Retake Advice

[rippersid]

Before I begin, I must thank each and everyone at Manhattan GMAT, for doing a wonderful job helping people out achieve their dreams.
Thank you so very much.

A little about me. 24 (oh well 25 this december), Indian M, BS in Chemical Engineering from Purdue (2006),GPA 3.1. For the past one and a half year, I've been back home, working for my parents. We have a family business.
So somewhere in the middle of this year, I decided to pursue an MBA. There were a lot of reasons as to why, but for this post, I will not delve into the real reasons.

On Monday (11/10) I gave my GMAT. Ended up with a 580 (V 28, Q 42).
My scaled scores on the GMAT Preps were between 34-44 for V and between between 42-50 for Q.
My strategy for the first try, which i now think is seriously flawed since I did not get the result I hoped for.

1) Was enrolled in a GMAT Prep class here in my hometown. They did a decent job with the overall material. It did help me get a hang of things and how to tackle certain problems and keep myself focused. But for the most part of the preparation, it was just the amount of time I spent outside class.

2) I did all the problems from the Official Guide (11th Ed.), all the problems from the Verbal and Quantitative Review Books, plus I did somewhere around a 1000 different problems for the quant section from some old exams and other material I had from the prep class.

3) I bought all the verbal guides from you guys. I studied all of them thoroughly, and applied all the techniques I learnt. Thank you so much for making a wonderful product. Verbal was never actually a problem for me. I am pretty well read, and 5 years in America, coupled with an American degree did have its perks. Languages have always been my strong area. Even on the SAT's i managed to score higher on the Verbal part than on the Quant part. So much for being a Chemical Engineer.

4) I gave my tests as soon as my prep classes finished and after I had finished all the problems from all the official sources, viz. The OG and the Green and Purple books. This was during the last two weeks prior to my test.

5) As far as my simulated tests go, now that I look back at them I see a fundamental flaw in my strategy. I only gave GMAT Preps in the last two weeks coming up to the test day. For the first test I gave, I did the whole test including the essays. I had access to the MGMAT tests, but for some odd reason, i never ended up taking them. All but the first two and the last tests were without essays.
As far as i remember these were my scores for the GMATPreps
600 - First Full Length Test including the essays (splits if i remember correctly were 34 V Q 42) I did not finish the quant section on this test, I had to guess on like 7 questions!
650 (V 38 Q 47 did the essays for this one too)
610 (don't remember the splits)
580 ( started seeing a lot of repeats after this test.don't remember the splits either)
570
700
710 (this is where i started hitting a 49-50 on the Quant with the verbal being around 35)
720 (roughly the same split, maybe a little higher on the verbal)
760 (V 44, Q 50)
720 (V 38, Q 49) I took this test around the same time I had my gmat scheduled (0800 hrs). I did the essay for this one as well

6) I followed Stacey's advice on what to do during the last day of the test. Did like 90 mins of high level review and then decided to go to bed at 2215 hrs, so by the time i got up at 0615 i had 8 hours of sleep. Woe be it, i couldn't sleep before 0230. I think I made a strategic mistake to have taken an early appointment. For the 4-5 months I spent trying to ace this monster, i used to stay up late at night, sometimes till 4-5 in the morning solving problems and going over awesome explanations that you guys had posted for questions from GMATPrep. For each wrong answer I got, i used to copy down the explanations into a word file and review it. I also did the same thing for some question I though I did not fully understand yet managed to get a correct answer. Sometimes I'd just check a problem to see if Ron or Dan had a simpler solution to the problems.

7) Maybe I did make a serious mistake in taking an early morning test when I was so used to staying up late (courtesy diet coke).

8) I had a lot of health issues during the time I was preparing for the GMAT. I've been sick since February of this year, and have been running from one doctor to another, getting every part of my body scanned, poked, pierced etc etc. I was diagnosed with Anklyosing Spondilytis (an autoimmune disease) somewhere around March, then diagnosed with collagenous colitis ( a manifestation of the disease localized to the colon) in september, and I was recently diagnosed with steroid induced diabetes just 5 days before the test. My test report also showed a higher than normal levels of cholesterol. Too much going on with all the tests. I don't want to hold my health responsible, atleast I want to believe that this did not affect my performance, but I don't really know if it did get to me.

9) I think I spent an insane amount of time preparing for this test. I had the luxury of not going to work. (coupled it with my excuse for being sick, and being lucky enough to have your own business). I started my prep classes in July. Wasn't serious enough about them. Just did the homework they assigned. So for of the 2 months out of 3 ( the class was 3 months long) I spent roughly 6-8 hours a week. Come september I decided to get serious. I started to work slowly but steadily and finished the OG 11th ed.This took me into middle of October. Around 6-8 weeks before my test I decided to take a date so that i would get even more serious. I finished the Verbal and Quant review books over 2-3 weeks. I did all the problems under timed conditions, and I kept a log of all problems I got wrong. I reviewed the problems and all the ones that I went over the time period. I saw something really funny when i analyzed this. I got an insane number of the early questions wrong. But as the difficulty picked up, as i got to the latter part of the questions in the verbal and quant review books, my accuracy increased. For example, starting out I had an accuracy of 55% on the first 20 questions of SC from the verbal review. By the end of the SC questions I was hitting close to 90% accuracy, getting like 18 questions right out of every 20 i did. I used to do 20 questions from each section every day. So in a day I made a point to solve 100 questions. I finished the verbal and math review books in 6 days. I had a backlog of some DS questions (approx 500 of them, that i wanted to finish since i was not too confident with DS). I finished those and did some PS problems from the practice book I had from the prep class. These problems were the same as the ones that are floating around on the web ( in the form of 500 DS and 1000 PS)

10) One more mistake, now that I look back at the tests that I took, was that i did not follow the timing of the break. I used to start a test, only to realize that I had to sit for lunch (have to sit with my parents for lunch, kinda family thing) or that there was something else that needed attention, or had to go see a doctor, or get a blood test etc etc. I also regret not following that strict discipline. I should have also written essays for all my tests since the last test I did write, i realized how big an impact the first hour has on my performance on the verbal section. By the end of my prep, I was just giving the test to boost my confidence. I knew they did not reflect my true abilities, but I just wanted to go in confidently.

Test Day experience
I had trouble sleeping the night before the test. I think i hardly slept for 3 hours.
I read some easy questions from the OG just to get started. Did not check the answers. The AWA was ok, I managed to put something down for both the Issue and the Analysis. But I don't think they turned out as well as i wanted to. I take the break, and I come back to start the quant section. The first question seemed to stump me because i ended up with a value that was not one of the choices. But then, today I realized that the GMAT wants the BEST choice. the best choice was, ON the damn test. I feel really stupid. I had a lot of question that were computationally intensive, required a lot of multiplication and division, etc etc. I think what also got to me during test day was the damn marker. I had to ask for a new marker atleast 5 times during my quant section. I think that definitely got to me. I was falling behind in the quant section, but I sped up with a couple of questions and I ended up right on mark as far as timing was concerned.

The Verbal part started off well with an SC, which I am sure I got right. SC's were the thing that I really really love doing. I don't really get ALL the technical nuances, but I understand MOST of them to be pretty happy with myself that I know what the GMAT wants. Also, I was used to the strategy of outlining the passages on the RC, and diagramming for CR's. Come test day, i realize that the damn marker won't write well enough for me to even read what i've written down. By the middle of the test, i just read the arguments for the CR's and decided to mark the choice I felt was the right one. I hardly made an outline for the remaining two RC passages I got. I think that is what got me during the test. I've always been used to taking notes, scribbling down stuff. That's the only way i understand things. I think all that came into play, unfortunately, on test day. I click thru the screens and see my score
580 (Q 42, V 28). Looks like all the time I spent these past 6 months meant absolutely nothing.

Questions:
1) What would you suggest that I do now? How do you think I should approach my second try?

2) I am ready to change my tactics, since this did not work. So any suggestions would be more than helpful.

3) How do I go about my application process now? I have a list of 17 colleges and I was thinking of applying to 10 after shortlisting them once I got my score. I have to apply by Round 2 since I am an international student, so I really really need to get the ball rolling as far as my apps are considered. My question here is should I wait till I give my GMAT again december to start my applications since I will know what my score is and what colleges I have a fair chance of getting into, or should i start my essays right now and prepare for a retake at the same time?
These are the 17 colleges I have narrowed down, I plan on applying to 10 from these depending on the score I get.

University of Michigan (Ross)
University of California - Los Angeles (Anderson)
Yale University
Cornell University (Johnson)
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
Georgetown University (McDonough)
USC (Marshall)
University of Rochester (Simon)
University of Maryland (Smith)
University of Washington (Foster)
Purdue University (Krannert)
Michigan State University (Broad)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ohio State University (Fisher)
University of California - Irvine (Merage)
Boston University

The mean GMAT score starts out at 700 for Ross and goes down to 640 for Purdue. I am aiming for a 700 + on my second try mainly to compensate for my less than satisfactory GPA, and if I do cross that psychological threshold, I might add a couple of top programs, viz, Columbia, Hass, Sloan or Chicago. Not sure yet, but there is a possibility. I have a couple of papers that I have co-authored and these papers have appeared in a management related magazine. How do you think that, together with my non-IT background, help me stand out from the usual indian applicant IT pool?

Anyways I think this has been a long convoluted post. I will leave the gibberish out.

Any reply is appreciated. I understand you guys are swamped with work, and I don't expect a prompt reply, so i'll hang in there and wait till one of you guys get to it. Also, next time I'm in NYC, I might call upon whoever replies to this message, and take him or her out for a couple of drinks. The drinks are on me :)

Cheers, and thank you once again for being the best bunch of super smart guys ! Appreciate it![/i]

[StaceyKoprince]

You gave a lot of great detail - hopefully I'll remember it all as I try to address your situation! :) I'll address some of the things you said first and then offer some recommendations about what to do.

First, certainly the health issues and the lack of sleep the night before were not ideal. Given that you preferred to stay up late studying, I'm going to guess you're more of a night person than a morning person. If that's the case, then you definitely should take the test later in the day, not 8am. Basically, whatever your routine is leading up to the test, that's what your routine should be for the test itself.

Second, re: the applications, I know that nowadays the trend is to apply to a large number of schools for undergrad, but that's a lot harder to do for b-school. If you haven't already, download some of the applications and take a look. They tend not to have a lot in common; you have to fill out a completely separate app for each school (no common app) and they ask different kinds of questions for short-answer and essay responses. It can take 20+ hours to complete a single application.

In addition, you have to ask for recommendations from typically 2 or 3 people for each app. The forms they need to fill out take time; it's really not feasible to ask someone to fill out more than about 2-3 schools. You also can't have someone write up one recommendation letter and give you multiple copies to send to multiple schools - each one will need to be done separately for each school. If you apply to 10 schools and each asks for 2 recommendations, that's 20 recommendations. You'd need at least 6 different people, conservatively, to get those recommendations. It's pretty hard to find 6+ people who are all appropriate to give you recommendations.

You should talk more about the application stuff with the admissions consultants over in the Admissions Consulting thread - the above is just to give you an idea. Go post the stuff from above that's specific to applications in the Admissions Consulting thread and ask them for advice about this topic. :)

You mentioned that you were getting better percentages as you moved to harder questions. That might just be because you were studying more and getting better. It might also be that you were making more careless mistakes on earlier questions. If the latter, you need to make sure you reduce those careless mistakes because if you make too many on lower-level questions, you'll never lift yourself to the harder questions. (See below for some ideas on this.)

Finally, if you encounter severe difficulties during the test due to something within the control of the test center, talk to the people at the test center. If the problems are severe enough, they should offer some kind of accommodation, such as a chance to take the test again at a later date for free. If the pens are so dysfunctional that you have to request a new pen 5 times in a single section, something's definitely severely wrong there.

Re: the test. It sounds like you already have some good ideas about some of the things you need to do differently the next time around. Yes, you need to take the full test under normal timed conditions; otherwise, your practice test scores aren't telling you a whole lot. Also, I'm not quite sure about the timeline, but it seems like you took a very high number of tests in the last couple of weeks. I recommend taking a practice test no more than once a week. Simply taking a test doesn't do a lot to help you improve. What matters is what you do with the test results. What are your strengths and weaknesses? (And not just: I'm better at SC than RC. We need to get MUCH more specific than that.) What kind of study plan should you devise to tackle the weaknesses while maintaining the strengths? Then spend a week (or 2 or 3!) studying those areas before you take another practice test.

Re: your study, it sounds like you might have gone a little too much for quantity over quality of study. This is definitely something I'd change for the next time around. When you're doing a set of, say, 20 practice problems, after you've spent 40 minutes (timed, right?) doing the problems for the first time, then spend at least another 80 minutes analyzing those problems. Most of your learning comes in the analysis you do after you've tried to solve the problem. The general idea re: how to think about this stuff is below. Whether you study on your own, take another class, or work with a tutor - make sure you are following the below in your study.

Questions to ask yourself (whether you got the problem right or wrong):
Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique?
Did I make a CONNECTION to previous experience? Or did I have to do it all from scratch?
Did I COMPREHEND the symbols, text, questions, statements, and answer choices?
Did I understand the CONTENT being tested?
Did I choose the best APPROACH? (even if you got it right, there might be a better way to do it)
Did I have the SKILLS to follow through?
Am I comfortable with OTHER STRATEGIES that would have worked, at least partially?
Do I understand every TRAP & TRICK that the writer built into the question, including wrong answers?
Have I MASTERED this problem? Could I explainevery aspect, fully, to someone else?
How will I RECOGNIZE similar problems in the future? This is the holy grail: if you can recognize something, you're both more likely to get it right and less likely to take too much time to do so. If you have to figure out something from scratch, it will take longer, and you'll be more likely to get it wrong.

If you've made an error (or if you got lucky when you got something right):
1) Why did I get it wrong (as specifically as possible)?
2) What could I do to minimize the chance of making that error (or those errors) again?  How will I make whatever that is a habit so that I really do minimize chances of making the same error again?
3) What are the right / best ways to do it?
4) Of the best ways, which one is the best way for me (combining both efficiency and effectiveness) given my strengths and weaknesses?
5) How will I recognize problems of similar type in future so that I can apply that "best way" to the problem?

[rippersid]

Dear Stacey,
I appreciate your response. That's a lot of stuff to keep me busy for a long time. I am going to follow what you've outlined, and see where it takes me. Will keep you posted with my progress, and my results. I will get back to you if I need any more help/advice.

I really appreciate what you guys are doing :)

Cheers!
Sid

[StaceyKoprince]

good luck - let us know how it goes!