I just Beat The GMAT!

Gave GMAT yesterday and scored 730.

This is my first post at BTG. I was a passive member, working up and looking on this site for explanations whenever I got stuck. Thanks to everyone at BTG.

Background info abt me: I am an IT engineer from India. I started preparing for the exam around February, but was unable to seriously prepare and gain any pace for 2-3 months mainly because of work pressure and lack of seroiusness. To add to the work pressure IPL and T20 world cup were the major distractions.

Materials used during the prep:
OG 11
OG 12
OG Verbal Review
Cracking the GMAT- Princeton (didn't find it much useful)
Princeton Verbal Workbook
Manhattan GMAT SC
Kaplan 800

Apart from these materials, I used to browse through beatthegmat and manhattangmat. manahattangmat's forum has detailed explanation for lot of problems by Stacey and Ron.

Tests I gave
GMAT prep1(right at the start without any prep) - 690
3 Manhattan tests: ranged between 630-680 don't remember the exact scores
Powerprep1 - 710
Powerprep2 - 700
GMAT prep2 - 730
GMAT prep1 (retake) - 660 (screwed up verbal big time..got a couple of phone calls in the middle of the test)
On an average, I ranged 48-51 on quants in the practice tests and 28-40 on the verbal

Exam experience:
Quant was pretty straight forward. Didn't face any difficulty at all and ended up the section 15 mins before time. I found the difficulty level to be a little more than the GMAT prep tests, but definitely less than the Manhattan ones. I used to end up Quant around 20-30 mins before time in GMAT prep and power prep tests.

I was really surprised at the verbal score as, I was not expecting a good score there. After a few decent SC and CR questions, I got two tough RCs and couldn't even make a work out out of the 2nd one. That scared the hell out of me. And then the level of questions went down and I didn't face much trouble. CRs were all straight forward, and SCs were of medium difficulty level.

Man, Congrats!! You are rocking!!

You definitely do rock!