Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

Just took the GMAT last Saturday and scored 780 (50 Q, 47 V). I was happily surprised by the results! Thanks to everyone for participating in this forum! It was very helpful to be able to read about the experiences and advice of others and the Problem Solving and DS boards were great places to go for some really tough questions. A few thoughts on my prep and testing experience in case anyone is interested...

Preparation: Used Princeton Review Cracking the GMAT 2007, Kaplan 2006, and the OG 11. PR was a good intro to the test format and strategies, while, as others have noted, Kaplan is probably a bit tougher than the actual test, especially in Quant. I took several practice exams, and since I was always curious as to how certain practice scores translated to the real exam, here are my practice results

GMAT Prep (from MBA.com): 750, 770
Princeton Review Online CATs: 720, 710, 790, 730
Kaplan CD-ROM CATs: 650, 710, 730

Testing Experience: As others have pointed out, it is nice to have the AWA first as a chance to settle down a bit and get your brain working. I didn't prepare much for this section, and lost track of time a bit at the end. My concluding paragraphs ended up being cut short as I raced to beat the clock. My score on this was a 5.5.

In the Quant section I was pleasantly surprised by the relative ease of the questions compared to some I had been working in my later rounds of studying. I would advise against trying to gauge your test performance by how hard you think the questions are as you go along. The fourth or fifth question I saw was by far the toughest, and most of the others along the way seemed fairly easy, but I still ended up with a good score.

Verbal questions on the actual GMAT were much better written than any of the practice material I saw. I had struggled with RC during preparation, but the GMAT RC passages were much more logical, well-written and easier to follow than were any of the Kaplan or PR ones. In practice, particularly on RC, I would often find myself thinking there were 2 possible answers, but never ran into this on the GMAT.

Overall, I had a good testing experience. I had heard of people complaining about the booklet and marker they give you for scratch paper, but I had no problems with this and would not recommend shelling out 20 bucks to buy one from a website in order to practice.

Anyhow, thanks again to everyone for participating in the forum and to those who run the site. It's a great resource for all aspects of GMAT prep!