Hey guys,
I am a silent member of this forum. I took GMAT today and score 660(Q49 and V31). This forum is a great place and for me, it was very motivating to read other people's debrief. Here's my story:
BackgroundIndian IT male with 6 yrs of exp(another typical applicant). Only few extra-curricular activities but nothing special.
Applying to Canadian B-schools only.
I started my preparation 10 weeks back and referred to following material:
OG 12 - Must do, closest to real exam questions
Manhattan SC - Good for concepts but do practice
OG/GMAT prep questions multiple times.
PowerScore CR bible (few chapters) - Nice book but for CR, practice is absolute must. Practice all questions from
OG.
1000 SC/CR/RC - did only first 100 questions of 1000 SC and 1000 CR. For CR practice, excellent resource.
Kaplan 800 - Did go through some sections but found nothing useful. You can avoid spending time on this book.
GMAT prep - Try to give it at least 4 times. There are some threads in which people have posted all GMAT prep SC and Maths questions(700+). Make sure you go through them after finishing GMAT prep.
CATS
GMAT Prep 1 - 640 (Q49,V28)
MGMAT CAT 1 - 650 (Q44,Q35)
MGMAT CAT 2 - 660 (Q46,V34)
GMAT prep 1 retake - 670 (Q49,V33)
MGMAT CAT 3 - 680 (Q47,V36)
GMAT prep 2 - 700 (Q50,V34)
MGMAT CAT 4 - 600 (Q47,V26)
MGMAT CAT 5 - 670 (Q47,V34)
Test dayAll bad things which could happen, happened on the test day(Murphy in full force) Anyways, remained calm and none of those bad things affected my test performance.
AWAI got topics on which I could have written many points. So it was easy.
QuantI was expecting 50 in Quant.At no point during the exam time did I feel that the exam is difficult. Maths was pretty straight forward except 2-3 questions. I'd even rate GMAT prep questions harder than the questions I came across during the GMAT though the structure was almost the same.
MGMAT CAT exams are much tougher and I never scored above 47 in those CATs. Except one difficult geometry problem, I never faced any tricky issues also. Time wise also, I was perfect. I had 23 minutes to left for solving last 10 questions and 3 minutes for last question. Dont know how GMAT works.
VerbalSC was always my weakness and I had worked on it but it got exposed during the exam. SC was the only part which I found difficult than GMAT prep and
MGMAT. There were some killer sentences on which i couldnt apply any of the grammar rules. RC and CR were OK. Surprisingly CR passages were always 3-4 lines only though I was used to 8-10 lines always. RC questions were also simple - nothing fancy. I never had timing problems in this section also. Never felt like rushing through any question. I was expecting at least 35.
Now planning to retake the test in another one month. Pls let me know how to improve on verbal(at least 37) and also how to reach from 49 to 50 on Quant.