Yale SOM 2008, with a touch of trepidation.

06 July 2006

Friday Mailbag

It would be more alliterative to have Monday Mailbag, but at least for now, we're taking your questions and comments, right here on the air on Fridays.

Speaking of advice column disasters (and yes, this post will prompt a national discussion on that topic, I'm guessing) check out the resignation of the staffer behind Wonkette's Ask An Anonymous Hill Staffer. Apparently, Anonymous accidentally printed out his - or her - latest column for Wonkette. The office chief of staff found it. Now Anonymous is unemployed and claims to be on the run in Central America.

Anyway, this week, Steven B. of Sacramento, CA. queries:
My boss, Arnold, wants me to go to business school. Every single year his operation runs a huge budget deficit, it's just spend, spend, spend all over the place, and he's sick to death of it. He wants my help. So I'm preparing for the GMAT. How did you prepare, Lex?

Thanks for writing, Steven.

First, I took a Princeton Review online prep class. I would only recommend this marginally; it's quite expensive and though it claims to be a superb diagnostic tool for identifying and then fixing your weaknesses - a certain type of data sufficiency problem, for example - I could never find a pattern in the questions I was getting wrong. For that matter, neither could Princeton Review. Basically, I felt like I wasn't getting any stronger. And Princeton Review certainly wasn't useful on the more complex quantitative questions, the ones that determine whether you'll end up with a 670 or a 720.

If I were to do it all again, I'd focus on actual GMATs from years past, available from (the sadists at) ETS. I'd also concentrate on Project GMAT from Veritas Prep and Kaplan GMAT 800. I didn't expect to master all of the questions in these latter two books (and succeeded magnificently in not mastering them) but got both the quantitative review and the level of difficulty that Princeton just wasn't giving me. Project GMAT is particularly good on statistics and probability (where Princeton basically sucks). And given that on the computerized GMAT two or three mistakes early on can put you in a hole you can't dig your way out of, I needed to close the big statistics/probability gap in my quantitative armor, such as it was.

I should note a) my big concern was obviously quantitative, not verbal, and b) I work pretty well on my own, and so had little trouble being disciplined enough to work my way through the books and do a series of practice tests. I can see how a class would be useful in forcing this kind of discipline, though, despite the downsides.

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