My GMAT debrief

Here is my debrief after yesterday's insane performance. I was able to get 760 with 49 in Quant, 44 in Verbal, 5.5 in AWA
I know that personally I get lost in long debriefs, so I'll try to make this as short as possible.

*** My 760 (99%) debrief ***

Prep CATS done

• GMATPrep1 #1 570 34Q 35V
• GMATPrep2 #1 650 40Q 39V
• PowerPREP1 #1 640 47Q 31V
• GMATPrep1 #2 660 45Q 35V
• GMATPrep1 #3 690 47Q 38V
• GMATPrep2 #2 710 47Q 41V
• PowerPREP2 #1 720 49Q 39V
• Kaplan CAT2 540 34Q 25V
• PowerPREP1 #2 710 48Q 38V
• GMATPrep2 #3 730 49Q 40V
• Real GMAT: 760 49Q 44V

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To create my prep strategy, I had to realize that I have three major weaknessess: 1/ I work full time and couldn't take any vacation. 2/ I have problems focusing for long periods of time. 3/ I am not very strong in math. 4/English is my third language, so English idioms are not well known to me.

In addition I had to realize my strong points: 1/ I can study by myself complicated stuff. 2/ I study best while practicing a lot 3/ I love challenges.

With these weaknessess and strengths in mind, I decided to prep for at least 3 months, and to put at least one hour a day. I also decided to prep by myself because I could solve batches of 20 questions, take a long pause and do another batch. I was afraid that in a prep course I will only do what I have to do, and not push myself to my limits.

From now on I'll refer to some crucial points in my prep:

• GMATPrep and PowerPREP: I took every test at least three times and it was the single most helpfull thing that improved my skills. This is amazing and like someone said: you feel like you're cheating when you see the real exam that looks exactly like GMATPrep. I urge you to solve at least twice every test.

• Other CATS: I did Kaplan CAT2 about one week ago, and got 540. Enough said, this test is pure horse crap.

• Books: I started with Princeton Review 2008 which is great for the basics, then I moved to Kaplan Premier 2008 combined with OG11. I worked on this for about a month and then added the verbal and the quant books of OG11 to the prep. Last two weeks I bought MGMAT SC but I will discuss this later.

• Net sources: The best advices came from http://www.beatthegmat.com . I tried to solve difficult questions that were posted, and also put some the question that I couldn't solve. The forum is great and they have a lot of resources to download. One of these resources are the BTG flashcards that I printed, I used them to refresh old material during the last week of prep.

• Simulated conditions: I believe that the GMAT should be approached like a sports competition, and I trained myself that way. For example, I saw that at the end of quant sometimes I have about 1 minute per question, and that my hit rates are very bad at this point, so I solved batches of 5 questions in 5 minutes and tried to adopt smart guessing techniques. This was very useful during the test as I had to guess about 4 questions in the Q part. Another part of the simulated conditions is again the prep tests, that I took at the exact same time of the day as the real GMAT, I also asked my girlfriend to come into the room where I was doing the test and to disturb me, so I can practice room disturbance as well.

• The part that you can improve easily and that the most significant effect on your score is the Sentance Correction part. I saw that I wasn't hitting above 85% during the last month of prep, so I ordered the MGMAT SC book which was great and helped me improve SC to about 95% hit rate. I am sure that it helped me a lot in the real test. Work on verbal this is very easy to improve and improves your score a lot.

• Psychological aspects and stress: I considered the gmat a challenge, and tried not to stress because of it. I knew that the pause between Quant and Verbal can have wierd effects on your mind, so I drank my redbull and did some push-ups, while telling myself that Quant was hard because I performed well, and that I know how to handle Verbal. It's all in your mind so try to control the stress. Answer one question at a time, and don't try to auto-assess during the exam.

That's it for now. I will answer some questions on the http://www.beatthegmat.com forum if someone wants to ask me something.

Cheers and good luck to you all. Scoring high in the GMAT is an achievable goal for everyone!