My GMAT Preparation

Hi folks...this is just a breather I'm taking from the essay writing.
I was going through some e-mails and suddenly remembered about how a post about GMAT was due.
I had a bad experience with GMAT the first time.After 3 months of prep. with OG,800score tests and Kaplan and other general stuff I was somehow letdown. In fact I won't say somehow, I knew exactly what happened. Questions #3 in Quant section happened. After spending an unacceptable 10 minutes on solving Q3, I panicked. Firstly I din't get the right answer.Secondly I saw that I lost 10 minutes from the total 75 mins and rushed through the subsequent questions.As a result my quant score was a mere 42...which is the lowest I ever scored.

With that experience in mind, while taking my second GMAT, I was more composed and calm. Whenever I felt that I spent more than 2 minutes on a question, I though whether or not to spend more time on that question.The important in GMAT,if you ask me, is to solve one questions and forget about it and then move to the next question afresh. Don't wonder whether that question was right or not and if it was a 700 level or a 600 level question.

The one challenge I faced when preparing for the second attempt at GMAT was - what books to use?? I had already exhausted my OG. So it was logical to use the OG verbal and quant supplementary books. Also,Totalgadha.com's GMAT resources proved to be a very very useful. Another important thing was the veritas prep. material.Frequent visitors to hella's applicant blog list would've already read Biz-Wiz's post . In addition to the books, the veritas prep tests are pretty decent. They actually come in a package of different test series,which includes the 5 800score.com tests that I had previously bought. But I liked the facility to store my performances on each test and track my progress. All said and done, nothing beats the official GMAT Prep software. It is a true indicator of your potential GMAT score.

On the test day,second attempt that is, somehow I was composed. And it helped.
Anyone whos akss me for GMAT advice will only hear one thing. Practice and be confident and composed on the test day.

Charted plan for prep

I'm in week 2 of my 5 week pep now.
With careful observations and useful lessons and experiences from others in my path,I've charted for myself a plan of 5 weeks for my GMAT.
This is how it looks =======>>

Meanwhile I tooka GMAT Prep test after week 1 , just to see how my performace was and the result was more than satisfactory :). Unfortunately my good performance on the GMAT Prep has made me a little lethargic for the last 2 days. Am starting afresh today and hope to achieve my self-driven deadlines.

Until next time - chow!

Useful GMAT sites

Apart from the well-known GMAT sites like clearadmit.com,accepted.com, hellaslist,totalgadha etc etc I came across a couple of sites that I've not heard of before. These turned out to be really good , esepcially the site mbapodcaster.com. This site has a huge inventory of podcasts , mostly interviews of experts. This is promisingly useful to both beginners as well as post-MBA folks.

Also useful was http://mbaleague.blogspot.com/

Prep Update - Apr 16 '09

I got back to OG. I took the diagnostic test they have in the beginning of the book.
The summary of the test is
Problem solving - Above avg.
Data sufficiency - Excellent(I surprised myself here :))
Rc - Avg
CR - Above avg.
Sentence Corr. - Above avg.

So I decided to start with the verbal section prep. I did the 141 RC Qs of OG in 2 days. And seem to have been doing OK. On an avg. I got all but 1 right out of every passage.My goal is to see if I can get a cent next time. Meanwhile I'm yet to explore Dagny' GMAT prep guide and other sources like Kaplan.

The one thing I have noticed in tha past 2 days is that when you sit and work a set of problems under a category you start developing the tricks and strategies for them. That is when I sat and did 70+ RC Qs at a stretch the pattern of the Qs and the process of fidnding the As to those Qs was kinda set into my mind. So I've decided that the last week of GMAT prep should involve re-doing the Qs all again. This is in the anticipation that my mind will be tuned to work on problems.As for the practice tests, I wish to take them then 2 weeks before that last week.

Until next time!