Category: Now that I had decided to go back to school to pursue an MBA degree, I figured the first step was to take the GMAT. Even before figuring out what schools to apply to, I knew that getting a “decent” score was a must.
For those of you unfamiliar with the exam, the GMAT tests skills that are supposed to be indicative of management ability, mainly reading/writing, math and logical thinking. As a quantitative analyst at a major financial services firm, I figured I could fake my way through the math portion of the exam, so I focused on the reading/writing portions for my studying.
This turned out to be a very costly mistake, in both time and money!
My first time taking the exam, I received a 590 out of 800 (Ouch!). It seems that in my haste in studying, I had only done most of the “easy” problems in the GMAT study guide, and little in terms of overall math review…had I read the book a bit more closely, I would’ve realized that the problems were organized by increased difficulty.
So rather than figuring out what “tier” of business school I could apply to, the only info I received from the $250 cost of admission was that I would be taking the GMAT exam again.
GMAT, MBA rankings, Test Prep
