GMAT

Phoo.....Now thats one hell of an exam and so popular. But how much is it worth to spend so much money on study materials, prep programs and a vast store of online material. Well, to tell you the truth, it is not worth as much as people think it is. Until I applied to universities, i felt a gmat score of 700 above is all that is required to achieve an advantage over other applicants. But I was wrong. A gmat score is only a cut off wherein you dont clear a level of score you face automatic rejection, but if you do clear the cutoff, then they look at the rest of your application. Unless that is satisfactory, a score of even 750 and above is not enough to get you a seat in the top schools. So it all boils down to the fact that an applicant needs to concentrate on his application as much as he concentrates on his gmat score. So what is the ideal score? I believe even god cannot answer that question correctly, but anything above 600 is a competitive score for upto the top 20 universities in the world and for the top 20 anything above 650 is a very competitive score. So if you are chalking out a study plan for yourself, leave enough time for you to complete the application thorughly. And as far as gmat goes, dont go by the dozens of sites that promise you a score above 750 and their teachers comprise of a list of GMAT A graders. That might be true, but they are probably brilliant students and dont need as much study as a common man does. Probably the best way to prepare is to order the Official Guide to GMAT which gives a very fair idea of the exam and enough practice material to start off. Then switch to other books, but limit yourself to the few branded ones like princeton, kaplan, manhattan. Am not a big fan of materials available online, though I spent a lot of time gathering them, cause they are an absolute waste of time. People do say that you get additional practice with those materials, but I feel they are misled. As books such as barrons, which are available online, not only waste your time but does not give relevent practise as the problems are a bunch of crap. So the best bet is to buy few books, hard copy and use them efficiently and I believe how ever bad a person might be, his score will come above 600 if he works hard for a month or 2. And for those who have no choice but to go for soft copies, there are lots of sites available which includes esnips.com and our very own orkut. Orkut has a large number of communities who post links to sites and downloadable material. Personally, I feel GMAT is nowhere near a good way of assessing a person's mathematical ability, but unfortunately, to get into bschools we have no choice but to write it.