Hi Guys,
I am also one of the victims of 10/01/2011, having scored only 560(Q47, V21). Although I was never fully prepared and did not spend enough time practicing for the questions, I never felt I will get this kind of score in the real test. I felt I should be somewhere in range of 30-35 in verbal, based on my scores on GMATPrep and tests from other vendors. However, I got completely beaten by real GMAT.
My test experience wasn't that bad except few quant questions which definitely threw me off the track. I never expected questions with this difficulty on GMAT real test. Just to put in the context, few questions from Geometry and probability were taking so long that I ended up guessing at least five questions at the end. Nonetheless, I was always confident that I should get somewhere in the range of 47-49 even if I guess those questions in the end.
Verbal started with two sentence correction questions--really tricky ones, with multiple commas to distract. I had no clue but solved using POE. After these questions, it was all smooth till 45 mins. CR questions were pretty easy. One short RC question within 10 questions. After these 10 questions, I realized that the test was going pretty smooth. I had no problem. By this time, I had solved one very long RC, one short RC, few CR questions and SC questions. After this point, GMAT started reacting crazy and throwing really tricky questions on SC, questions that I was definitely not able to solve even within 2 mins. To add to my misery, I got one more long RC passage, then few SC and RC questions combined, and I knew I was running 6 mins late from my target time. Since I have had enough for the day, I was expecting really easy questions at the end. But to my surprise, I got one more lengthy RC passage, I really did not have time to read this completely, so skimmed through it and solved questions faster than my usual speed. I was really late by then and had to guess few questions at the end. I guessed at least 2-3 questions in the end. Even after going through all this, I was expecting my score not to be this bad, and thought score should be somewhere in the range of 30-35. But when I saw the score, I was shocked to have 21 on verbal.
So far, my preparation has been all books from
MGMAT, Aristotle SC Grail, Power score CR, 10-15 passages from RC99, OG12,
OG verbal book, and few
GMAT Club tests.
My target is at least 720, but I would love to score 740
. I am not sure if this is achievable in next 45 days. I think I don't have enough practice on RC questions and need to really focus on RC questions. Each day from now, I am planning to solve 3 RCs, some of them from RC99 and some from OGs. Nevertheless, my biggest concern is SC. I have never been able to solve SC questions within 1 min. I always used to solve SC questions with the strategy: read the question stem, find out weaknesses in the question stem itself first, reject the choices with this weakness, find out mistakes in other options, then try to fit in the best option in the sentence to see if it fits grammatically with the sentence. This strategy used to take good 2 mins for me to solve any SC question. With this strategy, I was never able to finish verbal section on time and had to always guess 2-3 questions at the end. So as per my friend's recommendation, I tried split strategy in the real exam. This may have been the culprit for plummeting my score to this level. I need to plan well now and get good practice in SC and RC before I attempt next GMAT. Can you guys please recommend me the strategy that may be effective for me with respect to time management, considering the changes in SC area. Also, I need recommendation about LSAT material. Do you guys think I should try LSAT material to get some practice on CR and RC?