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Hello everyone!

I wanted to share my GMAT experience with you all since I have benefited from looking at posts on this forum.

I am an Indian Engineer working in the field of Finance for the past 5 years. Having prepared for and qualified the competitive Engineering Entrance Exams after my high school, I was confident of doing well in Quant. However, as I did my schooling in a vernacular (Hindi) medium school, I knew I would face difficulties in Verbal.

I started my GMAT preparation with the official guide and took the diagnostic tests first. I did quite well in Quant and to my surprise even my RC and CR scores were pretty decent, but my Achille's' heel was Sentence Correction. I finished the verbal section of the official guide, but still was finding it very difficult to eliminate the wrong options in SC. Then a friend told me about Manhattan SC book. I bought the Manhattan SC book but found it to be a dry read and somehow finished it half - heartedly. One day while browsing Gmatclub I found out about the e-gmat course. I subscribed for the e-gmat Sentence Correction course and that proved to be the right decision in restrospect. The audio-visual lectures were a welcome break from the monotony of reading a book. I went through the lectures and solved the questions at the end of the concepts and my accuracy improved. I spent about 3 weeks in completing the SC course and after finishing the course I felt much more confident about my SC skills.

For Quant preparation, I used to watch Thursdays with Ron video lectures and really loved the lectures in the areas of Combinatorics, Inequality, Probability, and his lectures on Test taking strategies.

After doing the above, I took the GMATPrep exam 1 and scored a 740. I analyzed the test and noted the mistakes I made. I did not have enough time to take the full GMATPrep exam 2 so I just took the quant section of the test 1 day before the exam to keep my brain alert.

Test day:

I took a chocolate and a few bananas with me to the test center. The guy right next to me was having some issue and the staff at the center was helping him and this caused a bit of distraction to me during the AWA part. While finishing my essay I noticed a spelling mistake in the first line of my essay but as soon as I clicked on the word to rectify the mistake, the time was up and the essay got submitted. It was not an ideal start but I told myself it's no big deal as the essay is not a crucuail part of the GMAT exam. In the IR section I flatered a little bit on one question but recovered later to finish the section in time. Then took a break to freshen myself and eat a banana. Taking the quant section,I felt the questions were easier than I expected and I tried to keep my pace up in the earlier questions as I was expecting some harder questions in the end. Near the end I felt the questions got a little harder to crack but I was able to finish the quant section comfortably with 2min left. After getting done with Quant, I took a break again to freshen myself. The verbal section started with a few SC questions which I was able to tackle confidently. Then came a few CR questions and then a long passage. As the test went on, I found the SC questions to be more and more confusing. By the end of the test, I had to really focus to eliminate the answer choices in SC. When I finished the score I saw was an IR score of 8 and a 770 (Q50/V44). I was pleasantly surprised as I was not expeting such a high score in verbal.

I would like to say best of luck to everyone and specially to the gmatclub which has helped me immensely with its tons of helpful material on anything and everything related to GMAT and the MBA admissions process.