AbhiJ wrote:As far as your friend is concerned, can accept that someone is smart enough to crack a 710 with minimal effort. However would expect such a SMART person to utilise the full time alloted and get a 750+ score.

hi guys --

1/
it appears that this discussion has devolved into something rather unproductive. just saying.

2/
while there are of course great differences between the individuals who are studying for this test -- i.e., some individuals may need more preparation than others -- still, this whole "a high score must involve some huge amount of preparation, or else it's a big lie" idea is false.
in fact, among just about all academic tests in the whole world, this one -- along with other standardized reasoning tests, such as the LSAT -- is among the ones on which naturally gifted individuals are MOST likely to achieve top scores without much, if any, preparation.
the reason for this is fairly simple: the level of knowledge required is very modest.
* the quant section doesn't test math concepts beyond first-year algebra and geometry, although those topics are made into ingenious problems.
* if a test-taker has considerable experience reading and writing formal english, then he or she may be able to do very well on SC without any explicit grammatical knowledge (in much the same way that children can recognize when a foreign speaker is "talking funny", even though those children obviously can't elucidate the exact rules by which this is judged).
* the CR and RC sections require NO memorized knowledge whatsoever, other than a sufficient command of the language.

given the above, it's very possible for an intuitively gifted (and probably native english-speaking) student to get a 99th percentile score without much, if any, formal preparation.
our own instructors at MGMAT are a case in point: all of them have at least a 760, yet very few of them undertook any sort of formal preparation for the test, and they don't even get to train with our curriculum until after they've already gotten that score.

contrast the situation with, say, a biology achievement test, which would test a great deal of memorized knowledge. on a test like that, even the greatest genius in the entire world would have to study quite a bit -- because, after all, a gifted intuition is not going to get you anywhere with questions whose answers must be memorized, such as "what is the function of vitamin b-12?" or "where are the lymph nodes located in humans?"

in any case, the point is not what works for other people; the point is what works for YOU, the reader. if someone else's situation is dramatically different from yours, then you need to be able to ignore that person's situation and concentrate on the tips and approaches that are relevant to your own situation.

for instance, given what's written above, a lot of the posters here would call me a big fat liar, because i got my own verbal scores without any advance preparation. (in quant, i had a great deal of "preparation" in the sense that i've taught other standardized tests with similar quant requirements for a long time.)
but, my situation is totally different: i've been a professional writer and editor, on and off, for the last 13+ years. in other words, i've basically lived and breathed the written english language for (at least part of) my living. not surprisingly given this background, i had very little trouble with SC, even though i knew *no* explicit grammar rules until i started teaching for MGMAT. (i still don't know most of the grammatical terms; if i ever mention "gerund", "subordinate clause", etc. in a post, then it's 100% guaranteed that i just finished looked up the term on google, and will probably forget it again the next ten minutes.)
also, i didn't have much trouble with RC or CR because (1) again, i'm a native-speaking professional writer/editor, and (2) i approached the task by intuition rather than memorization (which simply won't work) from the very beginning. the reason for #2 is fortuitous -- i don't approach anything by memorization, because my raw memory power is in the bottom 3% of the human population -- but that's just another illustration of the point i'm making here, which is that people in different circumstances might need radically different amounts of preparation.

in any case, it really doesn't matter. what matters is what YOU can do to improve YOUR score; all of this focus on other people's results is just a distraction, and not a good one.
here's an analogy: let's say you have Pat, who is very athletically gifted and can stay in excellent shape with a terrible diet and very little exercise, and Mo, who is naturally stouter, pudgier, and less athletic.
in Mo's case, the best advice is just to watch things like diet, exercise, and sleep very carefully -- and, if Mo does these things, then Mo can ultimately surpass Pat.
my point here is that Mo gains nothing by thinking about how much easier it would be for Pat to get into the same shape -- because those thoughts don't apply to Mo. same sort of deal here.