I just Beat The GMAT!

Hi, I am a long time listener and caller. Got back from the test today.. 630 overall (40Q 36V). I took the exam in late Sept but cancelled my score. For the 2nd round, I studied less.... WAAAAAYY less (about 1 hour a day.. sometimes I wouldn't practice for days). Heck, I didn't even touch quant in the past month except for 1 retake of the GMATprep last Monday. I concentrated on verbal since I knew it was my ticket to getting above 600. I received a 36 on V which is better than any other score on any of my practice CATs (I got a 39 on KAplan, but that was a retake of the diagnostic).

I tried to do a warmup before the exam (3 of each questions, SC, DS, PS,etc) but got 3 of 3 wrong for PS and ended up not doing any more practice Qs. I have also been busy with life, traveling, work, etc in the past month so I came into the exam ready to fail (Also, I was "connecting" with an attractive girl in the waiting area before the exam so my mind was on something else ).

Went in, (after awa) spent about 10 minutes doing 3 easy questions on Quant then proceeded to fall behind even further. At one point, I had 30 minutes left to 20 math problems. I did a few {EDIT ALOT} edjumacated guesses and finished on time. Took my break, knew I screwed up and tried to concentrate on verbal. Verbal was very easy. I guessed on about 5 of them since I was running low on time. Reported my score and was happy. 630 is above all of median scores of the schools I am appyling to (Arizona, Loyola Marymount, Chapman, Thunderbird, SDSU). As you can see, no top 25 programs... I have very unique and marketable resume (3 fortune 500 companies in 4 years since graduating with numerous offers from others) to the point where I don't even need an MBA to progress in life. I'm just looking at an MBA at progressing my education, increasing my business knowledge (I am a published scientist) while reloating to the SW region of the country in the process.

It was encouraging since this was the highest score I received on any of my CATs (except a retake on the Kaplan which repeated 100% of the Qs). I actually considered taking the exam under special conditions (double time) since I have ADD and am not taking medications. If I had special test conditions, I'd probably get over 700 (time management of one of the worst things that people with ADD struggle with). However, I DID NOT want an asterik next to my name when schools viewed my GMAT score. But, I might retake the exam again (despite being tempted to burn my GMAT books). AWA should not be a problem since writing professional essays are a strength of mine (don't use this post as a sample of my writing skills). Choi!

Congrats!!! You got what you wanted.Best of luck for ur apps.

awesome!!!

heyyy..odannyboi...congratz there!

The guy who had so many writeups for verbal!! ...now how did it feel comparing verbal with that of GMATprep...I think you got the exact score which you posted some days back on Gmatprep!.

how was the quant?

Best

Aslan

Hey Thanks guys... I know it isn't a great score to most on the forum, but it is to me.

@aslan

Verbal for the actual exam was on par with that of the GMATprep. Sentence correction was pretty easy... pretty much the only concepts I tried to master were subject-verb agreement, parallelism, and a few idioms. With a score of 36, I assumed I had about 8 or 9 total Qs wrong (once I had 10 wrong and received a 34 on GMATprep).

RC was easy... I had 2 science passages which is great since that is my undergrad although they were physical and environmental science passages (I am a molecular science guy). CR was my weak point and I actually guessed on 2 of them near the end. CR bible helped me increase my CR accuracy.

Quant was actually easy but I took too much time on quite a few questions to the point where I would do educated guesses 3 or 4 in a row! I literally guessed on about 20 of them (DS it is a little easier to do). I knew how to do most of them but couldn't hammer out the answer in time so I chose answers that were close to what I calculated (I did alot of approximation when calculating even when it wasn't an approximation problem). GMAT math is very crude, just try to get a "ball park" number and i doesn't have to be pretty.. its the beauty of multiple choice tests.

The very first quant question took me about 30 seconds to do and I thought to myself that i did it wrong.. then wasted about another 90 seconds trying to make sure it was right (it was).

Can't stress this enough, try to spend a little more time on the 1st few questions on each section, I tend to score higher when I get those correct.

All in all, I got pretty lucky with my exam questions. Now my sister took my GMAT books so I don't know if I want to study a little more and get a higher score (my top school, Arizona State, has a median of 672 but I didn't even report my score to them since I knew I wouldn't get near it).

@odannyboi:

I think you can take a leap of fate.You never know.One guy on BTG just got interviewed on 620 to IESE with two years out of undergrad.

Hey!
Some of the guys are reporting low scores due to the newly introduced experimental section .Did you face a similar problem?

@harsh.champ:

Nope.He gave it after the experimental .

I encourage you to go ahead with the test date, as people are getting ok with the vebal's now!