750 V45 Q48 6.0

[brianksc]

Hello friends,

I just received my official score which is 750 V45 Q48 6.0. I have been a lurker on the boards and I must give my thanks and appreciation to the countless kind strangers who have posted their problems and solutions. Before attending the actual exam I was a nervous wreck but I found comfort in the experiences that people have shared.

Materials Used

GMAT Official Guides

• GMAT Review, 12th Edition
  Quantitative Review, 2nd Edition
  Verbal Review, 2nd Edition

Manhattan Guides:

• Number Properties
  Word Translations
  Geometry
  Critical Reasoning
  Reading comprehension
  Sentence Correction

Kaplan Guides:

• Math Workbook
  Verbal Workbook
  (I did not feel that I needed these guides)

I also used the GMATPrep simulation tests four times.

Background
I have an electrical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia (in Canada). I have been working in the manufacturing field for four years. With the engineering background I thought I would have a real easy time with the quant section, however I found this was not the case. The kind of quant skills that are required for success on the GMAT are actually very different from what I was accustomed to.

I found the Manhattan guides for Number Properties and Work Translations to be extremely helpful and would recommend them to anyone looking to catch up on relevant quant skills.

Quant Section
I had the toughest time with the quant section during the exam. I had a 95% rate of success with Quant in the OG and GMATPrep tests, which leads me to believe that I was either off of my game in the actual test, or that the actual test is harder than the questions I had encountered prior. My problem was that I was actually running out of time near the end of the test, and had to guess four of the last seven questions. I strategically guessed every other question in the last seven in order to lower the chance of being penalized further for consecutive wrong answers.

Verbal Section
I had a very easy time with Verbal, and I would attribute this to over-studying. I basically focused most of my preparation on verbal, and on sentence correction in particular. In hindsight this may not have been the wisest way to spend my time, because the scoring algorithm appears to give greater weight to mistakes in critical reasoning and reading comprehension than to sentence correction.

I found the Manhattan guides helpful. It is interesting to note however that I was never able to fully absorb the "system" that they teach in the guides. For example, in the Manhattan SC guide they teach you to try to characterize the problem sentences according to their categories. I went through the book twice but could not remember their system, so here is the system that I used for sentence correction:

If I sought to quickly eliminate answer choices based on the following errors:

• Subject Verb Agreement
  Tenses
  Comparisons
  Parallelsm

If this proved too difficult, I went with my gut feeling and quickly moved onto the next question.

For reading comprehension, the system of "active reading" that I frequently encounter online is quite useful, I used the method prescribed in the Manhattan RC guide for doing questions in the OG and had a near perfect success rate. However, I found that more often than not (around 80% of the time), the answer to the question does not require a very deep comprehension because the answer can be explicitly found in the body of the question. To guarantee success in these cases, it is very important to read fast enough to go through the text again to find the answer.

I had a success rate of around 97% with the critical reasoning questions in the OG guides, so I did not go through the Manhattan CR guide very much. I would be comfortable with recommending those who are finding success for CR in the OG guides to not worry about this section too much.


Writing the GMAT:

It is always possible to find a really hard question from the forums that feel as if they are impossible to do within two minutes. To avoid freaking myself out, I did not study or look at anything GMAT related for two days prior to writing. The test itself blew by very quickly but I found that it was very important to take the breaks. The break was especially important for me because I felt as if I had bombed the quant section. I had a shot of cold expresso which I had brought from home during each of my breaks which helped.

Good luck to all those who are laboring hard in preparation for their exams. I live in the Vancouver, B.C. If anyone is prepping in this area and would like advice/help/further correspondence please feel free to contact me.

-Brian

[uprightcitizen]

Congratulations on an excellent score. I had the exact same experience with the Quant... I ran out of time. It had never happened to me during practice, either.

How long did it take to receive your Official & AWA Score? (Do they e-mail you?) I just took the test on Friday.

[brianksc]

Thanks. I received the official report within a week. They gave me the option of either getting the official results by mail or by email, which was what I chose.

[sv77]

Congratulations for the score..Best of luck for your preparation... Can you please tell whether the difficulty level of Verbal questions in GMAT exams was in comparable to the one of verbal questions in latter part of OG verbal.. Also did you see any idiom usage in SC questions..

[brianksc]

The verbal questions on the actual exam were on the same difficulty level as compared to the OG. It leads me to believe that your success with the OG is a good indicator of your success on the verbal part of the actual test.

I did not see any pure idiom SC questions on the actual exam. Based on my experience, memorizing all the idioms on the various idiom lists online and in the Manhattan guide would be most useful for non-native English speakers. The law of diminishing returns applies here.