640....39Q 39V

[LouieTiger]

Well, I took the GMAT again (530 first time) and I scored a 640!!! I am very happy. The 39Q was expected, but the 39V was a shock - I never got higher than a 34 in any of my practice.

I took:
Princeton Review in-class program.
Kaplan GMAT 2008 Prep

My highest princeton review test was 550.
My highest GMAC practice test was 600.

Very happy.

Thanks for the help. I completely enjoyed learning from this message board.

[Prasanna]

Glad to hear that. Wish you good luck with the app.

[mercypoint]

Congrats! Can you explain a bit of your preparation on the second attempt?

[LouieTiger]

On the 2nd attempt....

I did the same approach for math, but didn't study ANY perms or probability questions. Guess what....didn't have one on the test. I just ran thru more problems to keep my brain thinking the same way as they test.

On the verbal....

Sentence correction - I read the opening sentence once. Then, I read each option and looked for mistakes in the new parts. I never put the new part in place of the old part until I was down to 2 answers that I thought was right. Also, I was OK with having 2 or 3 stay 'A'....on here I read that 2 or 3 (out of 15) are going to be answer A.

RC - I got lucky...they didn't give me a super science paragraph and mine were easy to understand. They were also relatively short.

CR - I was in the 'zone' for these....a lot of hard ones at the end, but I guess I got a lot of them right. I didn't have a lot of the standard weaken/strengthen ones. It was the harder 'finish the argument' and 'if this is true, what else must be true' questions.

Finally....I didn't stress about it. I was trying for a 600, a score I had received on my practice tests. I could get into my school of choice with a 580 of higher, so there wasn't too much pressure. I was SHOCKED when I saw the 39 in Verbal though....I ran out of time on Q - I think I should have gotten a 42 on the Q. The last 6 questions I had to rush - basically guess.