A) 2.721π inches
B) 2.722π inches
C) 2.723π inches
D) 2.724π inches
E) 2.725π inches
After five grueling months training myself to answer useless GMAT questions like this, I have managed to condense all of my math and verbal prowess into one simple, yet profound conclusion about the test: the GMAT is a four-letter word.
Before getting into the details, it's important to understand the format of the test. The GMAT consists of two 30-minutes essays, followed by a 75 minutes section with 37 multiple-choice math problems, then another 75 minute section with 41 verbal questions, also multiple-choice. The test is administered on a computer, and it's a computer adaptive test (CAT), which means that every time you answer a question correctly, the next question gets more challenging, and every time you miss a question, the next one gets easier. The harder questions are worth more points, so getting the early questions right is critical to earning a high score.
The math and verbal sections count toward the overall score, which ranges from 200 (the Paris Hilton end of the spectrum) to 800 (the Einstein end). The essays are essentially useless. They are scored from 0 (literally not typing a single word) to 6 (Bill Shakespeare Jr.), and business schools don't really care about the score unless it's so low as to give them cause to seriously question your writing abilities. For that reason, I consider the essays similar to playing the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA--you have nothing to gain from doing well, only the opportunity for extreme embarrassment if you somehow manage to screw things up. Now, on to my story...I apologize in advance for the record-breaking length of this blog post, but I have little apathy when it comes to my passionate hatred of the GMAT.
My long, excruciating journey began nearly six months ago. This past January, I decided that it was time to take a brief recess from my five years of procrastination and finally prepare take the GMAT, the first step toward an eventual return to business school. Test scores are valid for five years, so successful completion of the test could kick-start another five blissful years avoiding higher education.
My first step was to sign up for a Princeton Review prep course that met once a week for six weeks. This seemed simple enough--the class even met downstairs in the office at work. But simplicity was surprisingly elusive. Day after day went by, and I never heard a thing about the class. Finally, after a coworker who had also signed up for the class forwarded me an email from Princeton Review, I discovered that the woman on the phone had misspelled my email address when I signed up.
Even after straightening out this little debacle, Princeton Review continued to underwhelm. As of 3PM on the day of the first class, all of us students were still lacking a critical piece of information: the specific location of our class. Many phone calls and emails later, we received a message that the class was postponed and would start the following week. A brilliant lapse in planning by the fine folks at the Princeton Review office.
When the Princeton Review finally got its act together and the real day of that first class finally arrived, things didn't get any better. Everyone else in the class walked in with a pair of textbooks that they had received in the mail...textbooks that I had never received and was not aware that I should be looking for. Apparently Princeton Review forgot to send those my way, so I had to sit unusually close to another guy in the class and look over his shoulder for three hours. And those three hours were about as comfortable as my last visit to the Grand Canyon.
Things were off to a rough start, and I had yet to do anything even remotely related to learning the material for the test. Secretly, I'd hoped that the test would be fairly easy for me. I felt justified in my optimism--once upon a time, I was a pretty solid student, and I hadn't been out of school that long...right? But those dreams were immediately crushed during my first practice exam, the first of what would become many showdowns with the GMAT. Finishing a difficult, time-consuming test with 20% of your time remaining means one of two things: you knew the material really, really well, or you were guessing more than Sarah Palin on a history exam. In my case, it was the latter.
During that first class it became even more painfully obvious that I had forgotten just about everything I ever knew about math. When the instructor started talking about pie, I quickly scanned the room in search of a pastry before remembering that there's awesome dessert pie, and then there's disappointing math pi. It was one of my saddest moments of my GMAT experience--in the heyday of my mathematical prime, I could recite pi to the sixteenth digit, and here I was years later looking around the room for dessert.
Then, later in that same class the teacher asked me to read one of the math sections out loud for the group. For some reason, one of the problems had an exclamation point next to a number--when I saw "7!" I thought the textbook wanted me to yell "seven!!" really loud. Weeks later, I learned that this was actually a factorial symbol that had some kind of mathematical relevance.
Slowly but surely, after sitting through a few of the classes I felt like I was picking up some great tips and really starting to understand the material. I couldn't wait to see my score shoot through the roof on the second practice test. After reviewing the results of my first exam, the teacher had commented that something seemed a little "off" about my pacing...apparently she didn't think it was a good sign that I had spent less than 15 seconds on a lot of the questions. So this time around, I assured myself that I would take my time and put my full effort behind every single question.
And take my time is exactly what I did...but I overcompensated. As the final seconds ticked away on the math section, I had seven of the thirty-seven questions remaining. Without reading a single word, I "dialed down the center" and guessed "C" on all seven questions. When the test was over, I was more disappointed than an Enron shareholder at the end of 2001. My score had barely budged, and I was shocked when I noticed that of those final seven math problems, not a single one had "C" for a correct answer. What were the odds of that?! (Though I ask that purely as a rhetorical question, it's not unlike an actual GMAT probability problem...) And, as an embarrassing side note, one of my essays got scored a 2, which on the 0 to 6 scale essentially means that I could have fallen asleep on the keyboard, submitted my work, and gotten the same score.
Despite this tremendous disappointment, I continued studying nonstop over the coming weeks, a task that consumed virtually every moment of free time. Coworkers who had taken the exam told me that the weeks leading up the test were pure torture, citing serious interruptions in their social lives. Oddly enough, I wasn't able to detect any noticeable change in my level of social activity, but spending all my time outside of work cramming my mind with useless information was nevertheless a soul-crushing undertaking.
I scheduled my grand showdown with the exam for morning of April 4th, one week after the last scheduled Princeton Review class...or so I thought. Then, on a snowy day in early March, Princeton Review made the inexplicable decision to postpone the class. Normally, this would seem like the logical thing to with poor road conditions, but it made less sense when all of the students work in the same building where the class meets. The makeup date for that snowed-out class? The evening of April 4th! It looked like I wasn't going to get much use out of class number six.
Walking into the testing room the on the morning of the 4th, I had my minimum score in mind--if I earned a score equal to or greater than that number, I would walk out of there, never look back, and immediately dump all the of useless information from my mind. The one nice thing about the GMAT is that you can see your test results within minutes of answering the final question. The three seconds between clicking "Accept Score" and seeing the number pop up on the computer screen feel like an eternity. I think I actually closed my eyes when I clicked it...
When I opened them, I was horrified. The one thing that I didn't want to have happen...happened. In a perfect world, I would get a great score, walk out, and never look back on the awful two months I'd spent preparing for the test. The second best scenario my mind, strangely enough, would be to completely bomb the test and know definitively that I should retake it. Neither of those scenarios played out for me. I missed my minimum goal by 20 points...not a catastrophic miss, but more concerning was my mediocre percentile on the math section, the area that business schools tend to focus on the most. I can thank the large number of foreigners who take the test for that sad result. Apparently what God shortchanged the Asians in driving abilities, he more than made up for with math skills.
After a few days of internal struggle, which I spent trying to find any possible reason why it made sense to not retake the test, I made up my mind: the rematch was on. The verbal section was no problem for me, so I ordered a set of detailed math study guides, which set me back over $100. Another $250 later, I had officially scheduled showdown #2 with the GMAT, this time on June 30th. It was on...again.
I took a week off after the test, then dove right back into studying. Weekdays after work: studying. Weekends: studying. Sitting on the toilet: studying. In the shower: studying. Slow days at work: sleeping under my desk (all that studying can wear a person out...) As the hours and days passed in a math-induced haze, I found it difficult to stay motivated. The weather was finally warming up, but I spent every spare minute indoors, learning about perfect squares, prime factorization, scientific notation, rhombuses, recursive formulas, and all kinds of stuff that I couldn't care less about.
I started to question the point of all this GMAT stuff--I've been working in the business world for five years, and not once have I encountered a single GMAT-style math problem. I'm still waiting for the day when a vice president of finance says to me, "This is brilliant financial forecast. Now, can you express next year's net sales as a product of distinct prime numbers? And I'm also going to need you to tell me where our cost of goods sold and admin expenses intersect on the coordinate plane when their square roots are divided by last year's advertising budget."
Spending beautiful summer days indoors, learning about properties of numbers felt even worse knowing that the information I was learning had nothing to do with business school or real-life work in the business world. After all, the only reason I had to re-learn this stuff in the first place was because I didn't use it a single time since after taking my last final 8th grade math test. The purpose and relevance of the questions on the GMAT make about as much sense as this sign:
But I forged ahead. April passed...and May passed. By June, I had a growing stack of used-up notebooks piling up next to my desk, filled with so much scribbled nonsense that if someone broke into my apartment and looked through my work, they'd surely think I was headed down a path to insanity...or perhaps that I had already arrived at my destination.
Every Friday afternoon was a four-hour practice exam. Every weekend was a pair of full eight-hour days learning about math. As of the morning of June 30th, I had taken the test a total of nineteen times--one real exam on April 4th and eighteen practice tests, each at four hours a pop. I'd had enough...twentieth time's a charm, right? As I drove to the testing center, I wanted nothing more than to kick the test in the crotch, drive a stake through its heart, burn it, and urinate all over it's ashes. Not that I was angry.
Four hours later, I once again faced my moment of truth. I clicked the "Accept Scores" button and waited for the verdict. My score had improved...by 20 points. I had achieved my original bare minimum acceptable score. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. The nightmare was over, but after three lost months of nonstop studying, I would have liked to clear the hurdle with a little more margin for error. And the most recent of those eighteen practice exams included some downright incredible scores. I may have landed that metaphorical kick to the groin, but there was certainly no staking, burning, or urinating as I'd hoped for.
When I returned home after the test, I piled up all the study materials I'd accumulated over the previous five months and realized that, when I stacked them up, my study guides and notebooks rivaled the height of one of my shoes. And I've got some good size feet:
While staring at the grotesque tower of mathematical agony, I reflected on the time and money that went into this mess. The financial toll alone exceeds the GDP of Burkina Faso--between the prep class, two registration fees, and study guides, I was in more than $1,600...though, fortunately for me, work paid for some of those costs. And the sheer time investment was staggering...the practice tests alone accounted for 80 hours, and I can't even begin to count how many hours were spent studying between February and July...and not just because I immediately descended back into mathematical ignorance on the afternoon of June 30th. Worst of all was the half of a summer I lost preparing for the test...
With a month of study-free nights and weekends behind me, any disappointment I initially had about my final score is gone, and I've come to terms with my results. I pushed myself to the limit and was able to (barely) meet my goal of slightly-better-than-mediocre. Now, I feel reasonably confident that I can get rejected from the country's top business schools based solely on my professional incompetence, inability to work with others, and lack of meaningful accomplishments in the workplace, not my GMAT score. And in the end, I suppose that's the best anyone can ask for when it comes to the GMAT.
