I just Beat The GMAT!

(Update: I got my AWA score just now. It is 5.5. I am happy with this after having written 5 practice essays at home. Also I am pasting my recap here in the beginning so that others can read it directly).

Here is my recap.

I started my preparation on the 5th of December. I searched on the web and became a member of BeatTheGmatForum on 3rd Dec. I checked resources section ofthe forum to get an idea of what to buy. I didn't know how long I was going to take because I never even looked at GMAT until now. For example for the first few days, I was conciously deciding what the options A, B, C, D and E meant while answering DS questions. I started with absolute zero background.

Resources:
I first ordered the OG11th edition online. And I got the following although not all of them at the same time.

0) OG 11th edition.
1) OG verbal supplement (once I realized my weakness in SC).
2) Arco's GMAT.
3) Princeton review - Cracking the GMAT.
4) Kaplan Premier - with the CD
5) Kaplan 800 (I didn't find it very helpful).
6) Peterson's GMAT prep (online tests in the library).

My plan was simple. After few weeks into preparation, I will know when to register for the exam.

Princeton Review:
I started reading the math related topics in Princeton and began answering the examples the book gives. I spent around 3 hrs on the work days (I have a full time job) and 8-10 hrs on the weekends. I'm not a native english speaker and I'm very bad at SC. Anyway, after going through the book, I took the diagnostic test in Princeton; It doesn't have the Percentile rankings in it. I left out the 4 math problem bins and 3 verbal bins for later.

OG11:
I started the book with great hope, but the diagnostic section got me down to Earth quickly. I think I was nervous because I was answering the "real" GMAT questions. I did "average" on all the sections except SC. where I was low average. Well, shouldn't be a problem, I was just starting my preparation and diagnostics are meant to show your strong and weak areas. Math is my forte and SC my weakest link, so to speak.
After realizing my weakness in SC, I ordered the OG verbal supplement.

Kaplan premier:
is a nice book, with lots of pratice excersices and 4 CD tests. The excercises are simple but important in building your confidence. I read the introduction to all the questions but didn't do the excercices yet. By now the play time is over, and time to get serious. Until now I wasn't bothered about my timing. I needed some practice and I was concentrating more on getting the stuff right than rushing through it. All this changed after I took the GMATPrep1.

Arco: 6 tests.
I started working through the Tests directly anf for the first time I started timing myself. I think there were 6 tests
altogether in the book. There weren't any percentiles or scores for me to give here. I was running out of time, I could not get to
the last 5-6 questions in verbal.

OG11:
I started making columns on a sheet of white paper for each GMAT section.

For e.g. under CR:

20/4/2:30 which means I answered 20 questions in one sitting, 4 of which went wrong and I took an avg. of 2 minutes 30 seconds to answer each. I read about this method in BeaththeGmat website.

After I do this, I immediately to go back to the questions, and try answering the incorrect ones again, but this time I take as long as 5-8 minutes to answer each incorrect one.

Now I was ready to take GMATprep1.

GMATPrep1: (650)
I carefully analyzed what went wrong. Although a score of 650 is impressive there were many simple questions that I got wrong in math, and verbal I think I had 15 incorrect. I spent around 2 hrs analyzing my mistakes.

Analysis of GMATPrep1 (in the order of weakness, biggest weakness first):

1) I am very weak in SC. Not that I can't speak well or anything. I can write well and speak well, but the nuances of SC, I wasn't so sure about. I am not a native speaker of English.

2) I am blind. I can't read a question properly. If a question asked me to calculate the distance between Chicago and Denver, I was calculating the average temparature for Seattle. (Obviously, I am exaggerating, but you get the hang of it?).

3) Again, I am blind, the question asked me to compute something in inches and I calculated in feet and selected the wrong answer. BEWARE, if you see questions that ask you to compute something like .. "How many seconds did it take..? "How many feet is it from..?" etc. the answer options are likely to contain "correct" answers both for seconds and minutes, or inches and feet. Both answers will be in there. Just glance back to the question one more time before selecting your answer. This
plagued me for a long time in my preparation.

4) Another persistent problem with me in general is that I focus too much and forget the world around me. I just zone out of the reality and completely become one with the problem at hand, may it be fixing my bike, or looking at the clouds or solving a difficult problem.

OG Again:
Using the 20/x/mm:ss approach I mentioned above, I went on with all the questions. Mostly in the morning, just to wake me up from my slumber I start with Math PS and DS 20 each. Then analyze very carefully. Then in the evenings, if I have time, I do the same with RC or CR or SC.

It is Jan 4th and almost 4 weeks into my preparation and I felt pretty confident that I can take the exam in about 2 weeks. I checked the registration but unfortunately I didn't get any dates (exam dates duh!), until Jan 29th. But the danger was the lull which was going to come in. It is very dangerous not to excercise your brain and use up all your working material a week before exam.

You need to have new material left out to work your brain in the last few days before the exam. So I left GMATPrep2 and Kaplan CD exams for the last one week. It usually takes two days for me to get done with one exam, remember, I told you that I take hell lot of time, analyzing my mistakes. I will drive through the process by an example below.

I took a Kaplan test 3 weeks before hand. I got a score of 520. I was horrified. Then I went to the exam, dug out the math problems I could not answer. Some problems, were hard but then I remember I spent lot of time on a hard problem and attacked it completely.

I finished up all the Princeton's bins, I got 3 wrong in the hard bin section for Math and 4 wrong for the verbal. Finished up all the Kaplans CD tests. I didn't do the verbal in Kaplan CD after the first test, because it was confusing. The answer explanations weren't satisfactory. You need really good explanations about the incorrect answers. But Kaplan was mostly explaining why an option is right rather than arguing why an option isn't. I wasn't always convinced with its explanations either. That's also one of the reasons why I stopped working on 1000SC, because you can't lern from your mistakes, thre are no explanations. Kaplan Math is a different story, though. There are amazing problems in it.

Although I praise Kaplan's math, the quality of the problems is different. In OG, the problems were simple but there were more elegant, where as in Kaplan most of the times, they are plain number crunching problems.

AWA:
Wrote three Issue essays and three Analyis essays as practice and wrote them only once in GMATPrep1 and GMATPrep2.

My advice to you is this:
1) First few days\weeks depending on how much time you have be easy on yourself. No one ever does these weired problems in day to day life.
Don't time yourself, understand the crux of the problems and verbal.

2) Then start timing yourself, silly mistakes are okay in the beginning, by the end of your prep you should not be doing them.

3) Analyze the incorrect question\answers very carefully. Don't look at explanations unless you have thought a lot about the problem. Remember that when you spend a lot of time, trying to get the correct answer, getting the correct answer isn't as important as thinking in different directions. The more you get used to it, the better you will be at solving unfamiliar problems, because the practice of thinking in different directions accelerates your thinking. It's like a chess champ, who doesn't think deliberatly, but will zoom in on the right approach. You will develop this sense too, if you spend a lot of time analyzing your mistakes.

Few mistakes that I learned from:
If x / y > 1, is x > y ?
I got it wrong. I thought 3 / 2 > 1. But later in my analysis -3 / -2 > 1
and here x < y. Then, I spent lot of time on number line, working the different relations between x and y, and how they are correlated, how the values change between 0 and 1 and how the values change between 0 and -1 etc. Then I checked the value of sqrt(x), cuberoot(x)m square(x)and cube(x) for x between 0 and 1 and for negative numbers. In short I spent about 2-3 hrs working out various scenerios and then I was comfortable.

x(x-(2/3)) < 0 ?
How would you solve this? I took a long time to solve a problem based on this once. But then it my analysis, I stuck with this problem for about 2 hrs, taking various mock examples. And I realized that you just have to solve the inequation as if it is an equation x(x-(2/3)) = 0.

So x = 0 or x = 2/3. Now note that, this divides the number line into three ranges. -infinity to 0. 0 to 2/3 and 2/3 to +ve infinity. You just have to check three values of x in each of the ranges for you to know, which range is the right one. Be careful about the inequation is it "<" or "<="? In short, I worked on this example for a long time, understanding the various relationships, and I then I went one more step ahead, what about |x(x-(2/3)| < 0? And then I got headache working with modulus. But I spent couple of hours again on this, and then there was no inequation and modulus problem that I couldn't solve in under two minutes in GMATPrep or Kaplan.

For a negative number say x, you may find it useful to substisture x with -b where b > 0.

StandardDeviation:
In Princeton review, math hard bin, there was a problem on SD that I posted in the forum. I didn't get the question right, but I spent lot of time reading about standard deviation. In one of my posts, I have discussed this problem, which depends on the empirical rule about normal distribution. Stuart, countered that GMAT may not ask such problems, but I read a lot on SD at that time, and from that time onwards I welcomed questions in SD.

Kaplan:
There was a difficult geometry problem that I couldn't solve. In my analysis I spent about two hours on this one, the problem, if I remember correctly, gives you the two sides of a rectangle, and drops a line from one of the corners onto the diagonal perpendicularly and asks you to find the ratio of the areas of the two traingles. I am not sure about the exact questions, but it wsa more or less similar. I worked on that problem for two hours, working the various relationships, among different shapes in that diagram. And I know it in and out. It won't help you to read about this stuff from somewhere and remember it. It is more helpful if you try to work out the difficult problems on your own, because it makes you go through the process of thinking in different directions, which is worth it. Trust me on this. And later I realized that, this problem can be extrapolated to a traingle in a circle with its one side as its diameter. It is similar to the rectangle problem above. And I encountered a simpler version of this problem in OG DS. Can you guess how much I took to solve this one? Flat 2 seconds.

Summary:
1) Princeton review book - read the entire math, verbal sections, took the diagnostic.
2) OG 11 diagnostic.
3) Kaplan Premier - all excercices.
4) Arco book - 6 tests.
5) GMATPrep1 (650)
6) Kaplan CD Test1 (520)
7) All OG.
Kaplan CD Test2 (600)
9) Princeton bins.
9) Kaplan CD Test3 (only math - got 4 wrong) Last week of preparation.
10)Kaplan CD Test4 (only math - got 3 wrong) Last week of preparation.
11)GMATPrep2 (750) Last week of preparation (Got 8 SC wrong - I was shocked). I make another attempt at the wrong SCs, and I got 6 right. So little carelessness may be.
12)I ran the GMATPrep1 and GMATPrep2 multiple times, always used to get at least few new math questions and SCs.

Jan 28th:(d-1)
It snowed in Seattle and I was worried that the exam might be cancelled. So I called the number they give on the website. But no one responded.

Jan 29th (GMAT):
I slept well in the last three days, no more waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I woke up at 5:30, ran the GMATPrep2 again, spent 25 min on math and 25 min on verbal, just as a warm up and I was ready. Left home at 6:30am, reached the center by 7:30am. The center was nice and warm. I took the ear plugs and I was off to my cube.

Well I believe I wrote the essays well. I will post my score after it is available.

Math:
The questions flew by like a breeze. I was "one" with the questions. I didn't know that world outside existed, I wasn't even aware of myself. There were few tricky questions in math and I thought to myself "Ah! I caught you" and I answered it right. There was this one difficult geometry problem, I still remember, but I attempted it for about 3 minutes and moved on. (Now that I am free after the exam, I will solve it).

The last few questions weren't difficult, but lots of words. You have to read the whole question and that is when you tend to panic. But trust me, there won' be any tricky questions, all you have to do is stay calm, read the entire question, read the question twice may be and answer it. I observed that you tend to get wordy questions in the end. They are not difficult, but they tend to pressure us. But not me.

And the last question was based on a big prime number or something to that effect, but again "Ah! I caught you" feeling and I got it right (I must have).

Break:
I took the break, quick trip to restroom and then I came back to my locker and ate a banana.

Verbal:
It started nice and easy. But soon I realized it was going to be more difficult than I thought. I didn't know whether I was answering right
or wrong, unlike math where you would get instant feedback. So I was a split personality. One part of me was answering the questions, one part of me was watching me answer the questions, and another part of me was wondering whether I was anwering right or wrong. Somewhere along the line, I didn't even realize it, I spent lot of time, I got into that zooming in mode where I forget my world and lose track of time - I had 10 questions left and 13 minutes!

Anyway, I had four seconds for the last question and I didn't even read it. I just clicked option D.

And then the dreaded moment of score:
Do you want to cancel the score? Well, I thought for a moment and said "No"

The following appeared:
Quantitative: 51 99%
Verbal: 35 75%
Total: 720 95%

I was happy. I was disappointed with my verbal. OG verbal screwed me. The GMAT verbal was more difficult than the OG. And I didn't find any SCs similar in principle in the exam. In my OG, although I started with being poor on the SC, by the end of it, I got only 3-4 wrong in the last 40 verbal questions.

Ironically, if you are strong in an area OG can't screw you, if you are weak in an area, after practising OG you will be comfortable that you have done your homework, but then the real GMAT will screw you. That's my judgement about OG. Never trust it completely.

And then I went back to work, reminding myself to post my experiences on BeatTheGmat forum. I couldn't concentrate on my work for that day and then I went to the daycare to pick my 17 month old son and I forgot all the pain I had been through, all those difficult mornings waking up at 4:30 to prepare, all those 6-8 weeks of intensive work, I forgot everything for a moment and enjoyed my baby's sweet smile.

My future plans:
I am going to apply to the top 5 schools with the scores I have. I think the 3rd rounds have deadlines in about a month. If I don't get in now, I probably will take GMAT again but taking GMAT and appying to 6 schools costs me almost my one month's salary (after paying for my son's day care), so I may not write the exam again.

BeatTheGmatForum:
It is a great forum which offers a pivotal point for various resources for GMAT. By the way, giving back to the forum doesn't mean you come here and post your after experiences on GMAT, while that is certainly laudable, participating in the forums by arguing the answers helps not only others but also you. For e.g. when you do a mistake on the forum answering something wrong as I did at times, it has a greater affect on you than making the same mistake sitting your room alone and you are more likely not to do the same mistake again.

Further, if I get a good score, it is easy for me to come back and post my experiences on the forum, but if I get a low score, it might be hard. But please, do post your experiences irrespective of what your scores are. That would help others to avoid the same mistakes that you did. Human being's life isn't long enough to learn from one's own mistakes.

Just few weeks in the forum and many of the ids became house hold names - sankrut, magicalcook, gabriel, stuart, simplyjat, cris, desihokie, rajmira, camitava.

And if you got a low score on GMAT or if you didn't get a score that you wanted it's not the end of world. And for non-native speakers of English the verbal section may not be an accurate representation of your abilities. And if you are taking the exam for the second time, because you got a low score, my hats off to you. You have the courage to stand and fight again - for as Theodore Roosevelt once said "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

Calista.
PS: Please excuse any mistakes, spelling errors etc. I don't have the time now to proof-read and polish what I have written, for the deadlines for the 3rd rounds are in a month and I have to get started on my essays.

Congratulations!!!
I think it is a very good score. Was the verbal section very difficult?
Please post in your study plan and your scores in various online CAT.

Best of luck for your applications.

StarDust845 wrote:Horrible! Horrible! - just horrible verbal score.

My scaled scores are 51 Math and 35 in Verbal, which is 99% in math and 75% in verbal. I am so disappointed with my score.

Actually it is not as much with my score as my dreams of going to the top 5 schools.

Is there any hope of getting into top 5 schools, with a 75% verbal?

Calista. PS: I'll post about my preparations etc in few days from now, after I recover from this.

Although your verbal is not very impressive, your Quant is going to help you out. Not so many people get 51. If the rest of your application is solid, i think you stand a decent chance with 720.

If you got 51 in Quant, it means that is your strength and i think you can get 51 again. In verbal you can't do worse than 35. So one part of me says that you can take the exam again if you have plenty of time. Otherwise i would spend all my time and energy in preparing my application !

Calista, congrats lady! I would like to day something here -
It's true that I don't know much about the fact - "how do colleges interpret your score?" but I will say - this is a very good score at all. According to me, does it matter much if you get little less in Verbal section? But you have scored 720 (91 percentile) in GMAT. And this is the big thing one can achieve. Don't be some disappointed. I think you can get in top 5 B-School with this score. Because the positive points you are having is the total GMAT score - 720. Now look, if you can -
1. present a good profile before the colleges u r going to apply.
2. handle the interview tactfully and give some positive response towards the interviewers.
3. convince the interviewers (if they ask for little low score in verbal) that exam can not actually decide the verbal skill you are having - the reason of ur failure can be many different things.
I personally think if you can go ahead with these points, you need not to think about retaking the test again.
Now you have to decide-the ball is in your court now... But if I were at your position, I would like to o ahead with this. Because this is a not bad score at all - even 75% in verbal.

Congratulations Calista. I was waiting for you to post your score since yesterday, as I knew you are taking the test on Jan 29th. Great score. Post your experiences which will help people like me .

~R

Here is my recap.

I started my preparation on the 5th of December. I searched on the web and became a member of BeatTheGmatForum on 3rd Dec. I checked resources section ofthe forum to get an idea of what to buy. I didn't know how long I was going to take because I never even looked at GMAT until now. For example for the first few days, I was conciously deciding what the options A, B, C, D and E meant while answering DS questions. I started with absolute zero background.

Resources:
I first ordered the OG11th edition online. And I got the following although not all of them at the same time.

0) OG 11th edition.
1) OG verbal supplement (once I realized my weakness in SC).
2) Arco's GMAT.
3) Princeton review - Cracking the GMAT.
4) Kaplan Premier - with the CD
5) Kaplan 800 (I didn't find it very helpful).
6) Peterson's GMAT prep (online tests in the library).

My plan was simple. After few weeks into preparation, I will know when to register for the exam.

Princeton Review:
I started reading the math related topics in Princeton and began answering the examples the book gives. I spent around 3 hrs on the work days (I have a full time job) and 8-10 hrs on the weekends. I'm not a native english speaker and I'm very bad at SC. Anyway, after going through the book, I took the diagnostic test in Princeton; It doesn't have the Percentile rankings in it. I left out the 4 math problem bins and 3 verbal bins for later.

OG11:
I started the book with great hope, but the diagnostic section got me down to Earth quickly. I think I was nervous because I was answering the "real" GMAT questions. I did "average" on all the sections except SC. where I was low average. Well, shouldn't be a problem, I was just starting my preparation and diagnostics are meant to show your strong and weak areas. Math is my forte and SC my weakest link, so to speak.
After realizing my weakness in SC, I ordered the OG verbal supplement.

Kaplan premier:
is a nice book, with lots of pratice excersices and 4 CD tests. The excercises are simple but important in building your confidence. I read the introduction to all the questions but didn't do the excercices yet. By now the play time is over, and time to get serious. Until now I wasn't bothered about my timing. I needed some practice and I was concentrating more on getting the stuff right than rushing through it. All this changed after I took the GMATPrep1.

Arco: 6 tests.
I started working through the Tests directly anf for the first time I started timing myself. I think there were 6 tests
altogether in the book. There weren't any percentiles or scores for me to give here. I was running out of time, I could not get to
the last 5-6 questions in verbal.

OG11:
I started making columns on a sheet of white paper for each GMAT section.

For e.g. under CR:

20/4/2:30 which means I answered 20 questions in one sitting, 4 of which went wrong and I took an avg. of 2 minutes 30 seconds to answer each. I read about this method in BeaththeGmat website.

After I do this, I immediately to go back to the questions, and try answering the incorrect ones again, but this time I take as long as 5-8 minutes to answer each incorrect one.

Now I was ready to take GMATprep1.

GMATPrep1: (650)
I carefully analyzed what went wrong. Although a score of 650 is impressive there were many simple questions that I got wrong in math, and verbal I think I had 15 incorrect. I spent around 2 hrs analyzing my mistakes.

Analysis of GMATPrep1 (in the order of weakness, biggest weakness first):

1) I am very weak in SC. Not that I can't speak well or anything. I can write well and speak well, but the nuances of SC, I wasn't so sure about. I am not a native speaker of English.

2) I am blind. I can't read a question properly. If a question asked me to calculate the distance between Chicago and Denver, I was calculating the average temparature for Seattle. (Obviously, I am exaggerating, but you get the hang of it?).

3) Again, I am blind, the question asked me to compute something in inches and I calculated in feet and selected the wrong answer. BEWARE, if you see questions that ask you to compute something like .. "How many seconds did it take..? "How many feet is it from..?" etc. the answer options are likely to contain "correct" answers both for seconds and minutes, or inches and feet. Both answers will be in there. Just glance back to the question one more time before selecting your answer. This
plagued me for a long time in my preparation.

4) Another persistent problem with me in general is that I focus too much and forget the world around me. I just zone out of the reality and completely become one with the problem at hand, may it be fixing my bike, or looking at the clouds or solving a difficult problem.

OG Again:
Using the 20/x/mm:ss approach I mentioned above, I went on with all the questions. Mostly in the morning, just to wake me up from my slumber I start with Math PS and DS 20 each. Then analyze very carefully. Then in the evenings, if I have time, I do the same with RC or CR or SC.

It is Jan 4th and almost 4 weeks into my preparation and I felt pretty confident that I can take the exam in about 2 weeks. I checked the registration but unfortunately I didn't get any dates (exam dates duh!), until Jan 29th. But the danger was the lull which was going to come in. It is very dangerous not to excercise your brain and use up all your working material a week before exam.

You need to have new material left out to work your brain in the last few days before the exam. So I left GMATPrep2 and Kaplan CD exams for the last one week. It usually takes two days for me to get done with one exam, remember, I told you that I take hell lot of time, analyzing my mistakes. I will drive through the process by an example below.

I took a Kaplan test 3 weeks before hand. I got a score of 520. I was horrified. Then I went to the exam, dug out the math problems I could not answer. Some problems, were hard but then I remember I spent lot of time on a hard problem and attacked it completely.

I finished up all the Princeton's bins, I got 3 wrong in the hard bin section for Math and 4 wrong for the verbal. Finished up all the Kaplans CD tests. I didn't do the verbal in Kaplan CD after the first test, because it was confusing. The answer explanations weren't satisfactory. You need really good explanations about the incorrect answers. But Kaplan was mostly explaining why an option is right rather than arguing why an option isn't. I wasn't always convinced with its explanations either. That's also one of the reasons why I stopped working on 1000SC, because you can't lern from your mistakes, thre are no explanations. Kaplan Math is a different story, though. There are amazing problems in it.

Although I praise Kaplan's math, the quality of the problems is different. In OG, the problems were simple but there were more elegant, where as in Kaplan most of the times, they are plain number crunching problems.

AWA:
Wrote three Issue essays and three Analyis essays as practice and wrote them only once in GMATPrep1 and GMATPrep2.

My advice to you is this:
1) First few days\weeks depending on how much time you have be easy on yourself. No one ever does these weired problems in day to day life.
Don't time yourself, understand the crux of the problems and verbal.

2) Then start timing yourself, silly mistakes are okay in the beginning, by the end of your prep you should not be doing them.

3) Analyze the incorrect question\answers very carefully. Don't look at explanations unless you have thought a lot about the problem. Remember that when you spend a lot of time, trying to get the correct answer, getting the correct answer isn't as important as thinking in different directions. The more you get used to it, the better you will be at solving unfamiliar problems, because the practice of thinking in different directions accelerates your thinking. It's like a chess champ, who doesn't think deliberatly, but will zoom in on the right approach. You will develop this sense too, if you spend a lot of time analyzing your mistakes.

Few mistakes that I learned from:
If x / y > 1, is x > y ?
I got it wrong. I thought 3 / 2 > 1. But later in my analysis -3 / -2 > 1
and here x < y. Then, I spent lot of time on number line, working the different relations between x and y, and how they are correlated, how the values change between 0 and 1 and how the values change between 0 and -1 etc. Then I checked the value of sqrt(x), cuberoot(x)m square(x)and cube(x) for x between 0 and 1 and for negative numbers. In short I spent about 2-3 hrs working out various scenerios and then I was comfortable.

x(x-(2/3)) < 0 ?
How would you solve this? I took a long time to solve a problem based on this once. But then it my analysis, I stuck with this problem for about 2 hrs, taking various mock examples. And I realized that you just have to solve the inequation as if it is an equation x(x-(2/3)) = 0.

So x = 0 or x = 2/3. Now note that, this divides the number line into three ranges. -infinity to 0. 0 to 2/3 and 2/3 to +ve infinity. You just have to check three values of x in each of the ranges for you to know, which range is the right one. Be careful about the inequation is it "<" or "<="? In short, I worked on this example for a long time, understanding the various relationships, and I then I went one more step ahead, what about |x(x-(2/3)| < 0? And then I got headache working with modulus. But I spent couple of hours again on this, and then there was no inequation and modulus problem that I couldn't solve in under two minutes in GMATPrep or Kaplan.

For a negative number say x, you may find it useful to substisture x with -b where b > 0.

StandardDeviation:
In Princeton review, math hard bin, there was a problem on SD that I posted in the forum. I didn't get the question right, but I spent lot of time reading about standard deviation. In one of my posts, I have discussed this problem, which depends on the empirical rule about normal distribution. Stuart, countered that GMAT may not ask such problems, but I read a lot on SD at that time, and from that time onwards I welcomed questions in SD.

Kaplan:
There was a difficult geometry problem that I couldn't solve. In my analysis I spent about two hours on this one, the problem, if I remember correctly, gives you the two sides of a rectangle, and drops a line from one of the corners onto the diagonal perpendicularly and asks you to find the ratio of the areas of the two traingles. I am not sure about the exact questions, but it wsa more or less similar. I worked on that problem for two hours, working the various relationships, among different shapes in that diagram. And I know it in and out. It won't help you to read about this stuff from somewhere and remember it. It is more helpful if you try to work out the difficult problems on your own, because it makes you go through the process of thinking in different directions, which is worth it. Trust me on this. And later I realized that, this problem can be extrapolated to a traingle in a circle with its one side as its diameter. It is similar to the rectangle problem above. And I encountered a simpler version of this problem in OG DS. Can you guess how much I took to solve this one? Flat 2 seconds.

Summary:
1) Princeton review book - read the entire math, verbal sections, took the diagnostic.
2) OG 11 diagnostic.
3) Kaplan Premier - all excercices.
4) Arco book - 6 tests.
5) GMATPrep1 (650)
6) Kaplan CD Test1 (520)
7) All OG.
8) Kaplan CD Test2 (600)
9) Princeton bins.
9) Kaplan CD Test3 (only math - got 4 wrong) Last week of preparation.
10)Kaplan CD Test4 (only math - got 3 wrong) Last week of preparation.
11)GMATPrep2 (750) Last week of preparation (Got 8 SC wrong - I was shocked). I make another attempt at the wrong SCs, and I got 6 right. So little carelessness may be.
12)I ran the GMATPrep1 and GMATPrep2 multiple times, always used to get at least few new math questions and SCs.

Jan 28th:(d-1)
It snowed in Seattle and I was worried that the exam might be cancelled. So I called the number they give on the website. But no one responded.

Jan 29th (GMAT):
I slept well in the last three days, no more waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I woke up at 5:30, ran the GMATPrep2 again, spent 25 min on math and 25 min on verbal, just as a warm up and I was ready. Left home at 6:30am, reached the center by 7:30am. The center was nice and warm. I took the ear plugs and I was off to my cube.

Well I believe I wrote the essays well. I will post my score after it is available.

Math:
The questions flew by like a breeze. I was "one" with the questions. I didn't know that world outside existed, I wasn't even aware of myself. There were few tricky questions in math and I thought to myself "Ah! I caught you" and I answered it right. There was this one difficult geometry problem, I still remember, but I attempted it for about 3 minutes and moved on. (Now that I am free after the exam, I will solve it).

The last few questions weren't difficult, but lots of words. You have to read the whole question and that is when you tend to panic. But trust me, there won' be any tricky questions, all you have to do is stay calm, read the entire question, read the question twice may be and answer it. I observed that you tend to get wordy questions in the end. They are not difficult, but they tend to pressure us. But not me.

And the last question was based on a big prime number or something to that effect, but again "Ah! I caught you" feeling and I got it right (I must have).

Break:
I took the break, quick trip to restroom and then I came back to my locker and ate a banana.

Verbal:
It started nice and easy. But soon I realized it was going to be more difficult than I thought. I didn't know whether I was answering right
or wrong, unlike math where you would get instant feedback. So I was a split personality. One part of me was answering the questions, one part of me was watching me answer the questions, and another part of me was wondering whether I was anwering right or wrong. Somewhere along the line, I didn't even realize it, I spent lot of time, I got into that zooming in mode where I forget my world and lose track of time - I had 10 questions left and 13 minutes!

Anyway, I had four seconds for the last question and I didn't even read it. I just clicked option D.

And then the dreaded moment of score:
Do you want to cancel the score? Well, I thought for a moment and said "No"

The following appeared:
Quantitative: 51 99%
Verbal: 35 75%
Total: 720 95%

I was happy. I was disappointed with my verbal. OG verbal screwed me. The GMAT verbal was more difficult than the OG. And I didn't find any SCs similar in principle in the exam. In my OG, although I started with being poor on the SC, by the end of it, I got only 3-4 wrong in the last 40 verbal questions.

Ironically, if you are strong in an area OG can't screw you, if you are weak in an area, after practising OG you will be comfortable that you have done your homework, but then the real GMAT will screw you. That's my judgement about OG. Never trust it completely.

And then I went back to work, reminding myself to post my experiences on BeatTheGmat forum. I couldn't concentrate on my work for that day and then I went to the daycare to pick my 17 month old son and I forgot all the pain I had been through, all those difficult mornings waking up at 4:30 to prepare, all those 6-8 weeks of intensive work, I forgot everything for a moment and enjoyed my baby's sweet smile.

My future plans:
I am going to apply to the top 5 schools with the scores I have. I think the 3rd rounds have deadlines in about a month. If I don't get in now, I probably will take GMAT again but taking GMAT and appying to 6 schools costs me almost my one month's salary (after paying for my son's day care), so I may not write the exam again.

BeatTheGmatForum:
It is a great forum which offers a pivotal point for various resources for GMAT. By the way, giving back to the forum doesn't mean you come here and post your after experiences on GMAT, while that is certainly laudable, participating in the forums by arguing the answers helps not only others but also you. For e.g. when you do a mistake on the forum answering something wrong as I did at times, it has a greater affect on you than making the same mistake sitting your room alone and you are more likely not to do the same mistake again.

Further, if I get a good score, it is easy for me to come back and post my experiences on the forum, but if I get a low score, it might be hard. But please, do post your experiences irrespective of what your scores are. That would help others to avoid the same mistakes that you did. Human being's life isn't long enough to learn from one's own mistakes.

Just few weeks in the forum and many of the ids became house hold names - sankrut, magicalcook, gabriel, stuart, simplyjat, cris, desihokie, rajmira, camitava.

And if you got a low score on GMAT or if you didn't get a score that you wanted it's not the end of world. And for non-native speakers of English the verbal section may not be an accurate representation of your abilities. And if you are taking the exam for the second time, because you got a low score, my hats off to you. You have the courage to stand and fight again - for as Theodore Roosevelt once said "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

Calista.
PS: Please excuse any mistakes, spelling errors etc. I don't have the time now to proof-read and polish what I have written, for the deadlines for the 3rd rounds are in a month and I have to get started on my essays.

Hmm .. I don't know how I missed out on this thread. I know it is kind of late but congratulations on an excellent score (Yes, 720 is still considered to be a very good score).

Best of luck for the apps .. I sincerely hope that you get into a school of your choice.

Regards

PS:- This was one of the best debriefs I have read.

Impressive and inspiring debrief Calista. Good luck with your admission and as usual pot your experiences

Just got my AWA score of 5.5, I am happy with this score after having written 5 practice essays at home.