Quants took it away: 680 (Q46, V 37) AWA:6

Its funny..it really is!

All through my preparation, Verbal was my pain area and Quants was something I was comfortable with. Always finished quants with at least 10 minutes remaining and never scored less than 48 in the practice tests but the real thing was different and pulled down my score to a 680. And the worst part about a 680 is that its an average score - its a score which is in the range of scores of schools I want to apply to but its just that- average. If it were 640 or something, the next step would have been to retake but a 680 is like standing on a three way and banging you head to decide what to do next. So once the initial frustration is out here, let me breakdown my experience:

AWA: AWA was fine. Nothing unexpected. AWA infact helped me calm down my nerves and got me into the test taking mode. I had read chineseburned templates and they were very helpful in creating the very important basic structure. You can find the template here:
how-to-get-6-0-awa-my-guide-64327.html

Quants: First five questions were ok, I breezed through them and then the difficulty level increased and I was happy that I was doing fine. But after say 7th question, it became really different (I would not say difficult because the questions were not tough. They all were doable.) in the sense that they were long questions which took time to read and then with long calculations. For example, calculating area of odd shapes for which the only way was to breakdown the shape into rectangles and triangles - calculating the base or height, calculating individual areas and then summing it up. I got 2 questions like that. Doable but time consuming. I guess my entire quants experience was weird to say the least. I got at least 10 questions from geometry and co-ordinate geometry, 3-4 from compound interest calculations, few from probability and these questions came in rows. I got 4 co-ordinate questions in a row. And all this made me run out of time. I practically had to guess last 3 questions.

Verbal: Verbal was predictable. Very GPrep like. The question formats and structures were similar to Gprep. I got 4 passages out of which only one was super lengthy and rest were ok. The CR and SC questions were not very confusing however, SC did test some real skills

All in all, I am left confused after the test. I have decided to take a week's break and then may be jump again into the wagon and tame the GMAT. Wish me luck!!!

P.S. Tips to improve quants will be appreciated.

Edited to include AWA. Chienesesburned AWA template is amazing. I went through the template once or twice and got a 6.