Location: Bay Area, CA
Starting GMAT Score: N/A (Pivoted from GRE)
Final GMAT Score: 760
School Attended: Berkeley (Haas)
The first interesting thing about Jake’s situation is that he came to us having already taken the GRE in college and having gotten a very good score: 159Q and 168V, which translates to a 680 GMAT (39Q and 44V). So I was hesitant to even suggest the GMAT, fearing that he may not do better on the GMAT and may blame me for suggesting that he consider switching in the first place! In particular I looked at his Verbal score (168) and thought there was a very good chance that he might not even be able to equal that score on the GMAT. If that happened, his score increase would have to come completely from a large jump in his Quant score and possibly even make up for a slight decrease in the Verbal score!
Jake didn’t want to take a diagnostic test because he was too rusty with all of the material (for exactly this reason only about 50% of people we work with take a diagnostic test before starting prep, and that is ok). But we discussed his strengths and weaknesses and I felt that the GMAT might be a better fit for him than the GRE, so we decided to aim for the GMAT. The truth is that it can be hard to predict which test really will be better for a person (and of course it’s possible that a test taker would score similarly on both tests). But as we mention in our post about choosing between the GMAT and GRE and as I explained to Jake, when you are on the fence, it’s better to prepare for the GMAT. Pivoting from the GMAT to the GRE, if that eventually feels necessary, is easier than pivoting from the GRE to the GMAT, and doing the necessary Quant work to be prepared for the rigor of the GMAT Quantitative section is ultimately beneficial even if one takes the GRE in the end anyway.
Once we began, it became clear that Jake was pretty typical in the sense that he was really inclined to just “do Math” and was not at all aware of how the GMAT is a reasoning test and how creative problem solving and good old-fashioned quantitative reasoning are the order of the day. Old habits die hard, so it took a lot of work to break Jake of these bad habits, but he fully recognized the value of changing his approach. Plus, like many of the people we work with, he is very smart but not an absolute Math all-star. So when pushed to lean into his innate intelligence and reasoning ability and stop trying to be a Math robot, he excelled.
He also needed to really put in the work to build his Math foundation. He had not prepared for the GRE in years and had not done most of the Math that is found on the GMAT in a long time. He even needed to really drill basic things like fractions and long division (as do most of the people we help, so don’t feel bad if you are reading this and thinking, “I would need help with that too!”).
Things progressed well, although on a slightly longer timeline than we had anticipated. Truthfully, that is common too. We try to set a realistic timeline with people when they begin, but things often get in the way (vacations, job stuff, family crises, etc.) or sometimes things just take longer than expected. So initially we said that the whole process might take 3 months, but we should budget for 4 just in case, and in the end it lasted just over 4 months. That itself is an ambitious timeline. Most people coming in at square 1 typically need more like 4 to 6 months or sometimes even more, but I figured that Jake would need almost no help on Verbal and that that would accelerate things.
When it came time to take practice tests a couple of months into the process, his first test was a 710 with a 39Q and 49V. To be clear, this quant score was only equal to what he had gotten on his GRE in college – the overall score increase came entirely from the Verbal, which we had spent only a fraction of our time on. So this could have seemed like a very bad outcome, but this is typical! Usually the first practice test does NOT go well for a whole variety of reasons, most notably poor time management. That is to be expected, and I had warned Jake that his score on this first practice test might actually decrease from his GRE attempt, so he was unperturbed. I was actually happy to see the 710. Again, often that first practice test is a disaster and I knew that the Quant score was artificially low based on his poor time management, so I knew he was likely to score quite high. And the 49V was ridiculously high, so that was nice to see!
There were some content gaps, such as exponents and quadratics, that needed to be addressed. Another problem was that Jake would make a lot of careless mistakes. Tackling that problem can be surprisingly difficult. One can’t just write off careless mistakes as careless – one really needs to get to the bottom of what causes such mistakes and try to address those root causes. In Jake’s case it was partly about recognizing the types of situations in which he tended to make careless mistakes (exponents, fractions, inequalities) and learning to be more careful in specifically those situations. The other factor was that he would often do calculations in a vacuum and not “keep the logic wheels turning” while doing them. So we worked on “staying logical” and having “logic checks” along the way to make sure he wasn’t making mistakes.
But the main challenge in the second half of his prep was to address his timing issues. There were two main issues, both typical…
One is that he needed to do a better job of sizing up questions and deciding how much time to invest in them instead of just diving head first into every question with the intent of answering each one correctly. Jake needed to realize that some questions would either take a long time or just be low percentage questions for him and he needed to either dump some of these or at least take a path that was intended more to arrive at an educated guess than at an exact answer. This is much easier said than done. People want to just answer every question correctly and don’t think about how they could effectively deal with something that they may not be able to “solve” in a traditional sense. We had worked on these issues in the first phase of the process, but it can be hard to apply those skills in the context of the actual test. So that is something we worked on a lot.
The second issue was that under pressure he would reflexively just start “doing math” instead of leaning into his innate reasoning and problem solving ability. Again this is typical and addressing this problem is easier said than done, but we came up with a practice regimen that would help him reinforce these skills under pressure.
Addressing the above two issues is what really allowed Jake to jump to the next level. His practice test scores climbed and he went in to take the actual GMAT confident and prepared. Most people underperform on their first try, but Jake nailed it: 760 48Q 46V! That score is obviously amazing in and of itself and could even be used on a resume, regardless of the business school application (many employers in the world of finance and consulting use GMAT and GRE scores to judge candidates). The icing on the cake, however, is that Jake followed up to report that he had gotten into his top mba program and gotten a nearly $100k scholarship on top of that!