I need to take the GMAT, and I want to do well. I need to take it by mid December, so that should give me a little over a month to study. Does anyone have any advice on preperation, tips that worked for you, etc? I think there was another thread about this, but for some reason the site won't allow me to perform a seacrh. It also won't let me edit my posts. Do I have to do something to have those options? Thanks.
I took the GMAT a month ago. I scored very high. I did not take a course, but rather studied on my own using the Kaplan, Princeton Review, and PowerPrep (put out by the test administers themselves). You need to really put in a lot of time if you want a really good score. The good news is that you can most definitely raise your score through studying. I would advise buying the Princeton Review book that comes with a CD with practice tests on it. Take those practice tests after reviewing the book throroughly. Then the weekend before your real test take the PowerPrep tests that you can download from MBA.com's website. I thought those were the most accurate practice tests. You should really focus on the math concepts and the sentence correction parts, as those are definitely two areas where you can boost your score. Good luck.
I scored a 750 on the test this morning. The best review book is "The Official Guide for GMAT Review", which is put out by ETS themselves. This in combination with the PowerPrep software is far and away the best study tools. The other books don't use the same line of thinking as the test creators, and are somewhat misleading. If I had it to do over again, I would use the book I mentioned, the powerprep software and perhaps the Princeton Review book. That's it. No course and definitely nothing with Kaplan's name on it. If you want any of this material, contact me through the bbs. For all of you who perpetually claim (Major) that my reading comprehension is poor -- I scored in the 99% percentile on the verbal, which consists largely of reading comprehension. Once again, your claims are baseless. Thank God that test is over. Time to get wasted.
I'm taking it tomorrow morning. Trader, could you tell during the test how well you were doing? Just curious. Oh, and I have a princeton review book and the free stuff from online, which i haven't completely gone through yet. Doing some form of cramming, but not worrying too much.
Job market is very tight right now for MBAs. Most of the big I-banks have cut back on recruiting and hiring significantly. So make sure that you get a good score, and go to a decent school. Because an MBA from a Baylor or Houston is not worth very much these days.
I could tell I was doing pretty well in terms of timing and since the questions get more difficult as you get more right, I could tell that I was doing well towards the end. However, because of those 'trial' questions that don't count to your score, it's hard to tell how well you are doing. For instance, I got a ridiculously easy question towards the end of my verbal section that had to have been a trial question. That was a little disconcerting. Just make sure you focus hard on the math and verbal concepts on the PowerPrep CD (mixtures, combinations, interest, group totals, properties of numbers, probabilities, properties of polygons, sentence correction stuff, etc). Princeton Review/Kaplan/Thompson's apply their own lines of reasoning and are not generally reflective of what you'll see on the test. Oh, and don't forget to do as I did: When you see your final scores on the screen, stand up and yell to the rest of the test takers: CASE CLOSED M***** F******
710 - finished 30 minutes ago. If I had more time to study, could have maybe pulled a little higher, but I didn't, so I'm satisfied.
