660 - horrible Pearson VUE experience!!

Hi guys

I'd like to share my horrendous gmat experience with you all!!

I was scheduled to give my test thursday last week. I received my test confirmation letter from pearson vue sometime in Nov 2005. It had the contact details for the test center. So a week before my test day, I called up and spoke to a staff member there. She confirmed the date, time etc etc and told me about the famous "erasable noteboard" business. So I thought .. ok .. its all good .. all sorted. I was glad to get that worry off my shoulders. I focused on some last week study and was all set to attack on G-day!

I reach the test center an hour before my scheduled time and find that all doors are locked and there's no one around. I was a little worried but thought perhaps I was too early (it was 8.15am or and my test was at 9.15am). So I waited for about half an hour and in the meantime tried to call them up. Surprise surprise .. there was no answer! I was getting frantic because my test was supposed to start in 15 mins! Finally I managed to get someone on the line and she tells me ... "those guys have moved out of there 2 months ago!!! You're at the wrong place!" ! I just didn't know what to say .. I was almost in tears!! But luckily she said .. you're not too far from the new test center location .. she gave me directions with about 20 different roads and by the time she finished saying all that .. my very dearest cellphone decided to die on me! Perfect timing I'd say!!

Anyways, speeding like mad I finally reached the address she gave me only to find that the actual building where I was supposed to sit the test was across the road .. so we walked down to the "final destination" and I was almost 45 mins late for my test. I decided .. NO WAY am I sitting the test in this condition. I showed them the confirmation letter and said "do what you like but I am not sitting the test today. I want you to reschedule it"! The people at the test center were quite considerate though and agreed to reschedule the test. Next mission was to get hold of VUE (US)! After half a day of getting put on hold and getting transferred from one service to another .. the task was finally accomplished! Got the test rescheduled for the next day! Phew!

And as if all this wasn't enough .. finally I ended up with a crap score too! I was pretty confident to score atleast 700! But no! gmat had something else in store for me ...

First attempt - (Nov 2005) - 640 [Q=47, V=32]
Second attempt - (Jan 2006) - 660 [Q=49, V=32]

I can't believe it .. after all the analysing/reviewing/studying and hardwork for two months including the christmas/new year break, I end up with a mere 20 points improvement!! This can't be it!

As for the test:
I found the quantitative section pretty similar to GMATPrep. Got plenty of DS questions throughout - prime numbers, even/odd numbers, integer properties, geometry. The PS questions were fairly straightforward - rate, mixture, probability, perms/combs, interest. All in all I think GMATPrep is very close to the real test!

Verbal - well ... it started with some nasty long twisted SC's. And after about 5 ques, I got two RC's one after another - one was about 70 lines and the other about 40 lines. They were not too bad! Hence I'm guessing I screwed the first few SC's and so got easy RC's resulting in a low overall score Or could there be a different explanation for the low score?? Apart from that the rest of the verbal was pretty similar to OG/GMATPrep .. got a couple of BF CR's ..mannn I really struggled on those ones .. had no idea what the BF parts were doing!

I am really disappointed with my verbal score and want to give it another shot! But I don't see much point in resitting the test if I don't know how to improve!

Can someone pls suggest good practice material/strategies for verbal. I have exhausted kaplan800, kaplan 04/05, OG 10 and don't want to go over familiar questions. A lot of ppl on this forum mention the 1000 SC, 1000 RC, 1000 CR documents. Where can I find these? What other resources could i use? I have just ordered the PR 'cracking the GMAT' book with CD. I havent done any PR material .. so hopefully those questions will all be new to me. Any other suggestions guys ... all those experts out there .. pls help! I desperately need practice material!

I'm thinking of re-sitting the test by feb 15! So I really need some advice to help me achieve my goal of 700+ asap!

I dont want to give up but I'm very close to doing so!! Stop me!!


Thanks
eskay