Thanks to the Almighty.... 740 on the 1st attempt.

It hasn't been even an hour since I left my centre and already I'm on gmatclub. Woke up by 8 (which is quite early by my standards.. my office starts at 9 and is 5 minutes away from home whereas the Pearson Vue centre is a full 15 minutes..). Didn't have much of a breakfast. Pretty much left for the centre on an empty stomach. On arriving at the centre, found that they don't have a parking facility. Had to park my car in the middle of the road in an area which is known for cars being towed away...

After doing away with the formalities came the AWA. Fortunately, the argument presented was hugely flawed and I didn't have much trouble taking it apart. Apart from maybe poor grammar somewhere, I expect a 4+ score. Then the IR. Cant say that I did very well over there. Multisource was very dry and I ended up just running through them and ended up answering only 11 of the 12. Will be happy with a 4+ score on IR and hopefully it wouldn't matter much.

Quants : I skipped the break since the one minute given to read the instructions was enough for me. I should say the quants were easier than expected. Infact, by the time I had crossed the 30th question, they were getting so simple, I was starting to get worried that I wasn't doing well. The last question, I had selected the answer choice but however could not click next before the timer ran out. So not sure whether that would have counted. Now my mind was telling me.. "Okay, you've answered the questions fairly well and maybe the questions getting easier towards the end was just good luck.. So lets not think about that and move on to verbal."

Verbal : I should say luck was greatly on my side on verbal. My weak area was RC especially when it is about some dull historic event, but fortunately got only one of those and the remaining were fairly simple. SCs were very easy at the beginning and got tougher towards the end. Guess I would not have got any of the SCs after 30 correct. CR was overall easier than expected and I can say with some level of confidence that I would have got all CRs right. I finished the verbal section with about a minute to spare.

The came another set of formalities like reconfirming the data given on mba.com and selecting the schools to send the scores to filling up all of which was very frustrating as I could not wait to see the results. Finally after having entered all the required data and after the longest 10 seconds of 2012 the results showed:

Quantitatve : Scaled Score : 49, Percentile : 83
Verbal : Scaled Score : 42, Percentile : 96
Total : Scaled Score : 740, Percentile : 97

Update : AWA : 5.5, IR : 8

Would be an understatement to say I was overjoyed. For someone who's only source of study had been the internet and who had been getting scores in the 690 range on practice tests, this score was a really pleasant surprise. Now only have to wait and hope that my IR scores wont dampen this joy.

Gmatclub has been a great source of study and support for me. Many thanks to BB for creating this wonderful site. Valuable insights from Bunuel, Caracass, Evajager and VeritasPrep Karishma to name a few have been great sources of study. And most of all, I would be lying if I said that I did not believe that there was some divine intervention. Thanks to the Almighty.

Best Wishes and Best Of Luck to all future GMAT takers.

PS : One note of caution I would like to add - especially for Tamil people (we typically do not have surnames and the "Last Name" column in our passports usually carry our father's name). I had actually scheduled the exam on the 8th of November but on getting to the test center, I learnt to my dismay that the name that I had applied with did not match that on the passport. So that was $250 down the drain. Apparently, this happens very often at the Chennai facility. So, when scheduling the appointment KEEP YOU PASSPORT AT HAND. The first name and last name might each be more than one word.