Location: New York City
Starting GMAT Score: 480
Final GMAT Score: 600
School Attended: Columbia Business School
Chantal was one of my all time favorite students (I am still friends with her) and her case illustrates several important lessons. Chantal is Belgian and came to New York specifically to prepare for the GMAT with the hope of attending Columbia. She was very young (only 21 years old) and had just finished college in Europe, so the cards were stacked against her in terms of getting into an MBA program. But there were several factors that in the end helped her achieve admission to Columbia, factors that I will describe below.
First, the GMAT. When she came to me, Chantal had no experience whatsoever with the test. As a non-native English speaker, the Verbal section was obviously a challenge. She had been speaking English nearly her entire life, so her command of the language on an informal level was nearly equal to that of a native English speaker, but she was not great with the formal aspects of the language, especially grammar.
Right from the start it was apparent to me that she was extremely intelligent, but since she had absolutely no experience with the test I had her wait to do a diagnostic test until after we had had a few sessions together. Still her initial score was only 480 and she struggled on both the Quantitative and Verbal sections of the test.
Because she was so smart and had such good innate reasoning ability, it was not that hard to quickly bring her Quant score up. More than almost any other student I have ever had, she took completely to the idea that she needed to rely on her creative problem solving ability to handle the difficult questions on the test. She had pretty good innate Math ability but she was NOT good at formal Math and no matter how much we tried to boost her ability on the more formal Math approaches, it didn’t really help that much. In the end, it didn’t really matter because she was able to achieve a high Quant score by relying more on reasoning and effective problem solving than on pure Math. In fact, she became absolutely masterful at attacking questions strategically despite the holes in her Math game and this, in my opinion, teaches an important lesson: there are many avenues to a high Quant score, but one does not need to be a master of the content that underlies the questions; rather, if one learns to be a creative problem solver and to rely on reasoning more than formal Math, one can achieve great success on the Quantitative section of the GMAT.
Unfortunately the Verbal section was more difficult to deal with. She pretty quickly learned to master Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning questions, but Sentence Correction remained a huge challenge. At first I focused more on the strategy aspects of SC since I knew that it would be an uphill battle for her to really master the specific grammar concepts that she was lacking, and this helped her get much better at SC and increase her Verbal score. Nevertheless, at a certain point it seemed like she needed to really dive into the grammar more, so I had her work through the ManhattanGMAT Sentence Correction book (as I sometimes do with my students). Unfortunately, all of that focus on the nitty-gritty grammar details made her less strategic in the way that she was approaching the questions and she actually got worse at SC! So we spent some time trying to get her back to her previous mindset on the question type (while at the same time trying to incorporate some of what she had learned from the book). This again offers a very similar lesson, in my opinion: content knowledge, even on the Verbal side, is not a substitute for really effective strategic thinking with regard to the questions.
In the end, Chantal took the GMAT several times. Unfortunately for her, she would get a really high Quant and low Verbal score on one exam and then flip flop and have a much higher Verbal but lower Quant score on the next. She was never able to put together great performances on both sections on a single exam. So her final GMAT score was 600, but she achieved highs of 48 on the Quant section and 33 on the Verbal section (had she been able to “superscore” these separate section scores into a new GMAT score it would have been in the high 600’s).
The final point of interest to mention about Chantal is that she got into Columbia despite her somewhat low GMAT score, lack of work experience, and extremely young age. I am not an admissions expert, but I would offer a few explanations that might be useful to prospective applicants. First of all, Chantal is a really impressive person when you meet her and must have absolutely killed it on the interview (she is extremely charismatic, but was also very mature for her age and very driven and definitely did not seem like your typical 21 year old). Secondly, she did something very smart to help her chances: she managed to take some economics classes at Columbia as a sort-of non-matriculant, so this undoubtedly helped her get her foot in the door there. Furthermore, regarding the GMAT score, although schools don’t technically “superscore” GMAT scores, I always wonder if they will at least consider the high section scores even when they don’t combine to a single high GMAT score (in Chantal’s case I could imagine that the admissions committee may have looked at her highest Quant and Verbal scores and said, “look, this girl clearly has the quantitative and verbal ability to handle the classes here”). Finally, although she didn’t have any post-graduate work experience, she had grown up working in her family’s business, and she hired an admissions consultant who really helped her package the whole story to make it appealing to the admissions committee. In the end she was admitted to Columbia and excelled there, graduating at the top of her class.