i printed out this post on tuesday and was just reading it at the coffee shop. was going to spend the remaining time studying but thought i should rush home and make a reply (also my first post because i joined this club on monday).
what is said by praetoria and by his materials on this site, about eliminating mistakes and nailing down timing, is the key.
i too have been studying for the gmat for a while. let's just say the gmat has been the bane of my existence and a hobby for the past 2.5 years. two years ago i took kaplan, because of work i wasn't able to put 100%, took the test and the computer said, mister, here is your 570. i left the test center and when i got in my car i almost cried. this year year i said balls out, whatever it takes. so i signed up with
MGMAT. i especially like their material, how they identify which
OG problems are challenge level problems.
MGMAT has very good CATs on their CD which are very reflective of the real test. i've had to study real hard in SC and CR. because i moved around alot when i was young, i never properly learned grammar. on top of the MGAT SC material (which is very good), i read the random house handbook, and the grammar and diagramming sentences book by DeVincentis-Hayes. the last book tought stuff i should have learned in 7 th grade. my sc was so poor that i had little understanding of adverbs, adjectives, verbals, identify subject, objects, direct objects, prepositions... let just say i was very bad with SC.
so i took the test this past monday (aug. 23), i was expecting to score at least in the 660-680 range (kaplan,
MGMAT, PP all said so). but mr. computer at ETS said i got a 580. this time i didn't want to cry, i was pissed. on the drive back home i analyzed what i did wrong, i think it all comes down to timing and not screwing up the last 5 questions. my mistake, granted very stupid, was i guessed on the last 8 quant questions, and last 6 verbal questions. i felt i was doing really well in quant, seeing very hard questions (eg. question 3 was a combinatorics question, 5 was a probability question, 7 crazy exponent, 10 was a difficult geometry question); and in verbal i saw difficult CR and SC sentences (you recognize a difficult SC when the whole sentence is underlined and the question is testing 3 or more topics). but in both sections because I spent too much time in the first half, i did not have much time in the second half.
what this site says about the last 15 to 20 questions in quant being average is very true. even the last 8 questions i guessed on were of average difficulty and required time to solve, which i didn't have.
so now it is back to the drawing table. i too want to go to a great MBA school, i too want to make a difference in the business world. what i am concentrating on now is becoming an emotionless and accurate testing machine. i had dinner with a friend who just finished his master, and we discussed his gre testing experience. he score 99th percentile in both the quant and analytical. he said his problem in quant was timing (sound familiar!) and how he overcame that was by doing alot of problem sets, working on his accuracy, increasing his accuracy to the point where his first calculation and intuition were always right. in the beginning he use to double or triple check (which i did on monday), but after practicing for a month, he was able to do 100 hundred problems (averaging less than 1.5 minutes for a problem) and miss only 1 question. that is an error rate of 1% or what i like to think 100%-1% = 99% percentile!
so i say keep on keeping on. from what you have written i'm sure you're going to score well. like what praetorian said, keep a good mistake matrics, make sure you understand what you got wrong and don't make the same mistake again. make sure you have enough time to finish all the questions.
another piece of advice, don't sweat the AWA, if you have a hard time writing in a timed situation the AWA will likely cause stress that will carry on into the quant sections (what happened to me the first time i took the test). just write the AWA like you are writing a memo to a work colleague or a friend. take the five minute break, go outside the testing center get a breath of fresh air, go to the bath room and splash water on your face. go back in and kick some butt in the quant section. take the next five minute break to refocus. go back in and rock the verbal. be a emotionless, efficient, and accurate machine.
good luck and i hope you do well.
p.s. oh yeah, since i'm kicking it into high gear and studying to take the test again in 4 weeks, where can i get some more problem sets of all question types and where i could find challenging questions?