Hey Jose,
i have never been a big contributor to those forums either. Today was my 2nd exam day and because i know how you are feeling at the moment i think you might be interested in my story
I cant tell you exactly what to do or what you did wrong, but i think i can encourage you a bit and i can tell you for sure that your 3-4 months of practice have definitely not just disappeared.
I actually experienced pretty much the same thing as you did.
I also studied for about 3 months 2-3 hours daily & 6-7 hours weekends. On my very first GMAC CAT (on the beginning of my study time) i scored a 540 (Q:40; V:25).
After 3 months of work and sacrifice i scored another 540 on the real GMAT. I literally could not trust my eyes when i saw my score (also because i thought i performed quite well and used to score around Q:45 V:35 on preptests). I was - really - incredibly disappointed and discouraged and was thinking about not trying it again.
I actually also had the feeling that i neglected the easy problems and focused on the hard ones only (especially in quant). But i think this is bullsh**. How did you reach the hard questions in the preptests then? I think the GMAC CATs are really good score indicators and i really think that it depends heavily on your daily condition, nervousness and just luck. Imagine you would have to take the exam tomorrow again - i dont think this would happen twice consecutively! You mastered the concepts but it was just not your day.
I took about 6 weeks off from studying (also because i went to a study abroad and thus just havent had time to study).
Then i decided to give it another try:
Since i am currently studying abroad for a semester and the courses i take are not too challenging, i had plenty of time to study and decided to do 6-9 hours per day, starting at 8am every day for 4 weeks.
Once i finished all the
MGMAT books (again) i made it a habit to do about 30-40 quant questions, 20 SCs and 20 CRs under timed conditions per day and subsequently reasoning every question
thoroughly out. Another point that i think is important is that you should devote the good hours of a day to study instead of studying in the night (as i usually did for my first attempt).
Especially, for me, SCs turned out to be a huge present. I think SC is really good to study and after about 60-80 SCs i saw huge improvements and i was always under 1 minute per SC (even though, as you might have noticed already, i am no native english speaker
). Not mastering SC in a way that you could solve SC questions in sleep is - in my opinion - a waste of points.
So, today was my big day and i scored a 700 (Q:43; V:42). As you see i kind of bombed quant (i used to score around 48 on the preptests) but i compensated it with verbal and i really dont want to complain about my score
Just give it another try! You should try to get to a point on which you can clearly say "i am definitely better prepared than i was for my first try". How else could you go confident into your second exam?
I wish you all the best with your second (and last) attempt
You can definitely do that!
Tom
EDIT:
what i forgot, IMHO:
do not overweigh the
MGMAT scores. I always scored lower in the
MGMAT exams than in the GMAC CATs.
The math section is really good and in my opinion harder than the real GMAT (thus a good preparation).
Also the SCs are ok. But the RCs tend to be longer than the real ones and, to be honest, i think the CRs are really bad.
Still, i think the
MGMAT CATs are the best complement when it comes to CATs.