First of all,
I'm from Uzbekistan but since the test center isn't open in my country I registered to take the test in Kazakhstan. Background info: I'm married, have a child and on top of that I have a full time job (9hrs a day: 6 days a week). I knew what was tested on GMAT and had a basic idea about the test. So i took 2 weeks off prior to my test and started preparing for it. The program i am applying requires 500+ and at the beginning of my intense prep I scored 530. So it took all the pressure off me. Because I knew I could still get an acceptable score without much of a prep. But I reviewed the Manhattan strategy guide books and looked at some of the video lessons. I knew as a non-native speaker I had to put much effort on my Verbal but i also wanted to brush up on my math skills. 2 weeks flew by quite fast. Toward the middle of the 2nd week, my body couldn't take no more. I was studying 6-7 hours a day and the next day would be too painful. Basically, for the last 4-5 days I tried to take it easy even though i hadn't covered all the topics tested. My test was on 19th of June and my flight to Kazakhstan was on 18th. I took the final practice test (GmatPrep) without the essay on 17th and overall score was 590 (Q42 V29). I looked into the Quant section and learnt some of the explanations offered in the forums, but i was physically unable to go through my Verbal. The day before the test I didn't do anything, i tried to adjust to the new city, new people and etc.
My test was at 2pm, so I had more rest and a light breakfast at around 10am. I arrived at the test center 40 minutes earlier with 2 bars of snickers and a bottle of "Red bull". I managed to finish my argument essay ahead of my time and also proofreaded and changed the structure a bit. Anyways, i'm expecting somewhere about 5 and above for that. Then came the new section of the Next Generation of GMAT- Integrated Reasoning. The questions appeared on the internet are a lot easier than the actual questions on the test. That partially may be due to the time constraints. It just seems it's impossible to answer 12 questions within 30 minutes, besides I hadn't expected to read long passages to answer the questions. Anyways, i'm not sure about the score I may get somewhere from 0 to 4. For those who don't know: there are 4 questions and each contains 3 related questions and if you miss any of those 3, you receive zero credit for the whole question. That's little unfair, maybe not... But most of the MBA admissions will ignore the score for this portion of the test for a while.
Finally, the real section of the test kicked off, but the first problem looked a bit harder than the average, again it maybe due to the pressure that one has to get the first few questions correct to boost their overall score. I knew it'd be horrible to fail the first one so I panicked. I spent about 3 minutes and just moved on with my best guess. Luckily, I finished the sections 2-3 minutes earlier, i felt satisfied. I took my 2nd break and was feeling quite good before the verbal section. But this section was tougher than I expected. I was surprised to see very few CR questions which I'm best at. Instead there were tons of SC questions (my weakest area). RC questions were quite tricky and couple of times I realized I got the previous question wrong after seeing the next question. Toward the end of the section I looked at my time and there was 5 minutes left for 6 questions to go. I started panicking, i knew i couldn't leave any questions unanswered. But at the same time random guessing at the end might hurt my score. 5 out of those 6 questions were Critical Reasoning (my strongest area) but again with the time pressure I couldn't understand the argument I was reading and ended up randomly guessing 3 questions. And the last one was SC, and a tough one too. but I was right on time so i had to do the little survey afterwards and saw the 600 (Q44 V29) on my screen and I felt bittersweet. I didn't know whether I should be happy or upset... I could've done better at Verbal if only had I managed my time better. But again, on the test day, it's difficult to keep everything to the ideal...
I'm from Uzbekistan but since the test center isn't open in my country I registered to take the test in Kazakhstan. Background info: I'm married, have a child and on top of that I have a full time job (9hrs a day: 6 days a week). I knew what was tested on GMAT and had a basic idea about the test. So i took 2 weeks off prior to my test and started preparing for it. The program i am applying requires 500+ and at the beginning of my intense prep I scored 530. So it took all the pressure off me. Because I knew I could still get an acceptable score without much of a prep. But I reviewed the Manhattan strategy guide books and looked at some of the video lessons. I knew as a non-native speaker I had to put much effort on my Verbal but i also wanted to brush up on my math skills. 2 weeks flew by quite fast. Toward the middle of the 2nd week, my body couldn't take no more. I was studying 6-7 hours a day and the next day would be too painful. Basically, for the last 4-5 days I tried to take it easy even though i hadn't covered all the topics tested. My test was on 19th of June and my flight to Kazakhstan was on 18th. I took the final practice test (GmatPrep) without the essay on 17th and overall score was 590 (Q42 V29). I looked into the Quant section and learnt some of the explanations offered in the forums, but i was physically unable to go through my Verbal. The day before the test I didn't do anything, i tried to adjust to the new city, new people and etc.
My test was at 2pm, so I had more rest and a light breakfast at around 10am. I arrived at the test center 40 minutes earlier with 2 bars of snickers and a bottle of "Red bull". I managed to finish my argument essay ahead of my time and also proofreaded and changed the structure a bit. Anyways, i'm expecting somewhere about 5 and above for that. Then came the new section of the Next Generation of GMAT- Integrated Reasoning. The questions appeared on the internet are a lot easier than the actual questions on the test. That partially may be due to the time constraints. It just seems it's impossible to answer 12 questions within 30 minutes, besides I hadn't expected to read long passages to answer the questions. Anyways, i'm not sure about the score I may get somewhere from 0 to 4. For those who don't know: there are 4 questions and each contains 3 related questions and if you miss any of those 3, you receive zero credit for the whole question. That's little unfair, maybe not... But most of the MBA admissions will ignore the score for this portion of the test for a while.
Finally, the real section of the test kicked off, but the first problem looked a bit harder than the average, again it maybe due to the pressure that one has to get the first few questions correct to boost their overall score. I knew it'd be horrible to fail the first one so I panicked. I spent about 3 minutes and just moved on with my best guess. Luckily, I finished the sections 2-3 minutes earlier, i felt satisfied. I took my 2nd break and was feeling quite good before the verbal section. But this section was tougher than I expected. I was surprised to see very few CR questions which I'm best at. Instead there were tons of SC questions (my weakest area). RC questions were quite tricky and couple of times I realized I got the previous question wrong after seeing the next question. Toward the end of the section I looked at my time and there was 5 minutes left for 6 questions to go. I started panicking, i knew i couldn't leave any questions unanswered. But at the same time random guessing at the end might hurt my score. 5 out of those 6 questions were Critical Reasoning (my strongest area) but again with the time pressure I couldn't understand the argument I was reading and ended up randomly guessing 3 questions. And the last one was SC, and a tough one too. but I was right on time so i had to do the little survey afterwards and saw the 600 (Q44 V29) on my screen and I felt bittersweet. I didn't know whether I should be happy or upset... I could've done better at Verbal if only had I managed my time better. But again, on the test day, it's difficult to keep everything to the ideal...
