This burgandy book was the bane of my existence for longer than I care to admit. In fact, purchasing its predecessor, the one with the orange cover, was the start of my on-again, off-again love affair with the monstrosity known as the GMAT. To be perfectly honest, I bought the 11th Edition Official Guide on a whim, to just "try it out" and see what score I get on the diagnostic test. That score shall forever remain a dark secret, but I can tell you that I was devestated--after being in denial--and didn't open the OG for another year.
Finally, I decided to slap myself back to reality and I knew that I needed to tackle this beast, or at least court it properly. As many know, it's a necessary evil and usually the first step that many of us take to fulfill our MBA dreams. Of course, we all go in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinking that the quant section is a piece of cake with high school-equivalent math (and no calculus or trigonometry!). And the verbal section? Come on, sentence correction and reading comprehension? We were doing this kind of stuff for the SATs!
I soon found out that while the questions themselves aren't rocket science, the hard part is to do the problems correctly, FAST. And this is what kills most of us on the GMAT. I lacked the discipline the first time around to properly drill with a stop watch and casually tossed the OG to the side once I found out that my practice test scores weren't improving much. And so I moved onto my next abusive muse:
Yes, I bought the entire set of the Manhattan GMAT guides. Yes, it was painful to cough up the money. I thought, "This time it's going to be different. I'll start fresh and get all the essential concepts down pat and then I'll conquer the GMAT...Top tier business schools, I'm coming for you!"
Oh, how naive I was. I admit, though, that some of the books in this set are absolutely brilliant, such as the Sentence Correction guide, the Number Properties guide, the Word Translations guide, and the Critical Reasoning guide. If you need to brush up on the fundamentals of quant & verbal, I highly recommend these guides. Once I honed my skills in these topics, I found myself back to the drawing board...All because I haven't been doing timed practice runs with the questions. So in the end, I found out what was most important once the basics were down: to drill, drill drill!
I ended up revisiting (more like crawling back to) the long-forgotten and long-neglected official guides and started from the very beginning with a stop watch in tow. I would do chunks of 20 questions at a time and then check my progress, take a break, and get right back to it for another set of 20. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Once I started the timed drills with the official guides, my practice scores improved dramatically. So there you have it--there really are no shortcuts and practice does indeed make perfect...It just took me a while for my pride to accept this fact, but alas, it was all worth it in the end.
