Dear all,
I am not going to write much as most things have been posted by many people who have done exceptionally well.
However, I would strongly suggest to adhere to their advice. This is pretty easy to say than to implement. Few pragmatic things-
1.ETS questions are very clear, don't waste enough time on shady questions.
2.Review you
error log as many times as you can.
3.DON'T THINK ABT QUANTS DURING VERBAL. Try your best to avoid this syndrome.
4. Have energy/stamina for 4hrs.
First attempt (two months ago) I had 640 M48 and V29 ( Pearson free Summer trial). Had the first test on London bombing day. Came to know about it during the break before verbal and screwed up the verbal. Though I scored similar in maths but the maths in that test was incredibly different- smilar to the test of Indian MBAs - lots of quadratic, coordinate geometry, probability etc but this time with ETS the questions were standard and very ETS type.
PREPARATION
Started almost a year ago but never did with right tempo. read for few months intermittently. I think I read properly only in the last 4 weeks. I never did any practice test. I guess I am too lazy to do!! But only thing I will suggest that you really need lots of stamina. I realized this during my first test as I was completely drained when I reached the verbal section.
Best suggestion:
You can buy any isotonic sports drink.
or make a 5% solution of glucose and a pinch of salt and take it some of that during the breaks, making sure that you don't need to go to the loo!!
RESOURCES
Used standard ones -
OG, Kaplan, Kaplan 800 , Princeton.
OG, as has been said many times is indeed the best for verbal preps. Won't recommend Kaplan 800- though the book teaches quite good things but I never faced anything similar to that in the test. One can argue that I might have if my score was approaching 800. Princeton book is very good for strategies. Needless to mention this forum.
MATHS
This time, I did couple of mistakes (must have done more- that is the hallmark of being tricked that you don't realize) in maths by choosing the answer quickly and confirming it -then realizing that they asked more than that. This kept on haunting me during the verbal session. Avoid that kind of silly mistakes as much as you can.
Though I feel I could have got 20-30 points more if I had not committed silly errors but I think I won't redo the test. I feel if I am not accepted to the school, it might be becuase of other reasons not GMAT score.
VERBAL
For SC, I used
OG twice- make sure you read each question,explanation and understand why each choice is wrong. First time, when I did the
OG, I checked explanation of those which I did not get right. This time I did all questions. The 270 odd questions becomes 270X4 when you try to understand each choice.
I also read all the questions religiously in the 'Best of verbal section' of the forum.
I did reasonably well in CR, didn't struggle with it at all - perhaps because I am a scientist!! and of course nice traps are very well discussed in the forum.
My weakes point was/is RC. I hate reading things which are not science/ business. To trouble me further, I had two more RCs- one on women suffrage and another one on native american. I didn't even feel like reading it. Actually I had very even types of RCs. Apart from these there were other two - one on DNA/biology (pretty easy for me) and one on business - long about 76 lines but easy.
TIP: You can use more time on your last RC provided you can do CR and SC pretty quickly. So, if you know the RC which you are doing is the fourth one, then you won't face any more RC.You can spend more time on that as the new questions will be CRs and SCs.
Many thanks to many people - Paul, Anand, hardworker Indian, twisxt, Dookie, Ritesh, HongHu, Praveen rao, venksune, Bhai, ywilfred, banerjeea and vitthal and I apologize if I have missed someone).
Thank you again to all of you for wonderful support.
S