levocap wrote:It a great score!
The question is, why did you get only 4 hrs of sleep?
Please debrief test day if possible.
The day before the GMAT I spent a lot of time studying throughout the day. I tried to go to sleep at 11:30pm the night before, and I couldn't fall asleep till 5:00am. I am not sure why, I was definitely tired. If I was to guess, it was because I spent so much time studying the day before instead of relaxing.
Test day, I woke up at 9am. I ate a light breakfast. Then I spent sometime in the morning looking at some idioms and 10 verbal and quan questions to help me warm up. I left and got to the test center about 30 minutes before my appointment time. During the drive there, I felt the onset of a headache from the lack of sleep, so I bought some Diet Coke to help me power through it. I was taking the damn exam no matter how bad it got.
Intro: On the introductory screens where you pick out 5 colleges to send your scores to, I really did not want to pick any, but I did anyways.
AWA: I started the AWAs. I did not feel good about the first AWA since I did not have enough time to write up a complete conclusion. The second AWA went a bit smoother. I took the break to grab a banana and go to bathroom and freshen up.
Quant: The first question was unbelievably easy and took 20 seconds. The second question was also fairly straightforward, but I ended up spending 2.5 mins on it just to make sure I was not missing some obvious trick. From that point, I basically flew through Quant for the first 23 or 24 questions. I felt nervous since I didn't find the questions quite as difficult as anticipated and was worried I was doing something wrong. At the 37 min mark, I hit a combination question, and I ended up spending entirely too much time doing it. There were a couple DSs in the end which took a bit of time. I ended up having to guess on the final question. I was not too thrilled with the way I ended Quant. However, during my break I didn't bother thinking about it, since I couldn't really do anything at that point. I just went to the bathroom and drank some water.
Verbal: My headache was subsiding a bit by this point (I think the caffeine was kicking in). I started the section with some SCs. I spent entirely too long on the second one. I had 3 short passages and one long one for RC. I never got any boldface questions on CR... so I was fairly certain I was doing badly. And as evident from my score I was. I don't think the verbal was anymore difficult than the GMATPrep. In fact some of the questions looked fairly similar. I am sure I made some subtle mistakes in CRs and SCs since my score was so low.
In conclusion, I would say the real GMAT is very similar to the GMATPrep exams. People have reported on here that the quant is more difficult than the GMAT prep, I felt the quant was pretty similar. The GMAT quant is different than Manhattan. Manhattan question test your substantive knowledge on combining concepts. And the questions are fairly heavy on calculation. On the real GMAT, the quant was mostly tricky and not as heavy on calculation.
I am going to spend the next 10 days deciding whether I want to take the exam again. I was routinely scoring 39 to 43 on the practice exams for verbal, so I am really on the fence about it.
