Cracking GMAT - Things to keep in mind

By Harshit Maloo

(Harshit is currently in the final year at St. Stephen's College. He secured 780/800 in GMAT)

For those of you who don’t know, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is an exam, the scores of which are accepted by most of the internationally acclaimed Business Schools including Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business and so on. Most of us in our pre-final or final year of college attempt this examination for the ISB-YLP program, as did I.

The very first thing to keep in mind is when you would want to give the exam. If you are constrained by deadlines for applications, then as the case may be. Otherwise, I’d recommend giving the exam at a point when you know you can devote at least a month beforehand for preparation. It isn’t usually a good idea to keep it near your college examinations or other entrances (GRE or CAT). However, with adequate preparation, it is possible to do well in all scenarios.

Choice of Examination Centre is something that is overhyped. I have seen a lot of debate over which centre is better for the examination. Personally, the date and time should take precedence over the location. The centre at Pitampura, where I gave my examination is nice and quiet. It seats a maximum of 3 examinees at a time, which ensures peace and keeps away chaotic situations. It is a good idea to visit the test centre once before your GMAT date to not waste time in navigation on the day of the exam.

Preparation time is relative from person to person, their background, and their level of comfort with Mathematics (Class X level) and English. As soon as you begin thinking about giving the GMAT, it is essential to give a diagnostic or an online mock test to evaluate where you stand. This can be done as early as 3 months prior to the examination. Preparation can then start accordingly.

There is a misconception that GMAT cannot be taken without tuitions, and that preparation time for it needs to span months. You can prepare for GMAT in the last 3 weeks also, but you have to make up for it by burning the midnight oil and doing nothing else for those 20-something days. A comfortable preparation time would be about 6 weeks.

The very first reference book you need to follow is the GMAC Official Guide. This book contains the basic preparation material; it will set the flow in motion. It is just the first step, as it does not contain 800-level questions in abundance. I would suggest keeping track of your performance during the first two weeks and then delving into higher-level books according to your areas of difficulty. The Manhattan guides for individual sections are extremely helpful in this regard. As you read the material, you’ll realize that even the higher-level books contain basic material, and acing the GMAT is all about practice and time management.

I’ll go into further detail, section wise:

Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA)

AWA is the first section, for 30 minutes. You are given a 4-5 line argument that you need to comment upon. You should aim to write about 4-5 paragraphs of 3 sentences each. It is not a lengthy task. The introduction and conclusion are standard, but in the body each paragraph must pick a separate point about:
(a) How the argument is invalid if certain assumptions are disregarded?

(b) What could be added to the argument to complete it?

(c) Any additional comment on the argument or its fallacies.

Be sure to not diverge far from the topic at hand. Since the essay is checked by software also, it is essential to have the keywords and basic vocabulary – with NO spelling mistakes. If you try and differ too much from the normal phrases and try to draw analogies, it might backfire.    

Integrated Reasoning

Integrated Reasoning is the next half an hour section that contains 12 questions. Each question has 2 or 3 subparts to it. IR is relatively easy, and it tests you on basic logic rather than on math. This is the only section where use of online calculators is allowed. 

The problem with IR is that there are limited resources to study it, so you have to make the most of what is available through the GMAC Software and certain other mock tests.

Quant

There is an optional break before beginning your Quant section for 8 minutes. You can use this opportunity to relax, stretch a bit, have a quick bite to eat (a chocolate does good for you J) and some like to gulp down an energy drink!

The Quant section tests speed and accuracy more than anything else. The concepts, formulae and so on can be brushed up using the reference material. But what it doesn’t prepare you for is the nerves, and the widely observed phenomenon that you automatically tend to double check your answers and thus lose on time as compared to when you were sitting at home and giving your mocks. When it comes down to crunch time, and you see that you do not have too much time remaining, do not linger on a question. It is not a taboo to make an intelligent guess (I made one in my Quant Section!). Your main aim should be to attempt ALL questions as you are heavily penalized for not completing the exam.

Verbal

The Verbal section starts after another optional break. This section tests your use of the written English language. Remember, what ‘sounds’ right may not always be right, because in our day to day usage of the language, we tend to misuse grammar and phrases. The Manhattan Sentence Correction guide and the Kaplan 800-Level Verbal Guide are of immense help in this regard. It is a recommended to attack these rules and idioms a few at a time as the list will seem overwhelmingly long towards the end.

With respect to Verbal again, only practice can serve your purpose. All the strategies and rules that you’ll read about will be of no use unless you can implement them. This should reflect in you mock test performance as you keep giving them.

Mock Tests

There are a horde of mock tests available online, some free and some for which you need to shell out a few dollars. I highly recommend giving as many mocks as humanly possible before the exam. Since all your other practice material will be divided into sections, and the questions will be also divided accordingly, it will not give you a fair idea of whether or not you are able to use all the principles you have learnt in a test like environment, where the type of questions and their difficulty vary.

While giving mocks, keep in mind that your score and percentile do not matter much. Each company’s mocks have different scoring algorithms and a different database of students against whom your percentile is scored. What you should review is the questions you were unable to solve, or solved incorrectly. Keep tab of which type of question persists in troubling you, and then go back and work on that area using the additional reference material.

You should save your GMAC mocks till the last week as they provide the most accurate image of your position. They have two mocks and they can be reset to take advantage of the vast question base. When you give the tests after resetting the score, some questions might be repeated, so do not get too happy if the scores are high!

You should be relaxed the day before your GMAT – if you do all that’s advised above, you will definitely be. It is an easy examination; all you have to do is put in some effort.        

Preparing for the ISB-YLP programme

By Satyaki Dhar

The YLP Programme is offered by the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad to provide guaranteed admission to its one year MBA Programme contingent on the applicants securing 21 months of work experience post earning their under-graduate degree. In case you aren’t aware of the programme, you can always find information about it at – http://www.isb.edu/young-leaders-programme

The application process for the ISB YLP Programme consists of three stages. The first stage begins towards the end of the pre-final year of your undergraduate degree. The deadline ISB sets for this stage is around the first week of March. The second stage will require you to take the GMAT, obtain two recommendations and write a few essays. This stage usually has a deadline of around the first week of August. The third stage is the interview and this is held face-to-face at the ISB Campus at Hyderabad. Interview slots range from mid-August to mid-September.

The application itself, considered as a whole consists of the following parts –

1)      Essays

2)      Curriculum Vitae (CV)

3)      Video

4)      Recommendations

5)      GMAT score

6)      Written case-study

7)      Interview

Essays: Essays seek to find out your perspective on how your life has been. In my application year, the essay topics were “Describe your two most significant achievements”, “What is your career aspiration immediately after graduating from the ISB?”, “Describe a past experience that has shaped who you are today”  and “Please provide additional information that will significantly affect the consideration of your application to the ISB”.

The last one is pretty standard. You need to look through your application and see if there is any other important point that you’ve missed out on due to the constrictions of the online application.

The achievements essay appeared again in the following year I believe. If it does appear again, my opinion is that in addition to telling them what the achievement was and how you went about doing things, you should also touch on why you chose this over your other achievements.

Other topics have kept changing.

CV: ISB traditionally asks for the one page CV. The difficulty in this isn’t how to compress everything into a page, but I feel its picking the right points to put on that page.

The best advice that I ever got in this area, and I’ll pass it onto you – make a complete list of all the achievements that you feel are worth mentioning.  More recent achievements are to be given greater weightage and as the time elapsed since the achievement increases, the impact of the achievement needs to be that much greater in order for it to feature on your list. Then prune that list according to the scale of the effort and impact of the achievement. Try to strike a balance in order to show consistency and diversity.

Speaking about diversity - I’ve heard is greatly valued for the ISB process. How much diversity should you represent on the CV? That’s a difficult question, but even if you’ve done a lot of things you’ll be able to represent only 2-3 adequately well on a one page CV. So you would end up talking about only your most important ones while the rest would have to be accommodated through other parts of your application.

So once you’re done selecting the achievements you want to put on your CV, get down to making it. There’s only that much structuring you can do for a one page CV, but the standard sections that most of us who applied kept it to were – Academic Qualifications (Including academic awards, scholarships), Internships/Projects/Research, Extra-curricular achievements, Awards (Other ECA awards) and a Miscellaneous section if required. Some of us created special sections in order to highlight certain special skills acquired (Such as Writing or Web-design) and that works as well.

Video: Now this the fun part of the YLP Application. Atleast I had fun shooting my video. You’ll need to don your formals (Well, I did) and speak about the topic that they’ve provided for 90 seconds. In my application year ISB wanted to know if they were to admit one more student to the YLP Batch, why should it be me. Take some time and plan out the answer. I personally took around a week and wrote down the whole answer and thought I’d memorize it, but that didn’t work too well.

My tip, if you aren’t an exceptionally good speaker, make the extra effort to write down the whole thing. Since its only 90 seconds you’ll need to optimize on every word if you want to pack in the maximum number of points. Even if you are a good speaker, write it down once and say it to yourself to see how much time it takes. Editing can also become a lot easier if you write it down.

Recommendations: Recommendations provide the only third-person perspective to your application and hence the process of choosing your recommenders must be carefully thought through. Recommendations can be both professional (Internships, work-experience), academic ( Teachers, academic instructors/counsellors) or extra-curricular (Related to any sport, society activity that you participate in. The single most important point that you should consider before approaching a recommender is that person’s position (NOT post) to comment on your life. Choose people that you think know you well and would be in the best position to comment on your life.

Once you make a list based on that criterion, you could start boiling it down using the kind of information that you might want to represent to the school. For example, it can be expected that an ECA Staff-Advisor will primarily talk about your enthusiasm and work in a certain activity or a teacher will talk mostly about your performance in class. 

Another factor you should consider is the credibility of the person providing the recommendation. If the Principal of your college would roughly write the same things on your recommendations as a Professor would, the person in the higher post (Professor) would be the better choice.

Talking about expectations, my conjecture is that since you’re applying straight out of your undergraduate degree and aren’t expected to have much prior work experience one recommendation should be from an academic viewpoint. Since you’re still a student and your profession is studying , someone should be willing to talk about how you perform there. Most of the people who were accepted that I know of had submitted two academic recommendations.

GMAT score: I believe this plays quite an important role in your application. Getting a 700 in GMAT isn’t really rocket science. From what I have noticed, your GMAT score is usually a function of how many questions you’ve practiced. There are exceptions ofcourse. The concepts are fairly simple and easy to grasp but practice does make a difference. It helps improve your speed and accuracy, both of which are well-tested during the exam.

It takes a bare minimum of 6 weeks to prepare for the GMAT. Around 2-3 hours of practice every day during that period should be enough for a 700. Do plan your study period and continuously assess your progress.

There is enough material and advice on the GMAT available on online forums. Lastly, in my opinion, coaching for the GMAT is really not required. Self-study as long as you’re willing to stick to a schedule should be fine. I know people who ended up getting as much as 780 with self-study, so it’s possible.

Written case-study:  Don’t be scared if you haven’t solved a case before. The cases are very basic and require nothing than a little common sense. Knowledge of class 11-12 Economics might be considered an advantage, but is not a necessity. If you’re planning to study though, you might want to pick up any Beginners Economics textbook (G.Mankiw, may be) and learn about demand-supply, revenue-cost etc. The first 2-3 chapters should suffice.

Lastly, the case-study is a an hour long written one so while on one hand it gives you more time to think, ISB naturally also expects you to be more precise in your answers. Examples of cases: I don’t remember the prompts I heard word to word, but they were something to this effect –

1)      Discuss the viability of a radio cab service in a metro. How would you go about pricing such a service?

2)      European mobile phone company wants to enter the US mobile phone market. What factors would you consider?

3)      Credit Card company is facing intense competition in the industry. What would you recommend for it to survive.

Interview: The average duration of an interview is between 10-15 minutes. The Written-Case Study and the Interview process are held on the same day.

The interview began with the generic question “Tell me a little bit about yourself…”. This is a standard question for most interviews (I realised that only later) and you can go ahead and prepare an answer for this. Be ready to talk for a good 2-3 minutes. You could give a short summary of your CV or alternately talk about things you can’t mention on your CV (For example: Personality traits). You could talk about how your life has progressed and how you have become the person you are today. Personally I mentioned a combination of all of these and how it has led me to apply for a deferred MBA program. You need to justify why you want to pursue an MBA, and why you want to take the YLP route.

Post that they tend to quiz you on the material you’ve already submitted (CV, essays, recommendations) and try to iron out the inconsistencies. Remember, they’ve got enough experience and have given enough time to your application before shortlisting you so lying would be a humungous risk. Be prepared to talk in detail about any activity, any point you’ve mentioned in other parts of your application. For this you might need some time for contemplation. Be clear on what your goals are, how you’ve gone about trying to achieve them and how the MBA & YLP fits into the picture.

All-in-all I felt that the interview process was meant to be a cross-check. I felt that they were trying to evaluate if I was capable of being the person that I had represented myself as on paper. There might be a few subject related questions

Lastly, again looking at the whole application - in my opinion, try to avoid over-laps. Don’t go to recommenders who will talk about something you’ve already written about in an essay. Don’t write about the same activity in more than one essay. Try to represent as much information as possible through the options available. It gives them a better all-round picture and helps them understand if you’re the kind of person they’d like in their class. Best of luck!

Satyaki Dhar graduated from St. Stephen's College (Mathematics Honors, Batch of 2013). He was the President of Finance and Investment Cell and perhaps one of the most active members of college. He got admission to ISB - YLP programme. Currently, he is pursuing Finance at London School of Economics.