I passed the test today

[jeromecukier]

and got 750.
I've started studying a month ago. I took 5 practice tests, 2 on paper, 3 online, and worked on some questions here and there.
when I did my first self-diagnosis test I was confident I'll do very well in maths, but I made errors because I would misread an important word of the question, or because I wouldn't check my answers carefully enough. anyway, on paper tests, there is a mix of easy, medium and difficult questions so I found that time wasn't a problem.
However, I didn't do well on verbal questions. And I would lose a lot of time on SC questions, because often I found that several choices were acceptable and I would hesitate as to which was the best.
I would also fail a lot at RC and CR, sometimes not understanding the questions well.

So I trained, and quickly found that there were very few rules to know in order to master SC. That proved to be the key to everything. With SC out of the way, there is no time constraint on verbal. I like to read the RC passages in full, although I am aware that most people would advise against that. But reading the passages and writing down a few keywords for each paragraph, which takes maybe 4 minutes, allows me to answer RC questions with confidence in less than a minute, so that's less than 2 minutes per question - affordable. While studying I also found that there are relatively few rules that govern CR, and I learned to spot choices I could eliminate with certainty. My strategy was to read the question first, then the passage, which I would paraphrase on the noteboard, at which point I would try to guess the answer. Then and only then, I would read the choices, and often one would match my guess.
In my last couple of tests, I found that I was finally doing very well at verbal questions. at the test, that worked equally well. There's nothing more satisfying than answering a SC question with confidence in 10 seconds. There were a few SC questions which did stump me, and I probably got them wrong because I got 45/95%. But I did not hesitate on any CR or RC question. All in all, verbal was the area where I found that training really worked.

Now quants.
to make a long story short, I ran out of time. I was being too careful, making sure to read every word and to triple check my answers. All of this was fine in the 1st half of the exam. After the first 10 questions I had over 2 minutes per remaining question, so I was encouraged in that direction. On data sufficiency questions, when I found I could determine the value of X given assumption 1, I would go ahead and calculate it - and that's 20 seconds gone. in one case, I could immediately eliminate 4 choices of the question - but I took 2 minutes to check that the last choice was indeed the good one. Then, a few questions completly stumped me. There are 2 or 3 on which I spent more than 4 minutes. So, towards the end of the exam, my time capital was completely spent. I got around 1mn per question when I had 12 questions left, which really affected my concentration and my performance. I couldn't answer the last 3 because I was out of time.
I think I only had medium or hard questions, and after a while fatigue kicks in.
Another thing is that I could never test in realistic conditions, because I hardly ever get 75 minute of peace and quiet. So I would pause and resume testing.
Anyway, my initial tendancy to thoroughly check everything worked against me, somehow, because if I had managed time better, I would surely have done well in the last 3rd of the test.
On a positive note, I was delighted to find questions very similar to some that I failed on online tests (including one from MGGMAT) which I probably would have failed in the real test if I had not read the explanations. So I could have used more practice. the results were 49/87%.

I'm an average guy, and not a native speaker of English. I struggled with verbal, but then it clicked and got more than decent scores. with quants, I think more practice and, more importantly, better planning would have helped. but all in all, I guess that higher scores should be within reach of anyone, especially those who got quants figured out.
So good luck to you all

[ambreen8]

what was ur score on quant and verbal


thanx in advance