760 (99th percentile)!

Hey guys!

Just wanted to offer up a word of encouragement: been abroad on volunteer work for the past six months and tried to use my "spare time" to study for the GMAT but ended up traveling Africa more than hitting the books...went through the Kaplan book and OG 11th edition over the span of 2-3 months, along with taking one of the GMATPrep tests (760).

In early July, decided to buckle down and just take a week instead to cram for the test and take it. I know that this goes against all traditional exam preparation tips and strategies but decided that prolonging this thing wouldn't necessarily help me study any better or faster -- I'm someone who's motivated by urgency and the "holy crap I'm so screwed tomorrow" instinct.

Booked an appointment on Saturday, July 25th at 8:00 AM. Came back from Africa 10 days prior and spent 48 hours recovering from jetlag, then hit the ground running on the Saturday before the exam.

* Finished OG practice problems
* Hit the OG Quant Review and Verbal Review (finished Quant Review on Sunday and Monday and Verbal Review on Monday and Tuesday)
* Reviewed Kaplan 800 book on Wednesday and Thursday
* Had 5 Princeton Review CATs at my disposal, and took them in the following order:
* CAT 1 on Monday morning: 680
* CAT 2 on Tuesday morning: 690
* CAT 3 on Wednesday morning: 730
* CAT 4 on Thursday morning: 710
* CAT 5 on Thursday evening: 680
* Took the second GMATPrep test on Friday morning: 780 (as suggested by many others, PR and Kaplan seem to underscore their practice tests, meaning they grade tougher than the actual GMAT, probably to scare you into signing up for the products or guaranteeing their "improved score," uh, guarantee)

Was still feeling sluggish on some of the quant problems (I thought the GMATPrep questions were significantly tougher and more time consuming than the PR and even OG questions, even though OG and GMATPrep are supposed to come from the same question bank) and sentence correction questions (some of the idioms were killing me), but I had locked down my test date and there was no turning back lest I lose an additional $250 from the wallet!

Had trouble sleeping on Friday night (anxiety most likely) but went in on Saturday guns a-blazing. AWA prompts were decent enough, but not having practiced enough on this section, I just spewed out whatever thoughts I could in a semi-coherent fashion (though being an English major definitely helped), then took my requisite 8 minute break before diving head-first into Quant.

The problems were tough, tougher than what I was used to -- definitely had to guess on a few of the questions, so I assumed I'd be losing a few points there. There were also a lot more "ambiguous" Data Sufficiency questions than those that you can generally lock down the answer for, so I felt really really unsure with some of my responses.

Transitioned over to Verbal, which was a little more appetizing. Some tougher critical reasoning questions with answer choices that seemed a little less concrete than what I was used to, but again trudged through the whole thing.

Ended up with 760, which I'm very very happy with, although my only concern is that my Quant percentile (87) is significantly less than my Verbal percentile (98). Given that I'm a humanities major, I'll have to let my quantitative abilities shine elsewhere in my application, but I am glad to have the exam out of the way!

Just wanted to offer up this little personal anecdote as evidence that the test is definitely conquerable, even with more unorthodox study strategies (like inundating yourself for 5-7 days before taking on the beast). Good luck to everyone with the test and all future endeavors!

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