Another 740(Q47,V45)

Hello All,

Finally its over. What a painful experience. But glad to see it end with a 740.

This site has been of great help and I hope to contribute back to it. (My previous few postings have been under ssk)

The Exam:

Going in I knew Quant was going to be a tough section and also that Quant was my weak area. And it sure turned out that way. The level of difficulty jumped after the first 2 questions and it was never easy from there on. I spent 4-5 minutes on the third and finally guessed. After every 2-3 questions that I was able to crack, the next one would be out of my reach. I found this pattern throught the test and it screwed me on the timing. I could finish only 32 questions and guessed on the rest.


So, going into verbal I knew that I better do exceptionally well to get a decent score. And luck was on my side. SC, CR and RC were all a piece of cake, exactly like the ones in OG. Also they never seem to scale up as rapidly as Quant. They all seemed to be of the same level??

Make sure that you read the explanations of the answers in the OG. This helped me to think like ETS and was able to quickly improve my verbal skills. My game plan was to get 90-95% correct in CR and RC and around 80 in SC. I think I managed that in the exam.

I was pleasently surprised to see my score considering my harrowing experience in the GMAT Quant section.

Other test scores were as follows:

PP: 730, 740
Princeton: 720, 710,670, 730( day before exam. helped me a lot in getting the final touches done)
Kaplan: 560,590, 610.

Used mainly OG to do verbal. Kaplan was good for maths, but OG is still better as the questions seem to reinforce the basic concepts, especially in abs, sq. root, odd/even int, type problems.

Did a bit of grammer from Cliff's notes as I am not a native english speaker and often did not even understand the OG SC explanations!

Prepared over 3 months, which now looking back was too long a period to work on. I had totally lost my edge in the last 2-3 weeks. 2 months should be more than enough.

Good Luck and feel free to ask any other questions on this topic.