took the test on 15th june got Disappointing 550

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I am 40 years old and have a work experience of 15 years in IT field in one of the biggest telecom company. I intend to do an Executive MBA from a reputed Business School, so took the GMAT. I prepared for about a month for the test and gone through Kaplan, Official GMAT guide and done most of the problems to refresh my memory. I was comfortable with maths, however Verbal was giving me some pain as I was taking more time than required in getting the answers.

I took practice tests from Kaplan CD as well as from GMAC TestPrep CD. My scores were 530 and 620, 650 respectively. However, to my utter disappointment when I took the real GMAT test today I got merely 550 with Quant 43 and Verbal 24.

I am 100% sure about two questions of Quant section where the correct answer was not there in the 5 choices. One of the question was simplify (.125) to the power 6 . Whci comes to (1/8)^6 or (1/2)^18. I had no choice but to select a wrong answer and proceed.

Can this be the on of the reason of my poor score? Should I take the GMAT again? or even with this score can I get into a business school for Executive MBA. I have an excellent acadmic record and professionally also have achieved a lot.

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by beatthegmat » Fri Jun 15, 2007 1:59 pm
Your actual GMAT score seemed to align well with your performance on GMAT Prep. Given you extensive work experience and academic performance, I'd do some more research to figure out whether it's worth re-taking the test. Try asking Stacy Blackman, she's the resident expert on MBA admissions.

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by aim-wsc » Fri Jun 15, 2007 7:38 pm
I've no info about ex. MBA but looking at your profile I dont think GMAT would be a problem for your app.

still you got to check your desired schools web site blog n their forums.

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thanks

by vinivivek » Sat Jun 16, 2007 9:53 pm
Thanks for the response. Any comment about the questions I mentioned for which no correct answer choices were there. Has similar thing reported in the past? I would definitely consult Stacy Blackman on the matter.

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by thumpin_termis » Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:02 pm
Well, the ones that actually count supposedly had enough data to justify its merit as a real countable question, so if you honestly believe that they were just flat out wrong, then it's very possible that it was one of the 25% of experimental questions that didn't go against you.