it´s finally over 740

740 Q49 V41

I did the test a couple days ago and just wanted to thank everyone on this forum, specially the math specialists!!!

I started preparing for the GMAT around Oct, I did some practice questions and realised immediately that my weakness was in math. I started coming to the site regularly doing the math questions and learning from how others solved the problems. I was really overwhelmed in the beginning but slowly got the hang of it and started to understand the GMAT pattern.

Being a native speaker, I always felt pretty confident about the verbal although I didn´t follow any strategies. My weakest part was definitely sentence correction but after doing all the questions in my test prep books, I began to see the common traps and felt more confident about it towards the end. Had regular practice on CR and very little on RC because of time constraints.

I took a 3 days off work to practice for the real test (test was on wed, so i had the long weekend) and did a practice test everyday, always with AWA section, it trained my stamina. My scores are as follows

GMAT Prep I 730
Kaplan 680
GAMT Prep II 710
PR 680
Kaplan 700
GMAT Prep I 740 (a few repeats but since the last one was a few weeks back, didn´t feel too cheated)
GMAT Prep II 760 (a few repeats but since the last one was a few weeks back, didn´t feel too cheated)


I made sure I had enough rest the night before the real test and went to bed at a reasonable hour, although I was too nervous to sleep too deeply. The test day went as expected, I got to the test center 30 mins earlier and waited for about 15 mins before the proctor let me start, there were other people taking the test but the noise was minimum, also because I wore earplugs (I had practiced with them as well just to simulate the real test). The AWA went ok, I had about 10 mins left and stayed in the room to get some rest. The Q was not as difficult as I had expected, the PS were pretty straightforward but the DS were quite tricky. I had a lot of absolute value, inequalities and number properties, a few geometry and word problems but no probability nor combination. I had about 10 mins left in the end and used 7 mins for the last question although I was sure of the answer. Took the break and started the Verbal. The RC passages were very easy to read, I had 2 very short ones and 2 medium ones and the questions were quite straighforward. Lots of sentence correction questions, luckily I didn´t have the long underlined sentences, I had a lot of short but quite tricky ones but i think i did alright. CR was very ambiguous, I was unsure of almost every question, so i took enough time to read through the answer choices and to eliminate as many as possible. I didn´t feel good about them and thought I was doing really badly. I had about 15 mins left when i finished the test, and since I couldn´t wait to see the score, I didn´t bother to take extra time to answer the last 10 questions. I couldn´t believe my eyes when I saw my verbal score, I guess I did get a couple of the CR right.

Anyway, just wanted to tell you all that it is doable. I didn´t study as intensively as many people in the forum but i think you need to know yourself and how you learn best, sometimes it´s the concentration that matters. I work long hours and almost never had time during the week to study so I used my lunchhour to browse the forum, doing math questions and I used the weekends to do one test and the review. I get tired and disinterested easily so I also took many breaks while studying on the weekend. My advice is to study the way you feel good about, it´s the quality that counts

Good luck everyone!!!!