Hey guys,
Wow, sorry to hear that it was such a frustrating weekend for those on this thread! I hope that we can all learn from the experience, and have a few comments on what you've written:
1) Honestly (and I know this is a day late and a dollar short) I don't think there are very many good reasons for anyone to cancel a score. You have far, far too much to lose (what if it was a great score? Even if not you can learn where you were stronger/weaker than you anticipated) and not that much to gain (unless your score reports show a pattern of awfulness, and I'm talking multiple low scores in succession, a low score can't really hurt you). I considered canceling my own score for a few seconds, and I know at least a few other 99th-percentile scorers who did the same - it's a hard test designed to make you feel like you got beat up a bit, but you're much more likely to surprise yourself with a high score than to somehow hurt your candidacy with a low score (which, like I said, is almost impossible to do just on one test).
2) Like you've said, the questions on the GMAT are not going to be carbon copies of those in the OG. The OG shows you the concepts and thought processes that the GMAT tests, but the authors of the GMAT are great at making the familiar look different. It's not enough to know "how to do" the problems in the OG - you need to know "why" and think about the types of thought processes that they're testing. Number Properties, for example, is more a way of thinking than a set of rules. If you learn from the OG that "even * odd = even", that's a decent rule to know, but it's not enough - you should really learn that "it's often possible to predict what kind of number an operation will elicit by looking for patterns when that type of calculation is performed". Finding patterns is a higher-order way of thinking...memorizing rules is much lower-level and not as likely to be rewarded often on a grad school test.
3) Odannyboi - I've actually said the same thing about those noise reduction headphones...I'd much rather deal with office background noise than hear my own heartbeat like I'm in an Edgar Allan Poe story! I'd definitely recommend to anyone that you use the essays as a warmup with some of that equipment - see if you like them or not by trying an essay with them and one without so that you have a gamplan ready once you get to the all-important quant.
Learn from this experience, guys - someone was telling me the other day that the average # of GMAT attempts per person is 2.2 (which I'm not sure about...it sounds high), so there's definitely not a scarlet letter for taking it twice. Just learn from the first experience and use it to improve!
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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