I just Beat The GMAT!

My Test Day

My test was a Saturday 8-AMer. This sometimes sounds frightening, but I am a morning person and generally am up and thinking by 6:30 each day. So, by 8, I am actually working at near peak mental efficiency. I got there early and was an easy volunteer to process first as the others were a little slower to move. I therefore got started about 15 minutes early with the real test part.

Essays – Finished first essay with 20 seconds and really had to rush the conclusion / introduction. I have never worried about the essays and practiced a few (about 4 sets during the my practice tests) and looked at recommendations for the structure from this website. I was still confident that I had a good essay though.

Second, finished with 10 minutes left and had time to modify. Harder than I expected. It was a very generic statement that I had a hard time figuring out the appropriate arguments for. I knew the side I wanted to argue, but just could not come up with many points for either side. Felt I had a good essay in the end, but personally dragged out some points longer than I would have liked. I did make one intelligent statement (one of my examples) that I am confident would make the real reader laugh.

I used the extra time to set up for the Quantitative section. I was terrified about time management in the Quant, so I had times listed question by question going down the notebook (I write very small) and crossed off each question as I finished it. This gave me a reference as to where I should be. Others might check every 5 questions or something like that, but I wanted to know immediately if I was running late. I used the generic ‘2 minutes per question’ rule. My times would then give me 1 more minute on the last question.

Overall, I still expected good scores (as was confirmed in the official report today).

Break – Took the break and ate a granola bar.

Quantitative –
Started off BADLY. Question Number 1 confused me and I could not solve analytically quickly. I fell back to doing math on each and every answer to find the lowest value. This was time consuming, but I absolutely refused to screw up the first question. This is the time of pride that caused me to have my Question-Time written on the page in the first place. I finally solved the question, having taken about 4 minutes, and started behind on my time.

I picked up speed quickly and knew I was catching up. So I started calming down a little. My next really bad question came at number 6. It was a data sufficiency question that I was not going to be able to answer in two minutes (or ANYTHING close to it). Individually, I knew that neither statement was sufficient. It looked like it would be sufficient, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it would be neither, but I would not know for sure until I work out all the math. If there was any easier trick, it was beyond me. I took a guess at (C) because it looked most like that. However, I believe that it was a trick and was really (E).

After this point, I breezed through the rest of the quantitative section. Maybe one or two more at most that left me with a bad feeling when I chose an answer. But overall, I did my best. By question 36, I was actually ahead of time and had a little over 6 minutes for the last two questions. Question 36 was a very hard geometry problem. With the time (about 4 minutes), I was able to work through it and know I got the answer right. Then 37 was fine and I finished with just under 1 minute left. However, I was confident that I had done well because of the difficulty of the last couple of questions that I knew I got right.

Break – Took the second break and ate another granola bar. Also downed a bottle of G2 that I was saving for this break. I felt like I was doing well and was relaxed. I chatted with one of the women sitting at the front desk and looked forward to finishing up now.

Verbal –
I am an engineer. I am also a native speaker and the son of a children’s librarian (mother) and a radio disc jockey (father). Verbal has not really scared me. I spent a lot of time catching up with Sentence Correction rules. I generally never had a problem with Critical Reasoning and could narrow down the Reading Comprehension questions to one right and one wrong answer and would pick one. During the test, I thought I was doing well. I did notice many more questions that I did not quite understand when it came to RC and CR. This really bothered me. I don’t think I did my best on these questions. I feel that it is a situation that given one set of questions, I would get them right, and another set, I would get them wrong.

With about 20 minutes left in the test, I realized that chugging a G2 was not my best decision of the day and really had to go to the bathroom. I kept testing and just had to hold it. Luckily, I move through the verbal section quickly and finished with about 12 minutes left. I know that finishing with time on the table is not a good idea. However, my experience is that I would not get the right answer on the questions that I missed if I spent any more time. I did spend more time on questions if I really didn’t understand or needed to re-read portions or something. I do not feel that working any slower would have made a difference in my case.


Result-
Finished up the test and went through their acknowledgments and further data entry screens. Acknowledged that I wanted the score and saw it. I was happy with it : ) It is the range I was hoping/expecting. It was probably an average to good showing for the quantitative section for me. I am a little disappointed with the Verbal. I honestly thought that I could have done better. Given another day, I think that should have been a 42 on an average-to-good day and maybe touching 45 on a very good day. If that's all I can complain about for the test, I got off easy.

Just got the official results today, only 5 days (and 2.5 business days) after taking the test. Full 6.0 on essays. 95th% on both verbal and quantitative. 99th% Overall.

Glad this is over. But it is still only a checkmark. Now, it is all about the essays and recommendations, etc.

Thank you, everyone on this board (especially simplyjat, netigen, saberprivateer, all the experts, and others). I learned a lot over the last couple of months. Hope to see you all in some top school later!




Long post… I know. But it is over! I may troll along this site for a little while longer, but it is time to move on.

Dude! Amazing score! Great going!

Did you feel like any sorts of problems were especially prevalent? Permutations, combinations, probability, number properties, geometry, etc?

Awesome score man.....congrats ....dude can you discuss about the study material you used? and wat was your strategy during preparation?

congrats!
Could you share your practice test results please?
Thanks

I described practice tests in the other forum:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/ready-for-th ... 11673.html

There were some changes in scores, but overall, I thought the 'closer-to-reality' tests were higher scores and I felt reasonably confident that I was learning from my mistakes.

Before the first GMATPrep, I did take a couple of paper 'diagnostic tests' in old GMAT books, before I learned of the online stuff. So I was not walking into the first GMATPrep cold.

As far as books, I seemed to have collected a lot.

I bought:
1) OG11
2) OG11 Verbal
3) OG11 Math
4) Kaplan Premier
5) ManhattanGMAT SC

Then, my local library provided:
1) Kaplan 800 (only did math portion, early in studying)
2) Princeton Review (flipped through, didn't do too much in it)
3) Peterson's Master the GMAT 2008 (took diag tests, original book that used before I was 'officially' studying)
4) some old ARCO test that I used as a diagnostic test too.

Like many before me, I recommend the OGs (all of them), the MGMAT SC, and the Kaplan Premier for more questions. Personally, I didn't get to open the Kaplan until I had studied absolutely everything else, so I am not sure if I learned anything new, but it was good for a little more practice.