Hi Everyone,
I came across this forum only a few days back and, unfortunately, could not use it for my GMAT preparation. However, it was really helpful to read about the experiences of the folks who had appeared for the exam recently. Everyone has some anxieties about the new GMAT (Pearson Vue) and this forum helped answer my doubts. I feel it is a wonderful resource and kudos to the founders.
I gave the exam on 5/25/06 and would like to share my experience with all of you.
Score – 770
Math – 49 (90 percentile)
Verbal – 46 (99 percentile)
Let me start by saying I myself was pleasantly shocked when I received this score. In almost every practice exam I took (GMAT powerprep, Princeton Review, and Arcos) I scored between 670 and 720. This is my experience about the Math and Verbal section:
Math:
It was definitely tougher than the practice tests. The questions were not difficult, but time consuming to solve. (At least that was my experience) I did not get any tricky probability questions, but several on co-ordinate geometry and property of numbers.
By the time I reached Question 36 I had 2 minutes left. I spent little over a minute and could not finish solving it. Thus, I guessed and moved to Q 37. I clicked on the answer for Q 37, but before I could confirm I ran out of time L
In majority of my practice exams I scored at least 50 in the Math section and the real score was below my average.
Verbal:
I think the Verbal was very similar to the
OG. Majority of the questions were SC (my weakest area) and almost an equal number of CR and RC. I got four passages, but I read pretty fast and usually do pretty well in RC. Only a few of the CR were tricky and I got one with the underlined statements. I was able to eliminate 3 of the 5 choices and am 75% confident I picked the right answer.
In a lot of the practice exams I used to get 8-9 of the SC wrong and that was what always tanked my score. The level of SC was very similar to
OG and I was fortunate to be familiar with some of the idioms tested. There were a few times when I had picked one answer, but then being paranoid about SC looked at the choices again and realized how I had fallen in the trap laid out for me. As SC was my weakness I spent more than 2 minutes at an average on each question and that really paid off.
My final Verbal score was 46 and in none of the practice exams I touched 40.
My Preparation:
I practiced exams from Arcos, Princeton Review, and the Pearson Vue CD. I spent about 1.5 months on preparation. As I am working full-time I did do two exams every weekend and spend the weekdays working through
OG. I spent a lot of time on
OG and solved every question. I kept track of every mistake I made (or even the ones that confused me) and went over them again. SC was the only section I did a second time.
Let me repeat what everyone says – if you don’t have
OG then go and get it. It is the most valuable resource if you want to score high on the GMAT (at least that is my two cents worth).
Good luck to everyone who will be taking the exam and we might run into each other on other forums as we start working on our application for Fall 2007.