I finished my GMAT today. This is my debrief and advice on taking the GMAT.
The FIRST step to taking the GMAT and starting the path down the MBA application process is to get motivated. When times are tough and life feels stressful, it can be hard to to get yourself into the mood for picking up the books and studying. Motivation helps get past these road blocks. I listened to an audio book called The Seven Hidden Secrets of Motivation. I found it extemely interesting and full of useful insights, such as just merely doing research and learning more about how to accomplish a goal will help increase the probability of success in your mind - and hence increase motivation. In fact, my mental perception of the probability of success played a big part in my level of motivation. The most important part of Motivation is having a really big Reason Why - why do you want to succeed at the GMAT? After a while, I found that I just got into the habit of studying while I was on the bus/train to work, during lunch time and after work.
The second part of taking the GMAT is doing research on how to get a top GMAT score. The mainstream books and materials available at high street book shops are not sufficient: this is aimed at the mainstream crowd aiming for 550 to 650 or so. Forums like TestMagic and BeatTheGMAT get you started thinking about this. I really recommend looking at the GMAT Strategy Guide complied by a few others. I have posted what I think is the most interesting part of this on my blog, Study tips that every single 700+ scorer mentioned. In a similar vein, there are some useful Insights from GMAC posted under the GMAT Strategies category of MGMAT Blog: i.e. those who study harder and longer generally do better. There are also other articles on the internet, such as Manhattan's Strategy Series. I highly recommend reading the debriefs of those who have scored highly and posted debriefs. In fact, not only did I read a number of debriefs from TestMagic, but I also copied out the parts of these I found most useful and posted them on my blog. These snippets that were useful to me (not necessarily you), as well as links to the original posts, can be found here and here.
Don't get too bogged down with the first two stages. What counts at the end of the day is solid grunt work: doing lots of exercises, learning from your mistakes and doing more exercises with a view to improving your 'strike rate'. There is plenty of material out there, in terms of questions and answers. The keys is tackling them in an organised way so that you track which questions are time consuming or you get wrong. Ursula's debrief describes how an Error log can be used to achieve this. It is worth stressing over and over again that the most important part of this is to learn from your mistakes. I also recommend keeping a cheat sheet for particular problems and methods of tackling them that come up again and again. You will notice that the same kind of sequence problem or probability problem will reoccur again and again. Collating all these and their answers is useful. I did this only for the problems I came across from the GMATPrep. I found this extremely useful because the Math problems I came across on the real exam were very similar to the in GMATPrep, and I had rehearsed the approach well for these.
However, the Errorlog approach to learning can be slow if you are not familiar with the subject matter to begin with. In this respect, the Manhattan GMAT guides are excellent for Math.
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