In that post I announced an offering of the the free Premium Access to those BTG practice questions to the first four people who would make a claim. The free Premium Access for readers of this blog was offered with compliments from Beat the GMAT team. All four access codes have been claimed. Now is the time to announce the four winners of that offering. I feel today is an appropriate date for this announcement because it is also a two year anniversary of my own first, not so fabulous, attempt on GMAT. You can read about that experience in my GMAT Anniversary post. In a way, it is my revenge on GMAT for that failure by empowering other people to get a better shot on beating it ;-) . And also this is a sort of giving back to the community of the people who are supporting this blog by regularly reading it. Thank you to all the readers!
So here are the names of the winners in the order their claims have been submitted:
Name: Puneet
City: New Delhi
Country: India
Target MBA programs: UCLA, MIT
Name: David Goliath (no further information was provided)
Name: Young
City: Vancouver
Country: Canada
Target MBA programs: UBC, Toronto, Queens, York, MIT and Stanford….
Name: Rodrick Womack
City: Germantown, MD
Country: USA
Target MBA programs: GW, Maryland(Smith), Georgetown(McDonough)
I was pleasantly surprised to see the broad geography from local to international locations and wide range of the target MBA programs of the winners. I wish them all great success on their GMAT and further on in their MBA programs. I am confident that the Practice questions from Beat the GMAT will be of great help to them.
For those of you who missed the chance to claim the Free access, I still have a good news. BTG has extended the discounted price for to Premium Access to Practice Questions till December 7, 2010. So go ahead and grab it at $49 instead of a regular price of $99: Beat the GMAT Practice Questions.
Update 11/19/2010. All the codes for Premium access to BTG Practice questions have been claimed already.
Last week I received invitation from the Beat The GMAT (BTG) founder, Eric, to review the new Beat the GMAT Practice Questions. Admittedly, GMAT is far from being on my priorities list with all the classes I am taking now in my second Fall Module of part-time MBA at George Washington University. However I was curious to check this out and to give some feedback to the creators of the BTG to help improve the quality of their offering to all the MBA aspirants.
The excruciating memories flooded me the moment I launched the quantitative section after logging into my reviewer’s account. Ah, all those sleepless nights I was toiling over the GMAT preparation just two years ago . It took me to go through just a handfull of the math practice questions to realize that there was a good reason for me to spend almost six months of my life preparing for the GMAT test. I courageously mastered through about a dozen questions on each of the sections: verbal and math and realized that it was enough.
Questions did seem to resemble the ones from the GMAT OG. I really liked the fact that the explanations of the answers were both in text and video format. I watched a few video explanations and they were quite clear and to the point. If you don’t have time to go through the video and want to keep your own pace of practicing, then the text explanation comes handy.
Another feature of the BTG GMAT Practice Questions I liked a lot was the benchmarking against other people who practice the questions. You can see not only your own average percent of correct answers and average time per question in each of the sections and sub-sections, such as Data Sufficiency and Problem Solving for math or Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension for verbal, but also the cumulative averages of all other users in the same categories. I think it helps to see other people’s averages in order to identify where your stand in terms of correctness and answering speed.
The team at BTG also took an effort to make the Practice Questions adaptive in order to make the experience as close to the actual GMAT as possible. I think this is really great.
There are a total of about 700 questions available for practice, 300+ verbal and 400+ math. The access to this new GMAT Practice Questions comes with the price tag – $99 for one year access. This will give anyone plenty of time and practice. However if you sign up for this service before November 15, 2010 you can get a real bargain – all the features of Premium account for half price. Plus, BTG offers 3 iPads to be rafted among all people who sign up for either Premium paid or Basic free account before November 15. All this comes with 30 days money back guarantee.
As for me, my half-assed attempt on the GMAT Practice Questions resulted, quite predictably, in about 50% correct answers on both verbal and math sections. OK, I will try to compensate for that by getting a higher grade in my actual MBA classes. If that fails, I can also find consolation in my grade for final exam in Financial Markets ;-)
If your read this far in the post I have another good news for you. Beat the GMAT has kindly offered a few free Premium accounts to the readers of this blog. So if you are still preparing for your GMAT test, shoot me an email ASAP (webmaster at parttimembadegree.com) and the first four people will receive FREE Premium access to the Practice Questions. I also would like to publish name (or at least nickname), country, city, and target MBA programs of those people who get this Premium access to BTG Practice Questions through my blog, with compliments from Beat the GMAT.
For those of my readers who are still in the planning phase of their MBA journey it will be very beneficial to learn about the GMAT Scholarship offered by Beatthegmat.com.
Beat the GMAT (BTG) is one of the few internet sites that provide a unique community platform not only for those who are yet aspiring to embark on the MBA experience, but also for those who are already plowing through the rigors of the business school.
I have been perusing their vast free resources and community knowledge at the time of my preparation for GMAT. But it also proved to be quite useful in other aspects of my application process for MBA. So don’t let the name of the site to mislead you. It maybe started as a place for sharing GMAT preparation knowledge, but over the years evolved into something much bigger than that.
I personally appreciate a very supportive and amicable spirit of a close-knit community on Beat the GMAT. If you have been a member of any forums on the internet you have most likely experienced trolling, flaming and other behavioral fallouts mainly caused by anonymous nature of the internet. On the forums of beatthegmat.com you will find support for your intellectual quest first, but also just friendly advice and encouragement from the like-minded members.
The forum and other resources of BTG have earned great reputation with the pre-MBA community at large. That’s why they have been able to establish partnerships with many highly-acknowledged GMAT Preparation companies: Grockit, Kaplan, Knewton, Manhattan GMAT, The Princeton Review, and Veritas Prep. For the four previous years Beat the GMAT in co-operation with these companies has been offering the GMAT scholarship, and this year the GMAT Scholarship Competition is back. Taking part in this competition offers a great opportunity to win a free online or in-class GMAT preparation course offered by these companies. Moreover, they will even pay your GMAT test fee! There will be six people selected to receive a prize this year and the competition ends on May 20, 2010. So hurry up, and shoot for the prize! Visit their site for more information: Beat The GMAT Scholarship Competition.
With all this snow days and hype I almost forgot about one year anniversary of my second attempt on GMAT in preparation for the part-time MBA program. It actually was on February 7-th. In my post about the first taking of the GMAT I already mentioned that the score of 550 that I got that time would fit me comfortably in the GMAT ranges of part-time MBA programs in GWU School of Business and Kogod School of Business at American University. I would be at the lower end of the mid 80% range for part-time MBA program at Smith in University of Maryland, but still it was quite reasonable result for that school, which was at the time my preferred school. Of course, Georgetown McDonough with its mid 80% range of GMAT score in 620-700 would be out of question alltogether.
Even with these quite reasonable chances of getting into MBA program this year, I had a very deep dissatisfaction with my first result on GMAT. Also, I was not absolutely sure that Smith part-time MBA program was a definite top choice for me. I wanted to keep my options open, so I needed to get a higher score on GMAT if I would change my mind and decide to go for Georgetown part-time MBA.
American University MBA program was a very-very last resort. I was planning to apply to it just for a backup, but I remember thinking at that time, and especially after attending their information session sometime in mid-February, that I might as well pass on the whole MBA aspirations if it were the only school that would accept me. In addition to their lowest ranking of the four schools on my list, there was some subjective feeling of resistence to this business school that I could not even articulate rationally. Let’s say, it just did not click for me.
My opinion about the GWU School of Business was not clarified around that time either. I just did not know enough about the program, so I had it on my list of possible schools, but I did not feel either negative or positive about it, other than the fact that it had lower rankings than Smith or McDonough MBA programs.
So, to solidify my chances for the University of Maryland part-time MBA, and to get any chance for Georgetown University MBA I had to get a higher score on GMAT. That’s why a week after my first failed attempt on GMAT I made up my mind to take it again.
My biggest weakness on the GMAT was quantitative part. That’s why in preparation for the second sitting on the test I focused mostly on the math. Almost all my preparation time I dedicated to the quants. Based on my experience with simulation tests and my actual GMAT test I identified one area in the quants where I needed most improvement: equations and inequalities. GMAT Preparation -Click Here!
By that time I have already heard enough positive feedback about Manhattan GMAT series. That’s why I decided to try out one of their guides:Equations, Inequalities & VICs .VIC here stands for Variables In answer Choices. In addition to quite clear explanations of the principles and GMAT techniques it also included one year access to 6 Computer Adaptive Online Practice Exams and online questions bank for equations and inequalities. If I had to buy the whole set of their GMAT Strategy Guides it would cost me between $150-200, depending on what kind of promotions was running at the time. But the beauty of their flexibility is that you can buy just a book on what you feel you need extra help and that book would give you access to the online practice tests and bank of questions related to the topic of the book. The price for a single book from Manhattan GMAT series -$26, is kind of steep, given that The Official Guide for GMAT Review can be bought for about the same price. But for me it was well worth it.
I mentioned already that I was not doing much of cramming on verbal. So in addition to my cramming on quants, with particular emphasis on the book from Manhattan GMAT, I was doing all practice tests I could put my hands on. And I was doing this under “real” conditions: timed test, with 10-minute breaks between the parts. My actual test this time was scheduled for 8 AM. So my practice tests I was doing all on weekends at that time.
On the morning of the GMAT test I felt quite prepared, though I knew that conquering the quants was still going to be an uphill battle. During the test I did not really know how I was doing, as I was too consumed with the questions. At the end of both sections I had to answer a few questions without really thinking, because I was running out of time. And as everyone knows with GMAT it is better to not have any questions unanswered, because you are penalized more for those than for the wrong answers.
When I saw my results at the end of the test I had mixed feelings. Even though I improved my score by 60 points, I was still short of my minimum target of 620. Here are my results for the second take of the GMAT test:
Total score – 610/69 percentile
Verbal score – 39/87 percentile
Quantitative score - 35/42 percentile
As you can see I improved my verbal score by moving from 78 to 87 percentile. My quant improved somewhat, even though not as much as I hoped. Still, with this score I have strengthened significantly my standing for Smith part-time MBA. I got a slight chance of getting into Georgetown part-time MBA, and I knew that I would not need to apply to Kogod whatsoever, as I felt that GWU School of Business would suffice as a backup. So I was in the game again, and all I had to do now was to finalize my choice of the program, if I got accepted to more than one. That process was not finished until I actually had two acceptances and one waiting list letter on my hands later. But that’s a topic for another post.
In the light of my post on whether MBA is losing its relevance for businesses and attractiveness to the students I was thinking what were the events relating to the MBA programs that attracted the most media attention lately. Since my personal interest in MBA evoked only in Spring 2008, this was the time when [...]
Here is a short followup on my yesterday’s GMAT post. In my preparation for GMAT I did not use any in-class or online prep courses. The reason is quite obvious – I was not applying to top 10-20 full-time MBA programs, which have a very high break-in GMAT score. Part-time MBA programs available in Washington, [...]
Today is a one year anniversary of my first attempt on GMAT. To be more precise, it was not on the same date, but the same day- Saturday after Thanksgiving a year ago. On Friday before the test I knew it was not one of my brightest decisions to schedule the test for that Saturday. [...]
GMAT is one of the major hurdles to overcome in pursuing admission to an MBA progrram. No wonder then that a big deal of attention is paid by every applicant to scoring high on this test. I’ll talk a bit about this as now is high season for GMAT taking, because of the second, and [...]
. It took me to go through just a handfull of the math practice questions to realize that there was a good reason for me to spend almost six months of my life preparing for the GMAT test. I courageously mastered through about a dozen questions on each of the sections: verbal and math and realized that it was enough.
can be bought for about the same price. But for me it was well worth it.
