Hi Guys
Thought I should share my GMAT experience here. GMAT date -11/2/2012. The official results were just sent out yesterday. Score- 740, 97%; Q-51, 98%; V-39, 88%; AWA- 5, 57%; IR - 8, 92%.
I had an earlier score of 710 which was more than 5 years old. Initially for my preparations, I had taken up KAPLAN and got 640 score twice in the KAPLAN mock tests. I never thought it reflected the sectional scores properly, 'cause one time I had got all 37 correct in Quant and still received a 50. And also KAPLAN has less DS questions than the
OG 13th edition. For people who are good at Maths, I'd suggest sticking to
OG 13th. KAPLAN Verbal is tougher than the normal GMAT. So again, I'd suggest sticking to
OG if you're not good at Verbal since it only brings down your confidence (specially if you've less than 2 months for preparation).
I didn't do anything special really for my preparations. Took 4 mock tests on the GMAT Prep software. My scores were 710, 720, 760, 750. Though the last one I had taken before my actual exam was more than 10 days before. I was too busy with work and could hardly find time for preparations. For Verbal, I feel enrolling for the
e-GMAT Verbal course did help a lot. Although I had taken the Verbal Prep subscription, I could make time only for the Sentence Correction part and a little bit of Critical Reasoning. I have seen Manhattan's SC guide too, but I'd still say
e-GMAT's structure for SC is much better. I could actually see myself improving my accuracy over the period. For RC, I couldn't touch any material- not even
OG 13.
For IR, I hadn't touched it at all. And just one day before the exam, when I started practicing the 50 questions from
OG 13, I actually panicked. I was not able to time it well. Somehow just managed to do all 50 questions that day.
Exam Day - My exam time was from 4pm to 8pm. I reached the center at around 3pm. After passing away time somehow, got started with the exam. During the IR section, I got stuck at 1 question (probably 8th or 9th) and couldn't see any connection between the answer choices and the data that was provided. When I realized I was running short of time, I just made a guess and moved on. After taking the break, came back for the Quant section. Till the first 25-26 questions, everything was running smoothly. But after that questions started getting tough. I thought I was losing concentration and I kept talking to myself not to screw this opportunity. I had the last 6 questions to complete in less than 10 minutes. I somehow managed to complete. I wasn't really sure how it had gone.
Finally came out for the break, and again told myself to forget about the Maths section and concentrate on verbal. I always knew keeping my concentration for so long had always been a problem. I planned to take a small 1 minute break for myself after I was done with 25-26 questions. Even though my preparation for SC had given me some confidence, that day most of the questions were nothing like the ones I had seen. There were no real "rules" questions, if you know what I mean. Though surprisingly, I felt I was doing pretty well in the RC questions. Previously, I used to have a bad habit of going back to the passage every time and not being able to concentrate. It didn't happen that day. Though after I was done with all the sections, I was not sure how I had fared. I wanted to see a 710-720 (which is a good score for someone my age -I'm 30). But when I saw the 740, I was ecstatic. I was really happy about the 51 in Quant even though my score is less "balanced" than a Q50,V41-42 break-up. It was more of an ego thing