The Impact of Experience on your GMAT Prep and MBA Admissions

An MBA if at all pursued is better done only in the top colleges. There’s huge cost of taking up this journey – taking a 2 year break from your work and doing an MBA. It’s a kind of double edged sword (the cost you incur) – you lose the earnings from your regular job during your MBA and you spend huge amounts on the course fee. To have an acceptable return on the investment in a reasonable time, one will generally find, doing an MBA from the top colleges helpful. Information about MBA courses, their fee and admission criteria in these colleges are available on the internet. There are some things which are common to getting an admission into these colleges – the GMAT score, the work experience.

To know more about how experience plays an important role in not just your admissions but also in your preparation for the test, you may hear to the following:

Kick-starting the first task – the GMAT Prep

Most of these colleges accept the scores on the tests, GRE & the GMAT, but the GMAT has been an admission test for MBA programs for a much longer time. The GMAT, organized by the GMAC, tests one’s decision making skills, considered important for managers to perform at business. The GMAT has Quantitative Reasoning (Mathematics) and Verbal Reasoning (English) as means to test these skills. It is very natural for one to forget most of the basic Mathematics and English learnt in the school days. This is for a simple reason that people planning to take the test are on an average 10+ years past their schooling. If you are one of them wondering where and how do you start your GMAT preparation, continue reading. It should help.

I would recommend you to spend 4 hours first in taking up a full length mock (diagnostic) test. This will make things such as the question formats, the difficulty levels and the scoring mechanisms clear. In the process, you may also end up knowing where you stand in your preparation phase. So two important purposes get served when you take up this test – you get to know the test and also know where you stand. These along with the knowledge of the least/average scores expected by the colleges will be the kick-starters of your preparation. Where do you take this test? Most of the test prep companies give free access to at least one such test on their respective websites. While any of these tests may serve your purpose, the one I would recommend is the test on the GMAC site itself. The GMAC, the maker of the GMAT gives the test takers free access to two such Prep-tests on its site. One can take one of these as an assessment test before starting any preparation and the other, a week before the actual GMAT.

Once you take the assessment test you must spend some time in going through the explanations of the right answers for all the questions. This is going to be an eye-opener for most. One will realize the need of brushing up on few very basic and essential things before starting the actual preparation. Most of the trainers in the test prep industry and the students who have actually gone through the preparation for the test will agree to this.

Let’s understand what all this pre-work includes and how to go about it listening to the following audio:

To your surprise, you will discover that you missed out on some of the questions on the diagnostic test for simple and silly reasons, which I call as "GAPS". It takes some time to fill these gaps which is actually a part of the pre-work that I am going to recommend for seamless preparation. Simple things such as the number 0 being an even number, the number 1 not being a prime number, some of the essential things to know are all forgotten. The terms such as the LCM, HCF, Factors, Multiples, Remainders, Factorization, Prime Factorization, Digits, Terminating, Non Terminating numbers are all out of memory. Rules of operating on exponents/roots, Absolute Values (the modulus symbol), Inequalities are all hard to recall. Things on the Verbal (English) section such as grammar (parts of speech) rules, reasoning skills are all away from your memory for a long time. Reading as a habit seems important now. To fill all such GAPS, I would recommend one to go through a BASIC BRUSH UP of the above mentioned. Though the above mentioned is not an absolute list of such essential fundamentals, there are not too many that I would have missed out too. Yeah, there is Geometry with the basic properties/formulae. There is the elimination process that helps when one needs to guess (either when running short of time or when not able to figure out how to solve). The “fabmarks GMAT Essential Fundamentals” recording(s) below should help you.

If you think you are better prepared now to go through a rigorous, systematic GMAT preparation, you may find our courses useful. Visit our site fabmarks.com.

Fabmarks GMAT Course Components:

48 hours of Live Online Classes – 8 Classes of 3 hours each (For Quant & Verbal;

The latest GMAT Official Guide;

404 Official GMAC Practice Questions, 4 Full Length Tests

(Given access through the GMAC online portal)