What an experience, but all's well that ends well!

eltonstout

I just finished the GMAT about two hours ago, and it feels great to be done!
A little background:
1 year, 9 months work experience, graduated in 2004 from a top liberal arts school.
I work in Mexico in a factory in general management, and am fluent in Spanish.
Math is my weak point; verbal always comes easy to me.

I arrived at the test center 45 minutes early, but realized as I was parking that I had forgotten my passport at home, which I needed since I'm in a foreign country. My heart started pounding right there, because it's about 20 minutes each way to my house form the test site, it was raining, and I still had to find parking. I was terrified that all my studying and the $250 fee would be for nothing just because I forgot my passport. I rushed home, got the passport, rushed back, and ran 6 blocks to the test center, making my 9:00 appointment at 9:05. They let me in, and I got started.

Luckily, the extreme stress I felt for the hour before faded away as soon as I started the exam. It came back a little, though, as I had a lot of trouble on the math section. I really thought I was going to bomb the exam, like down in the 580 to 610 range. Even the verbal was more difficult than what I'm used to. I had studied a lot of specific math problems I'm weak in during the days before the test, and almost none of them came up on the real exam! The format and questions were similar to the practice tests I had taken, but many strategies I had worked on weren't practical (or I just forgot to use them) during the test.

My heart stopped for about three beats as the computer calculated the score: 41 in Verbal and Quant, 680 overall. The overall percentile was 89, and my quant percentile was pretty low. I don't have the sheet in front of me right now. Luckily my verbal held me up.

I was hoping for a high 600's score, and while the GMAT will probably be the weakest area of my application, I don't think it will hurt me at all. I had never scored that high on a practice test, so that was a pleasant surprise. I just wonder if I had had a few more quant questions like the ones I studied for the last few days if I could have broken 700. Oh well, I'm just happy to be done!

Moral of the story--go in prepared! Get your passport out the night before if you're in another country, and study hard!

beatthegmat · Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 3:42 pm Post subject:

Congrats, eltonstout!

Glad to hear that your passport problem didn't faze your concentration during the test. Best of luck to you in your b-school apps!