I took the GMAT this morning and got a 650 (Verbal 84% and Quant 63%). I am really bummed out and was expecting to do much better. I have spent the past three months preparing, using Kaplan's online program along with OG11. I have taken three Kaplan tests over the course of this period and achieved the following scores:
Kap1: 590
Kap2: 570
Kap3: 580
Kap4: 600
Kap5: 640
I did not take any powerprep tests and this is probably one of my big mistakes. Based on what I heard from other peoples' experience with Kaplan, namely, that Kap tests are much more difficult than the real thing, I figured I would be able to achieve a +700 score. Anyways, I seriously underestimated the difficulty of the real thing.
I really want to go to a top school and need at least a +700. However, I am totally burned out right now and emotionally drained from the GMAT. I am applying for 2007 matriculation and therefore have plenty of time to prepare. I don't know whether I should rethink my schools or give the GMAT another shot.
I should also note, that I did not feel like I was in the right mind set going into the exam this morning. I know its easy to make up excuses, but I truly did not get more than 4 hours of sleep last night. I was totally stressed out and quite tired when I took the test this morning. Regardless, there were a number of questions on the quant. section that I was not able to answer.
To give you some feedback on the questions I encountered: The questions were much more difficult than anything that I have seen in
the official guide, especially in the math section. There seemed to be an inordinate number of word problems. Alot of the questions were quite tricky and not nearly as straight forward as anything in th
OG. I honestly believe that the
OG materials as well as Kaplan do not prepare you well enough to achieve a really high quant. score (especially when it comes to probability and comb./perm.).
As far as the verbal goes, nothing truly surprising. I did get one nasty bold face CR question, the others were all similar to what one sees in the
OG. I got 4 RC passages, three relatively short ones and one long and convoluted science passage. The sentence correction were also quite tricky. SC has always been my strength and there was a couple of questions where I had to spend quite a bit of time eliminating the answer choices.
Anyways, I am quite bummed out at the moment and am trying to figure out what my next steps should be. If any of you could offer some advice or if you have been in a similar situation and were able to improve your score in the order of magnitude that I am planning on, I really would appreciate it. Best of luck to any of you taking the exam in the near future.