Hi all.
I want to share some of my experiences of my prep and GMAT day. My first attempt was more of a joke. I was decently prepared for quant but totally underprepared for verbal. I did it more under dates and timeline pressure and hence the result. It was a Q48/V24/5.0 breakup.
I gave my full heart and soul in the next shot. I studied the manhttan verbal sc guide and did a lot of practice. I had an average of around 710 on my Manhattan mocks and 720 on my GMAT prep exams. But the score on my d day hit me like a shovel on the face. 660(49/31). When I started with quant, it was pretty easy. I did almost 15 questions in the first 20 minutes. The next question could have been a tough one or did not strike me at that time , and the greed to get all questions right drove me to doom. I ended up spending almost 10 minutes on that question, screwing up my time and psyche. I got tensed because of this and am ended up losing my abilities to think properly for the other questions too. Finally I scraped through the Quant secion.
The next mistake I made was carrying the negativity of my quant to verbal section. I was expecting a sorry 46/47 in quant. This kept coming to me time and again in the verbal section and hence the result, a 31 on verbal. Though shattered after the exam, I somehow understood how GMAT plays with your mind. If I knew it was a 49 (though not very good, but it is a good score) I would have probably done better on the verbal. I knew that I could cross the great barrier of 700 since I was getting the score on mocks consistently. It was just to play along with GMAT the way it does not want you to.
For my last attempt, all I did was to revise my SC, practice CR say ten questions a day. Now since I used up all my mocks in my second shot, I had to repeat them. I ended up giving manhattan and the prep mocks . Surprisingly I noticed that a lot had been updated on the GMAT prep, and the updates were some real nasty questions. I improved my cr by watching some of the thursday classes. A video on strengthen/weaken questions really helped me a lot to think better. If I am not mistaken its dated at 3rd March 2011. I took a date just two weeks in advance so that I reduce the number of my anxious days.
The quant section again started easy, but with some lengthy calculations but whenever I got stuck i made a point to leave the question in 3 minutes. Though I still had a time crunch in the end it was a so-so performance as per me. Regarding the verbal I made a point to be on time and stay focused on the question itself and not the score. The RC's were simple to understand and hence did not eat up any extra time. The 40th question was a bold face, a huge one. With my hand a little weak at boldface, I decided to just hit an answer after struggling for 2 minutes. I surely did my last question correct.
And finally I got the fruit that I always wanted. :-)
I really thank Ron and Stacey for their lovely posts and helping me getting closer to my dream. I wish good luck to all the future GMATians.
Cheers :-)
GMAT Forum