Location: Dallas, Texas
Starting GMAT Score: 640
Final GMAT Score: 710
School Attended: JD-MBA at Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern)
Heath came to me having taken the GMAT 6 times before! He had already done a Master’s in accounting so some of the GMATs he had taken had been for admission to those programs, but I often use Heath as an example with my students since his case demonstrates that business schools don’t really care how many times a person takes the test – in the end he got into the JD-MBA program at Northwestern even though he took the test a total of 7 times!
He is also a good example because like many of my other students he claimed to be very good at Math but was not scoring well on the Quant section. After starting to work with him it was apparent to me that although he was indeed good at Math, he failed to understand that the GMAT is a reasoning test not a Math test. So a big part of what I did with Heath was just break him down and show him that the questions could often be approached in creative and clever ways and that he needed to stop limiting himself to straight ahead, formulaic types of approaches.
The other issue Heath was having had to deal with time management. He had taken the GMAT enough times to know that you have an average of 2 minutes per question on Quant. But like many other GMATers, he thought this meant that he should basically be spending 2 minutes on every single question when the reality is that although you will average 2 minutes per question, some questions are worth spending 3 or 4 minutes on and others warrant a very quick guess in the interest of saving time. Part of his misunderstanding was based on a very common and erroneous assumption that many GMATers make: that you need to answer almost all of the question right on Quant in order to have a high score. This is definitely not the case; unfortunately if you believe this you will want to spend 2 minutes on every single question. But because almost all test takers will get nearly half of the Quant questions wrong, it clearly does not make sense to spend undue time on questions that you are likely to get wrong anyway.
Once Heath dealt with the above issues, his score increased accordingly and he was able to score a 710, including a very high Quant score. I did not tutor him for the LSAT (and actually didn’t even know that he was thinking about JD-MBA programs), but in the end he was admitted to and attended Northwestern’s extremely selective JD-MBA program.