Moderator note (Andy): this was originally posted on 5/17/12, Here is the link to his study guide
highest score on GMAT while working in banking
Background: I recently took the GMAT and scored a 770 on my first and only try. Long story short, I studied and took the exam under conditions that would not be considered ideal by most people. I work 80+ hours a week and pull all-nighters relatively frequently (which led to a lot of days off from studying). If you are interested in taking the exam, or simply in hearing about my experience, please read on.
How to Score High on GMAT: Steps to Success
Here is what you will need and the process of how to do it:
- Manhattan GMAT book series (8 books total - 5 quant, 3 verbal)
- GMAC Official Guide and Official Quant and Verbal Review workbooks
- About 8 weeks (1-2 hours per day, 2.5 hours for days you are taking a practice exam, 1-2 days off per week)
- A banker mentality (your time is precious, money is of no consequence, failure is not an option, etc.)
Get Familiar with GMAT and take a Diagnostic Test
Step 1 – Familiarize yourself with the exam and take a diagnostic test (
Take a few days to familiarize yourself with the exam. Read blogs/websites/the introduction in the Official Guide (or just read this post). This is also when you want to motivate yourself to do well on the exam – read about your dream schools, read other peoples' success stories – after doing this, you should be Brady4MVP style motivated about getting in to b-school.
All you really need to know is that there are three sections: Essay, Quant, and Verbal (in that order). Do not even worry about the Essay section until the last week of your preparations. Also note that the exam is changing in early June 2012 (not really that big of a deal, they are switching one of the essays out for an “Integrated Reasoning” section – this changes nothing because it appears to be relatively easy and is not part of the main score out of 800).
In the quant section there are two types of questions: Problem Solving and Data Sufficiency. In the verbal section there are three types of questions: Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning, and Sentence Correction. Familiarize yourself with the question types. The quant is 37 questions and the verbal is 41 questions and you get 75 minutes for each question, so you should be shooting for around 2 minutes per questions (+ or – depending on the section).
Also note that the GMAT is a computer adaptive test, so the questions change in difficultly based on whether you got the previous question right or wrong (ie. the next question will be harder if you got the previous question right, easier if you got the previous question wrong). Do not spin your wheels too much on this because on the actual exam, there are also questions that the GMAC is testing out for next year, which will appear randomly throughout the test. What is important to note is that you cannot go back once you submit an answer.
Once you feel like you know enough about the exam, log-in to the Manhattan GMAT student center and take practice exam 1 (I skipped all the essays until my last 2 practice exams to save time) – this will give you your baseline score (mine was 660).
Study with the Manhattan GMAT Guides
Step 2 – Review concepts (4 weeks) – you can skip this step if you want to, but make sure you have a good study guide (I can post mine if people are interested)
Go through the Manhattan guides (skim if you want) and put together a “study guide” with all the concepts that you need to know (this is very easy because Manhattan actually bolds most of the important concepts in the margin). Do the problems at the end of each chapter as prescribed by the guides – the good news is once you are done with the 8 guides, you will also have gone through all the problems in the Official Guide.
Many people will recommend charting your answers in an excel spreadsheet so you can go back, sort, and track the reasons for your mistakes, etc. This is probably a good idea, but I didn’t feel like doing it, so I just marked my answers on paper and circled the ones I got wrong (make sure to keep track of questions you got wrong because you will go back to this list in the last week of prep).
You should be able to get through each guide in 2-4 days or less (depending on which guide it is). I took a practice exam after I finished the 5 quant guides and another after I finished the 3 verbal guides to see how reviewing the concepts impacted my score (scores for these exams respectively were 740 and 730).
You can purchase the full Manhattan guide here on Amazon.
Work on Official Practice Problems
Step 3 – Practice using official problems (1-2 weeks)
This is the most important step (besides taking the exam of course). I went through each of the two workbooks separately. You could do questions from each question type each day, but that seemed like too much of a hassle / flipping between different books and different sections. I allocated one day for each problem type for a total of 5 days (1. PS, 2. DS, 3. CR, 4. RC, 5. SC). At the end, I made a list of all my wrong answers and took a MGMAT practice exam (score was 730). Take a day off and gather your thoughts. The last step is the most important in my opinion. Make a list, broken down by problem type, of all the questions you answered incorrectly. Go over your study guide and then go through all the questions until you get them all right and thoroughly understand each question. Next, take a practice exam (my score was 770). If you are not happy with your score at this point, I would recommend going back over the concepts and problem types that you are having difficulty with. MGAMT is great because you can download an analysis of your performance on the practice tests to see where you weaknesses lie.
At this point, you should be a little over 1 week from your exam. GMAC offers a program called GMATPrep which is now also available for Mac (you can also use a free trial of Crossover to run the PC-version on a Mac). This program comes with 2 free practice exams, which are the closest to the actual exam, so make sure to save these for the end (last week). Others will tell you not to take practice exams that close to the real exam because of fatigue/burning out, but for folks in finance, this is complete BS. I took one of them about 5 days before the exam and the other one 2 days before the exam (scored 770 on both). For these exams, I would also not skip the essay sections because you want to make sure you are good on stamina and this is also the time to start practicing so you can max out the AWA Essay score (its out of 6.0). The day before the exam, I ordered a product from GMAC for $30 called GMATWrite, which scores your essays using the algorithm used by GMAC. I scored 6.0 on both essays and it boosted my confidence for the exam (ended up scoring 6.0 on the real exam as well). I can post my guide for AWA Essays in a separate post because this is getting way too long.
Advice on Taking the Exam
Step 4 – Take the exam
Relax, get a good night’s sleep, eat a healthy breakfast, work out, listen to classical music, stop by your testing site the day before, blah blah blah, do whatever you think will work for you. I got almost no sleep and ate some Burger King on the way to my exam and did just fine, so to each his own.
Step 5 – Rejoice!
You are now done with the GMAT and can rejoice in your banker greatness!
I hope this was helpful, and for those applying to b-school this coming fall (or just taking the GMAT to get it out of the way), feel free to use/modify this approach to your liking.
For those of you who have taken the exam, how did my method differ from yours? How did you end up doing on the exam?
I am also open to answering questions/discussing GMAT related topics if it will be helpful for fellow WSOers.
Read More About GMAT Prep on WSO
- Best GMAT Prep Books For Self-Study - Recommendations
- Preparation Time Studying For GMAT
- How I Got A 770 On The GMAT . . . Whitecollarandsuspenders Version
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I'm atleast one person that would love if you posted your guide
Thanks for sharing. Great job on the GMAT.
So did you get into Ve Ri Tas?
why not an 800? are you some kind of dullard?
if youre asian, this is like some 7' dude writing about how he was able to dunk a basketball with minimal practice. jk, thanks for the advice man
+2
Your baseline score was a 660 - good info, and no offense, but I think most people will need to study more than the amount you outlined in your guide.
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Congrats on the score, but I was wondering, isn't the GMAT score hugely biased by the verbal section for native english speakers? I also scored above 750 on my first attempt after like 4-5 days of preparation, and it seemed ridiculous to me that 99% taking the test weren't smart enough to score that high. The only explanation I could come up with is that all the people who are not great in english are at a huge disadvantage in the verbal part, and that drives the pool of scores lower.
Regarding the preparation, for me the key point was time management, so the best advice I could give to other monkeys is to do the gmat prep in real conditions a couple of time (better try it straight away as you end up knowing most of the questions by heart). Also, I started preparing it with questions from book etc but I found it useless, because since test adapts to your level the question I ended up with were a lot thougher than the ones in the book. Doing the gmat prep multiple times is also a good preparation in that regard, because if you do it several times you answer right to all the questions you already had and end up with really though questions.
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Congrats on the great score. It seems like you're naturally a very good test taker since getting a 770 after studying for 2 months and working long hours is extremely difficult.
I thought MGMAT was great for verbal but bad for math. Hard to explain, but the questions were quite different form the actual GMAT quant questions. Not sure if you felt that way.
I got a 750 with 3-4 weeks of prep. maybe 10 hours per week.
What was your SAT score?
f4tality - agreed. I think the sentence correction questions sort of render the score meaningless. If I were in charge of reformatting the GMAT, those would definitely be gone. You can tell how good someone's grammar is from the AWA.
Brady - Did you use MGMAT's Advanced GMAT Quant book at all? I felt that was a big boost for helping with the 700 level math questions.
It would be very helpful if you post your guide
Why is there a tendency for people here to take the GMAT instead of the GRE?
My buddy here in school took the GRE, got a perfect score in the quant section and was admitted to booth.
Isn't the GRE better?
Do you know the logic behind the refusal to consider the GRE in some BSchools?
jameshetfield - I am not planning on jumping in the fire until this fall.
eriginal - I understand where you are coming from, but regardless of what your starting point is, I don't see why this method wouldn't work for someone looking to increase their score. I understand that it might not be the right approach for everyone, but for people like me, I think it will work very well. Also, the lower your baseline, the more room for improvement - given that there will likely be diminishing returns on your studying as you approach the higher scores, those who start lower can tailor their approach and take the exam when they are happy with the scores they are getting on the practice exams.
f4tality - Although the verbal section is definitely tougher for people whose 1st language is not English, I doubt that the GMAC would still be in business if the impact were as great as you are implying - I could be wrong, but I think that with preparation, non-native English speakers would be able to score quite well on the verbal section. I do agree with you on the timing piece though - the concepts on the GMAT are pretty simple, but you have to be adept at applying simple concepts in tricky ways. I agree that you should be focusing on harder questions if you are shooting for a higher score, however I think that building up with the easier questions first allows you to solidify the concepts and applications of those concepts which the GMAT is testing.
brady - Thanks for your note. I actually thought that the quant was better than the verbal, but maybe that's because I just like quant better. The highest rated MGMAT guide is usually the Sentence Correction guide, which I found to be less useful for concepts and more of a reference guide for idioms and other things. I also did not like or use their strategies for Reading Comprehension (long vs. short passages, headline lists) or for Critical Reasoning (T-diagrams), however I still scored high on the verbal. I think you have to use what works best for you.
In my opinion, the GMAT is better than the GRE for business school - all schools accept the GMAT for one - business schools also report GMAT scores in their statistics (which are used for rankings) - from an adcom perspective, obviously they'd like to take people who will contribute to higher stats for the school.
I have heard of folks who take the GRE because the GMAT quant is supposedly harder than the GRE quant (or they simply do better on the GRE) and the idea is that an adcom will be more willing to admit them because their score will not pull down the average. I know this is not true for everyone who takes the GRE (some probably take it because they are considering other graduate programs that primarily accept the GRE) but this is likely true in some instances.
Congrats. That is an amazing score, as you know. Hope you get into the school(s) you want to.
Great post about the GMAT. The fact that you were able to pull this off during your current work conditions is pretty impressive.
Thanks for sharing man! A 770 will lead you to amazing opportunities in life.
A 770 GMAT score is within the top 75%tile for most top ten business schools. That's a good enough score for any business school in the country. If people with 650-680 are in top programs, than so what? They probably had a killer GPA or FO jobs at the best banks in the world. Don't know where you were going with that.
How did you schedule your time? Would you get home from work and crank out some study? Would you fit some into downtime during the day?
The short answer is, whenever I had time.
For practice exams I set aside 2.5 hours of my free time for each one. For the reviewing of concepts I did it during down time. For the last week (practicing official questions) I worked mostly late at night.
I'm very very interested in your guide as well. Congrats on your score, really impressive.
I just scored a 760 (48Q, 46V) on the GMAT on Monday. I followed a very similar, few hours a day approach for 8 weeks. I took breaks, time off, and didn't start studying verbal until 3 days before the exam.
Manhattan GMAT Verbal books are excellent. After memorizing the rules for sentence correction, I never missed a practice question. Reading comp and crit. reasoning IMO cannot be improved. You're either a native speaker or you're not and the extra 2 points from 44-46 are largely determined by if your parents read to you as a child. My two cents.
My quant score from the study approach went from 44 to 48. I'm notorious for bad math at work, even on invoices (things you bankers get canned for). I had to practice extensively, and pretty much worked through every question I found on GMATPrep, GMATPrep Extra Question Set, and the Official Guide. And I still couldn't figure out 10 of the questions on the test, and I kept a running tally. I think the key was learning to educated guess. I did that in the 1-2 hours per day period for 8 weeks, nothing extensive.
I think the real question is...does a 99% even get you anywhere? How many take the exam get 760 or above? Probably more than are admitted to HSW. PM me for additional assistance. Happy to provide.
Great comments guys... the posts definitely motivate me. Question: would you say Kaplan for quant, them MGMAT for verbal. I seem to like the Kaplan pick #s and backsolving strategy.
Oh mayne.
Congrats! Where will you be going/applying?
I got a 770 on my diagnostic. Studied for a week doing a ton of DS and SC problems, got a 770 on the real thing. Kinda bummed that I basically wasted a week, but can't complain.
Cool story huh?
lol
I got a 730 and just finished up undergrad with about ~100 hours of prep. time. I consider myself intelligent but that test wasn't easy. Is it just me or jesus christ is everyone on this thread really f**cking smart?? Not to mention every one of us qualifies to join MENSA now.
there's some serious self selection happening here. anyone that's in a career that requires the highest levels of education and pedigree is, of course, going to be at the high end of the intelligence spectrum. Since this forum is dedicated to banking, consulting, etc. it's not surprising that you find a lot of people with 750+ GMAT's.
"high end of the intelligence spectrum"; oh my... Or just people divulging their scores are more likely to do so then people who miserably fail? So much amount of self gratification on this forum...
I thought it was a tough test. Didn't study much but still only scored mid 600's. However, the verbal is what drug me down. I was proud of my 44 Q with only 20 or so hours of study time. You guys are making me feel dumb
hmm... ya don't say.
Worked 6 months for my 770. Scored 750 at 1st. I'm not that smart. It was pure brutal hard work and stacks of aderall.
I applied to M7s for 3 yrs straight and got no luck. Made it to 1st round interviews with YSOM last year (not M7 but ok in my books). Craptastic ugrad and slow career progression have been the kink in the amor. I lost all my motivation but I might finally get a management post with my firm this year & get moved to Dubai so I'll start applying again in a few years.
Point is a 770 doesnt guarantee a target offer. Secondly, it's doable if you put the work...and PRACTICE.
traderdaily - I am applying at all the usual suspects.
I realize that a 740+ is a good score but does not guarantee anything. I think once you get above 740 (or maybe 750 now, as Brady pointed out) it really does not matter all that much - other parts of the application are equally, if not more, important.
My point was not to emphasize how important the GMAT is, but rather to provide a framework that I think could help a lot of people - also to provide a success story similar to the ones I would read to motivate me for the exam when I was starting to not really give a shit.
I don't understand why so many people find the GMAT to be difficult. I took the test for fun and scored a 720 on 2 days of practicing Princeton Review questions. The math is like high school level . . I didn't think I did well until I googled the percentiles after, lol do you really need such a huge study plan to score 770+? I was just going study for a week and write it again in June after I write the CFA to see if I could get perfect lol
Wow, you're so smart!
naw I'm not smart at all which is why I didn't understand lol
having trouble linking in his post, here is the link to his study guide: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/phantombankers-gmat-study-guide
Was planning on taking it blind to kinda get a gague (more out of boredom)...is there a negative to taking it without prep? Would improving greatly look better than just taking it once (kinda like the SAT)?
Sure, that's a fair criticism, but I'm talking in broad strokes. Plenty of people that score low on the GMAT, or have low GPA's are smart as hell. Conversely, some that score high on the GMAT got lucky. But in aggregate, most people that get 750+ GMAT scores, 3.8+ GPA's from top UG's, and get into M7 MBA programs can safely be considered intelligent. Call that self gratification if you like. Or just call it reality.
That was a good read, thanks.
OP, I scored mid 600's when I took a trial test a while ago, so I'm going to see how this increases performance. Thanks again for posting, this is extremely useful.
UFO - Glad to hear that. If there is any way I can help, please let me know. Also, please keep me posted on how you are doing / end up doing.
bookmarked this, thanks for the guide
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great
wow, the amount of insecurity in this post is unreal. hope it works out for you in the real world. lol
I'm calling bullshit on this entire thread. 770's are being thrown around like its nothing....for all of you lurking out there and reading this, I believe a 770 puts you in the 99.99%, if not higher. A 700 puts you >90%.
A site like WSO will obviously have a pretty fair number of 99th percentilers. A 770 is a dime a dozen when it comes to the top tier business schools -- usually the top ~20% of students at these schools scored at least a 770. Hell, I'm extremely unhappy with my 740 and will be retaking in June.
What kind of people do you think end up in investment banking? We obviously have more than our fair share of above average individuals.
LMAO you're saying out of the 200k-300k people who take the GMAT each year, only 20-30 get a 770 or higher?
Same. As stated, I got a 750 and I'm in at Booth this fall. Most people on these forums either aspire to top MBA programs, are already in them, or are alumni. Given that the M7 median GMATs are anywhere from 700 - 720, running into a bunch of 740's, 750's etc. is not that unbelievable.
How did you study for 1-2 hours a day while working "banking hours"? Your bank must have very good hours.
Great post, thanks for sharing.
Thanks
I used basically the same methods: Manhattan GMAT (love the number properties and sentence correction books) and official guides.
I think the thing that helped me the most was taking the official practice exams TWICE each (including essays) the final two weeks before the exam. These are the exams you download from MBA.com.
Being a tech nerd, I opened the questions database and noticed that there's over 10,000 questions for each exam. Sure enough, I saw maybe one or two of the same questions the 2nd time I took each exam. Even with the adaptive style of the GMAT, there are enough questions so that it's difficult to have a lot of questions overlap when you take the practice exams a second time.
I'd strongly recommend this method to anyone out there. When you take the real exam, you'll be totally comfortable -- it'll feel like you're taking just another practice exam.
I got a 780 (51Q, 47V, 5.5 AWA).
I think a great piece of work here, will most definitely be of use to me.
I think if 250K people take the GMAT annually, using some basic GMAT number properties, you're probably in a group of 2,500 with a GMAT score over 760, or the 99th percentile.
What would be interesting to see would be of those 2K (of course different cohort than those you took the test with, so who actually applies in what year is a factor), how many schools each got into across the M7, and across HSW. There are more than 2.5K slots in M7, but I'm guessing a small group gets into none due to various factors and vice versa.
Would be fun to write a B-School odds calculator.
I got a 770 without reading much. I am not even in I banking or Consulting.
I think this dude is an Asian. LOL
I am not Asian. I am in corporate development though.
Can you post where I could find your study guide?
Never mind, found it!!
Hello phantombanker
congr. for your score. Is it possible to have your "study guide"?
Thanks
Could you post your study guide please?
Here's the link to his study guide. It is very helpful.
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/phantombankers-gmat-study-guide
why so serious with GMAT...\m/
I remember talking with a HSW admissions officer who broke the GMAT down into 650~700 - check minus, 700~750 check, 750+ check plus,
..with the sub 700 people coming from above average (for b-school) work experience or a diverse background (not just the standard women/URM, but bschools also try to recruit a diverse international profile and make some allowances for non-native speakers). 750+ gives you a bump, but it's not worth sitting for another go if you've already gotten a 700+ score. Go make your life more interesting instead, it'll help your chances more and you'll probably enjoy it. Adcoms know that the GMAT is a rough and imprecise tool at best, especially at the higher levels of performance.
For what it's worth, the GMAT isn't that much harder than the SAT, and if you got your test taking skills up to par back when you had acne and sharpened your critical thinking skills during college it shouldn't be too bad. I went through the official test prep book lying in a dark cot of a ship when a two week exercise was cancelled due to bad weather, got a 770 the next month, interviews with 2 out of the top three in R1, and an offer from one that I took. Compared to my classmates I had a below average GPA, above average work experience, and probably above average essays.
Can somebody tell me what actually happens after you score very high on GMAT? Do universities around the country have access to this data and are able to contact you with a full ride offer?
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