The results are in! And the score is 720(Q47,V42), 6.0AWA

You didn't think I was going give you the score in the subject, where you didn't even have to click on the post? LOL It would be like the hero dying in the first 5 minutes of the movie!

Thanks you everyone (fresinha12, x2suresh, walker, brokerbevo, x-ali-x, apurva1985, raabenb, smkrn, jasonC [shout out to another Okie], gmatnub, bsd_lover, YihWei,, maratikus and anyone else that I may not be able to remember off the top of my head) that has been such an incredible help to me in preparing for this exam. I feel like I've come so far since the 650 at the end of April. I think I could have saved myself $250 if I would have found this place before my first attempt! Man, that would have been another school's application fee!

720 (Q47, V42)

While it's not as high as I think it could have been, I'm still very excited about it. I had been scoring 48-49 in quant, but then again, I was scoring 40-41 in Verbal, so it's a trade-off.

I think I"m capable of mid 700s, but at some point I have to start working on applications. The way I see it is that now, my score is the average or above for every business school in the country (Damn Stanford with a 721 average!) My only concern is that the adcoms would have rather seen a higher GMAT score in order to make up for my 3.05 UG GPA (that's all 4 years, not in major, which was like 3.7 or 3.8. I brought up my GPA from a 2.5 to a 3.05 in the last 3 semesters).

Now I guess it's on to the applications. I'm trying to decide if I should take Harvard off the list (a friend of mine graduated from there and wants me to apply there too). I figure for about the price of the Harvard app fee, I could add 2 other schools a bit down on the list. I'd have a better shot at getting into them, plus I would be adding 1 school.

As for the test:

AWA - Chineseburned is the best! I felt so prepared after reading through that AWA guide a few times. Hopefully the usage made sense, but i put "therefore" and "For example" and other key words in my essays so many times the scores should be good.

The quant seemd rather easy overall. I remember getting 1 or 2 questions that I thought "Holy crap, walker couldn't even answer this one!" I honestly thought that while sitting there taking the test. It may not be true, he probably could answer it, but that's the level I thought those few questions were. I only got 1 or 2 questions that I was able to use comb/perm on. I seemed to get quite a few DS questions, but then again, I don't like DS so they probably stand out in my mind moreso than the others. I got a couple of work problems (DS) and there were 2 questions I used a Venn Diagram on. i was surprised at that. When i was on question 35 i looked at the time and had 5 or 6 minutes left so I knew I had paced myself well.

Verbal

I'm strongest in verbal so I was not nervous for this part, although I really had to work during the break to get my mind out of the quant-mode and into verbal. I spent 2 -3 minutes of the break repeating "Subject-verb agreement, pronouns, modifiers, logical opposites, premises conclusions, weaken, support, " trying to get my mind thinking about those things again when all that seemed to be going through my head was numbers and more numbers!

I saw 4 RC passages, which I was happy about because RC is by far my strongest of all the verbal sections (thanks to all those cases in law school). The second most I think was CR passages and then SC. It seemed that I got a lot of SC passages where the entire sentence was underlines. I thought "Holy crap! I guess they mean sentence correction rather than phrase correction!" Then it struck me that this is easier. There are many more things that the authors have to get correct when correcting an entire sentence. Any error = the entire thing is wrong.

Kelli's advice on improving Verbal is spot on. Approach it very scientifically and use your ear only when you really can't decide. But even then, you should be able to limit the answer choices to 2 by eliminating answers that have obvious errors.

I noticed that the SC tended to have many misplaced modifiers. Like ", which" being used to refer to something earlier in teh sentence, but it was misplaced because the noun directly preceeding it didn't make sense as the antecedent.

Anyway, I've got another appointment at 1:30 (Going to the FAA to participate in a pilot study program and I get paid to fly their simulators! Woo Hoo this is a great day!)

Ask me any questions, and I'll be very happy to answer them. I will probably be back early evening and will get to them then.