A nice sunny day - 720 (Q50-90%, V40-91%) -94%

Question

The local weather anchor had predicted that today will be a rainy day with dark looming clouds, but it turned out to be warm and sunny day. My day started out similarly with clouds of anxiety and ended up bright and sunny.

Thanks to everyone at GMAT club who provided invaluable tips and insights, wonderful discussions and great moral support to help me achieve this! I am a way too tired right now to provide more details as am starting to see stars. I will try to give more information about my preparation soon. Meanwhile, if you have any specific questions let me know.

gmat2me2 · Answer

Welldone Nocilis!!

Praetorian · Answer

Congratulations nocilis !

I am sure you have many valuable experiences to share with all of us. Looking forward to your post. take care Praetorian

MA · Answer

Ohhhhhh very Surprising Nocilis. i was thinking your test date is yet to come.

Congratulations to you on your excellent performance in the GMAT test. 
I am glad to hear about your gr8 score. It is really a good news. 

I am sure you will share your experiances partuculary question type in RC (what kinds of passages e.g. science, sociasl science, business), level of difficulties in CR and SC questions, QT (perm, comb, prob, and so on). 

I must thank you for your every cooperation and support. 
Good luck with all your future endeavors. 

MA

Paul · Answer

Awesome score nocilis. Wow, the good news just keep flocking in! I'm glad that our old members are performing this well! :woohoo

HongHu · Answer

Oh my congratulations nocilis! That is wonderful! I'm so happy for you! Go have your celebrating party and then come back to see us!

Vithal · Answer

Excellent score!!! and well deserving too!

Congrats nocilis....and all the best for your app!

banerjeea_98 · Answer

wow ! That's awesome, I always knew u were a 700+ material. Congrats !Plz share with us ur preparation, practice scores etc. Party time for you :-D

Hjort · Answer

Great Job!

jpv · Answer

Congratulations nocilis!!! Excellent Score... :musband

Do let us know ur test experience...

mckenna · Answer

Great score Nocilis. Awesome!! Everyone on the forum was expecting a great score from you. You surely didn't disappoint us. Great job. Party time!

Look forward to your post with details, particularly of the verbal part of the test.

nocilis · Answer

Thanks for the kind words folks! Everyone of you helped me out in the past three months and I owe it to you. Here is some information about how I started and continued with my preparation. I have also included my practice scores in the hope that it will help some of you.

Math, Science and Engineering were pretty much what I did all my life resulting in my getting Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in the USA. I had moved from Chennai, India to the USA for my masters and later continued to work here. I have been in the Software industry as an Engineer for 6 years and I had been thinking about taking the GMAT for the past few years, but had postponed it for one reason or the other. Most of these reasons were made up and don't even come a million mile close to the meaning of the word 'reason'. 

This situation however changed about four months ago when I was at a company business conference in New Orleans where my company had arranged for an evening of entertainment with all the stereo-typical New Orleans attractions from live Jazz music to fortune tellers. I was curious as to what my future holds for me and decided to speak to the fortune teller at the club as many of my co-workers had. The fortune teller was an import, a Swiss lady who advertised herself as somebody who could read tarot cards and tell your fortunes in three different languages - English, French, and German. She reiterated that you can pick the language in which you want to hear your fortunes. Since my French was limited to 'Pardonnez moi madame', and the little German I had learned had long been 'Vergessen ', I listened in English to what my future holds. She drew some tarot cards for me and the next few words she said made me fall out of my chair. She didn't say that 'you should take the GMAT' outright, but she could have as well said just that. She said that I was going to study in the near future and the only way I could interpret it was that I was going to do an MBA. With my future made very clear by the Swiss lady at a New Orleans club, I was now ready to take on the scary green monster, that shoots misplaced modifiers at you, the GMAT.

Honestly, I don't believe in fortunes, but what better way to start-off preparing for GMAT knowing that you are going to succeed as a Swiss fortune teller had predicted. Taking a cue from the Google search results, I duly joined GMAT Club approximately a week before I started my preparation in December. Being a non-native English speaker I knew I had to concentrate on the verbal part and I tried to approach it scientifically. The irregular Latin derived verbs such as 'is', which changes to 'was', 'to be', 'have been', 'had been', 'would' and 'were' in different tenses without any pattern or any rhyme or reason made me think that this language cannot be dissected scientifically. But, a bit more understanding of the rules for modifiers, subject-verb agreement and parallelism slowly revealed a semblance of sanity hidden in the language. I decided that this was the time to imbibe the rules of English grammar that my high-school English teacher had miserably failed to impart into my grey matter and that GMAT club was going to help me achieve this.

I believe that GMAT Club discussions for verbal is by far the best in the internet where you can get quick answers and therefore I spent quite a bit of time over the past three months solving as many SC questions as possible here, explaining my reasoning most of the times. Initially I would give pretty bad explanations for the â€˜feels-right answer' I had in my mind, but later my explanations got better and actually made sense to me â€“â€˜I learnt as I postedâ€™. I will have to say that reading explanations of the experts and learning by osmosis here hugely helped me with SC. Although critical reasoning came naturally to me, the enormous number of CR postings in the site provided me with enough practice to tackle even the toughest GMAT CRs.

 Preparation Material: 
The standard materials: Kaplan, Kaplan 800, Princeton Review, OG 10, LSAT book (CR, RC). OG tops the list as a must complete book!

 Special Technique: 
Built flash cards for every mistake I made and constantly revised them. If I made an error in the use of elliptical clause, I would make a flash card with the whole sentence written on it with explanations. At the end I had about 50 odd 2-sided verbal cards and 30 odd 2-sides math cards. I think this helped me to refresh my memory constantly and also helped me to revise the problem areas when needed.

 Error Logs:  
Kept records of my exams in a file. Did problems in note-books and went back to revise problems that I got wrong. Most of the times I was repeating my mistakes.

 Practice scores: 
Kaplan Diagnostics - 680
Kaplan CAT 1 - 640
Kaplan CAT 2 - 630
Kaplan CAT 3 - 650
ETS Papers 1-6: 720-780
PowerPrep 1: 750 (after a bit of OG) three weeks before GMAT
PowerPrep 2: 770 (after a bit of OG) three weeks before GMAT

PR - CAT1 - (51Q, 44V) ~750, 4 days before GMAT
PR - CAT2 - (51Q, 42V) ~740, 3 days before GMAT

 Challenges: 
I took the first challenge before I started my preparation. I did not quite remember that '0' was even and had never encountered a DS before. That was Challenge 13: 83%. I stopped taking challenges for sometime after that as I was mostly concentrating on verbal. Then I took about 5-6 more challenges. The rough scores are:

Challenge 1: 98%
Challenge 2: 92%
Challenge 3: 88%
Challenge 4: 89%
Challenge 5: 96%
Challenge 15 or 16?: 56% (Got interrupted and dropped out).

I think the Challenges are great and help a lot as a practice tool. But, the GMAT math is easier than the challenges ... whew! Thanks a lot to Praet, ChallengeMaker, bb and others involved in creating these tests â€“ I appreciate it!

I will write more about the test day and the test as I get respite from my work.

swath20 · Answer

Great show Nocilis!!! Keep it up

maaverick · Answer

Great score, Nocilis (I just realized your name is the mirror image of the word "silicon")!!

Good luck with your apps!

praveen_rao7 · Answer

nocilis,
 Congrats on your great score. Feels good to get that GMAT monkey off the back?, isn't it?. Good luck with the applications.

jpv · Answer

Hey nocilis..
couple of questions:
1. How did you manage ur timing in Verbal during exam and what was ur speed?
2. How were you feeling during exam in Verbal portion compared with what u used to feel during practise tests?

:thanks

and

for ur apps.

and

for ur apps.

nocilis · Answer

A little delayed, but here is my test experience anyway. Week before: During the week of the exam, I took three practice CAT exams and I spent the day before the exam reviewing my notes and the error logs as I wanted to peak during the real GMAT and not in my practice exam. I visited to test center five days before the exam as many people in this forum had suggested. In a few practice exams I also used a head-phone (unconnected) so that when I use the headphones during the exam, I am already well accustomed. Center: The San Jose Prometric center is well organized. They provide big red head phones that virtually eliminate all ambient noise. I don't remember hearing any noise or even the sound of other people typing during the exam. :good

The breaks are timed, but the next section does not start until someone presses OK, so one can take 5-10 minute break without worrying about whether the next section is going to start after 5 minutes. Exam: I signed the agreement from ETS and the exam started duly around 8:30 am. AWA argument topic was straight forward. I jotted down the points, wrote down the opening and the conclusion first and then filled the rest of the section. In the analysis of issue there were multiple flaws - an analogy and a causal. I pointed out the flaws and provided ways for the argument to be strengthened. I wish I had a bit more time to revise what I wrote. With AWA out of the way, I plunged into the Math section. I felt that the Math questions were easy. Even after I was on the 10 th question I some how did not see the exam getting any harder. But I knew I got every one of the questions. Around the middle of the exam, I got a tough probability question with some geometry involved - I nailed it. I had a bit of difficulty with DS question dealing with inequalities, at the lag end of the section, so I had to spend some time checking and double-checking the answer. I finished math with 4 minutes remaining. Overall, I thought I did well and thought that 51 was possible. One point to note: The difficulty level of exam was like a roller-coaster increasing and decreasing throughout the exam. Verbal section was a different beast. The first two sentence correction questions were tough. They were not simple subject-verb or misplaced modifiers or pronoun error questions. Both of them were complicated in their structure and meaning and were testing multiple concepts. I used POE to eliminate some choices and finally decided on an answer choice with about 90% surety. This troubled me a lot and put me into a mindset which could have ruined my exam. But having taken many practice exams, I told myself not to worry about it and move on and I did. Having practiced in the GMAT club, I thought that the non-boldface CRs that I got were jokes. You could eliminate all but one choice in the CR and I loved it! Around the 20 th question, I got a BoldFace - It was moderately tough, but with POE, most of you can crack it. The RCs were long (or at least I felt like that), and I read them as if my life depended on it. Then I got one tough son-of-a-gun Boldface. I narrowed down the answer down to two choices, both of which seemed exactly the same. With time running out, I picked one and moved on. Sentence correction questions got a bit easier later and finally I finished the exam with one minute to spare. I did not have a great feeling about the verbal section. I came with the hope that I could score 44-46 in Verbal, and I knew ETS wouldn't let me. After completing the survey, I was very happy to see that I did well and that did not mess up verbal terribly after all. A call to my wife who was more excited than I was, confirmed that I had in fact scored well! :done

A few advice to future test takers: * Try tough verbal questions. Read all questions from best of the verbal section in GMAT club. Don't be too happy answering questions that you have solved earlier. Try newer questions, complicated questions. * Be active in CR discussions, doing so will make your exam experience easy. * Practice Math by taking Math challenges. This will make the exam seem not so tough. * Don't be worried about Kaplan CAT scores. * Best wishes!

nocilis · Answer

Answers inline.

nocilis · Answer

Yes, that wasn't accidental of course! 
Just wanted to be mysterious like the Morpheus of the 'Matrix'

Folaa3 · Answer

congrats nocilis and good luck

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A nice sunny day - 720 (Q50-90%, V40-91%) -94%

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