Hi!
I wish I should have been more active on this phorum earlier. I am reading today all the topics and finding them very useful and foccussed.
My GMat Experience:
Two month preparation:
OG-11 Complete(Except RC).
OG Verbal (Complete, Kaplan verbal book Complete).
Princeton Review: Diagnostic and (Math Bin 3 and 4)
Diagnostic
OG: Above Average rating for all ( Took lot time to finish though )
Some of my test scores:
GMAT prep1- 660 (Last month)
KAPLAN test 1 - 540 ( Had some CD from a friend which had 4 Kaplan tests)
Kaplan Free onlne diagnostic - 590 (
GMAT Prep1 - 720 (Q 50, V 38) 10/ 26
GMAT Prep2 - 710 (Q 51, V 37) 10/ 27
GMAT - 640 ( Q 48, V 28)
This was my second attempt. I had follwing scores in GMAT in 2005 :620 ( Q 47, V 28) . That time I didn't study verbal much and only quant.
I am highly dissappointed in my scores because I was very confident this time. I found the GMAT quant to be tougher than last time and even tougher than actual GMAT Prepn and
official guide. The first problem took me 7 minutes. It was difficult and first 10 questions were really time consuming. I found that problems towards the middle of exam and towards the end were relatively simpler nd direct and they annoyed me because I had less time now left. Some questions were too direct formulas that they took me just 30 seconds to solve. In quant Last 4 questios were guesses because I ran out of time.
I wasted some of my energy in break thinking about one of the problems which took more time, that was not to be. Never use break in thinking about what you did but to prepare for the next session. When I sat in verbal I was still in that confuse state.
Verbal:
I lost my two minutes because I exceeded my break time. Panicked because of my bad expecttion of quant, I wasn't able to concentrate but then I tried to take it easy by conditioning my mind that verbal is not too tough. Not sure whether that was a good idea or not because my verbal scores were not good. I found verbal relatively easy than the quant. I am weak in verbal and this time I prepared a lot for verbal especially critical reasoning and RC. I seriously didn't think that I was doing bad in verbal but I would be honsest to admit that in around 10-15 questions I did got confuse in selecting one of final two which seemed right. This kind of guessing always worked for me during tests. Is that the factor which didn't support me this time? Was I at the worst scale of my inconsistency this time? I ran out of time during last two questions and they were random guesses.
I did got a little tired in last 30 minutes and there was a period of 5-10 minutes when I was pushing my mind to get back to focus and reading critical reasoning/ sentece corrections again and again.
Some facts during preparation:
During my practice, I will admit, my answers were not very consistent. In my last review of
OG practice (Last 5 days of test), I answered so many question wrong which were correct in my first practice and answered some right which I had wrong and thus I found that I was inconsistent on Verbal which scared me. But my final test results gave me some positive feeling about my luck in exam.
I am little confused whether I should take test. I see lot of topics here that people did improve their scores. I just am confused because I can't analyse my weak points. Sometimes I am good at sentence correction but other good at critical reasoning.
I am not sure what to improve and how. I am ready to take some course which can help me for a month.
I did read a lot of posts on Knewtonian 50 point increase guarantee but even their course is adaptive in nature and based on certain algorithms which assesses your weak points. I am just worried that my inconsistency might not even dupe the computer system and would not help me.
Any foccused suggestion guys, I am sure some of you migh have experienced this inconsisteny in you. I am reading all posts and 90% of the things I have already followed so not sure what to do next. Whether it's lack of practice or lack of Verbal fundas is something which my mind is debating. Did I loose track of Verbal basic formulas during the end of my preparation or Exam nervousness did wipe out my intuitive capacity?
Thanks,
Manav