difficult problem, and it also had a good supply of extra practice problems. In general, their strategies can apply to all levels of questions, easy to difficult.

Number properties: again, I knew all the concepts, but it was very nice to see them systematically written out. I also was not familiar enough with this type of GMAT questions in general, so this provided just the extra review and exercises that I needed.

The other 3 quant books: not particularly useful to me - I've known all of these by heart since grade 3, no kidding. But they do look like good review material if you need help in any of these areas.