Guys,
FINALLY....I am done studying for this D@MN test!!
Just finished and got:
760: 99 %tile
Quant 49 (90 %tile)
Verbal 44(97 %tile)
I don't believe I scored this high. I wouldn't if it hadn't been for this forum.
The biggest thanks go to woohoo, whose story inspired me to beat down the GMAT!
Prat (especially with the last minute archive access), HongHu, ywilfred, Antmavel, kwasi7, HIMALAYA, Bhai, riteshgupta, gmataquaguy, trulyblessed, and coffeeloverfreak...you guys were the best at getting concepts down to the basics and getting them into my head.
Thanks especially go to richardj, ranga41, BG, chets, fresinha12, and duttsit for their excellent quant explanations.
Okay, now that I've thanked the Academy...
Study:
Materials:
OG 10 and 11, Kaplan, Kaplan 800, all the 1000 docs that are on the forum,
MGMAT, and this forum (the best one).
I also went to
https://www.deltacourse.com for comb, probability, and stats. It's got everything there.
MGMAT is crucial for success. The concepts just stuck better than using Kaplan.
I actually took a Kaplan class. COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY!! It's good for learning the basics but for 700+ I needed more challenging questions.
The math, I thought, was about even, if easier, than the real thing.
The first time I took the test, I got a 660. I was devastated. I had studied so hard but it wasn't until I read woohoo's success story that I felt like I could take it again and get 700+.
BTW, here's woohoo's post:
https://www.gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=18525
I pretty much had the same problems that he did. I did everything he advised to do in his post. Just like a lot of people, I focused too much on quantity and not enough on quality.
Test Day:
I was done with each essay within 15 mins. I went out after the second (argument essay) and talked about football (american, that is) with the proctor. Then I went at quant.
Quant:
First was an easy average question, second was combination that was WAY easiser than anything we do here. Then the real hard questions came at me: cylinders, triangles, figures in x, y coordinates. No standard deviation, though there were a lot of mean, median. Number properties. A couple rate problems. All in all, they felt harder than the
OG stuff but, on the avg, nothing compared to the questions in our forum.
I finished quant with a few minutes to spare and just sat there. Took my break and had a double shot and some energy bar. I knew that I did well in quant but that I really had to concentrate in verbal.
Verbal:
Started with two pretty easy SC's. Then came a boldface question that wasn't too hard. Then, WHAM two back to back RC's (45 lines and 70 lines). They weren't too hard to understand. Once you get boundary words and scope shifts down, all the RC's feel the same. Then came the onslaught of CR's and SC's. SC's on the whole were rather easy once you learn to cut away the fat. I listed subject-verb, tense, modifier, parrallelism, comparison, and idiom at the top of my scratch paper and reviewed them everytime I got an SC. I got stumped by a few CR's and then, WHAMO!!! Big, 100 line passage at question 31 with 15 minutes left. The questions were even worse. I had to actually scoll down to read all the answer choices on a few. I had 5 minutes left and 5 questions. A few CR's and SC's that weren't too bad. I had to make some quick decisions at the last CR and finished with 1 second. It felt like a movie with the bomb ticking away.
I went through the survey. I could barely finish it because I knew I did well on the test based on the question difficulty I faced. Hit the confirm and BHAM!!
760 baby!!!
I couldn't believe it. I almost started crying I was so happy. I studied for about six months and now I am done. Didn't do the fist pump, (like so many seem to) just got the hell out of there and skipped to my car.
Thanks for reading and thanks again to this forum. Couldn't have done it without this place.