Ok, now that the GMAT is over, all I have to do is save the world a few times, win an Olympic gold medal, feed all the inhabitants of Somalia, and I have a 75% shot at Harvard.
My GMAT story is a bit unlike that of many on this board. For one, it was my first try. For another, I did not implement a crazy 4 hour a day schedule. I guess I was lazy in that aspect. Don't get me wrong, my study schedule spanned little over a month, so I did do a lot of practice.
About the test, well for one thing, I thought it was going quite horribly. I got a probability question (easy one though) for my 4th question. I also got some easy stat and one easy combination problem. I think these 3 areas take a bit of practice initially but once you get the concepts down, they are MUCH easier than other questions that require computation. Anyway, so my Math went decent but I was scared of the fact that I had made an error in one of the few DS questions. Evidently not!
The verbal was very very weird and not much in line with the experience of others on this board. I got about 4 RC's. 1st one 40 lines, second 65 lines, third 45 lines (at this point I thought I was screwing up, this was waaayy to short!) but then I got a fourth RC for questions 34 through 37 that was 105 lines long!!!! I was seriously thinking of just marking 'C' for all of them since I had 10 minutes left at this point. However, I kept calm, steered away from my usual method of taking notes as this would take too long, and answered all the questions. The fact was that while the RC was long it was easy to understand and the questions were quite easy. Lesson learned: Adapt! There is no fixed way! Even though you practice a certain method at home, you never know what's going to happen and you need to be confident enough to take shortcuts that your not used to taking. This can only happen when you are extremely comfortable with the material tested on the GMAT. The SC's were hard initially and then got easy, hence again I though I screwed up. CR's were as difficult as the
OG.
I actually thought the Math was not harder than the
OG and I know many will disagree. To sum it up, I swear by the Power Prep. That and the
OG are the GMAT bible. Do it till you die. I only managed to do 850 questions from the
OG but I took both PP's.
PP 1: 710 (50Q, 36V)
PP 2: 700 (49Q, 37V)
How close is that?????
Ofcourse, this board is wonderful. I actually did not use it to it's full potential and if I did my scores might have reflected it. But I think there are some awesome questions here with some awesome people who are ever ready to answer your queries. So use it, its a powerful tool.
I would also recommend practicing tests without omitting the Essays. I only did 1 such test, and it was a Kaplan test on which I made a disastrous 570.
Other scores from tests aree:
PP CD 1 : 680
PP CD 2: 730
PP CD 3 : 680
PP CD 4 : 670
PP Online 1 : 620
PP online 2 : 680
Kaplan Diag : 680
Kaplan CD 1 : 630
Kaplan CD 2 : 570
Kaplan CD 3 : 570
I don't have any specific tips that have'nt already been mentioned. I found taking notes on RC to be an extremely good method but as you can see, I could not use that method for 1 RC. Hence, as I said before, practice enough to where you don't need a fixed method to succeed. There is no substitute to hard work. If anyone has specific questions, I'll be glad to answer them. Good luck everyone.
Regards,
Jack