First GMAT Attempt - 710 (Q49 V38 IR7)

Hey there!

I wanted to share my experience giving the GMAT for the first time last week at a test center. I began preparing for the GMAT at the end of March of this year. I took a cold diagnostic and got a 680 with a Q49. I was confident I could replicate that number and didn't make an effort to improve the score. In my second mock I scored a 710 with a V38. Although I posted about a month ago in the forum about improving my verbal, I was unable to see any improvements with brushing up on verbal basics. On the contrary, I lost more points after going through the verbal section of the mocks trying to categorize questions based on my understanding of basic principles. Went through mocks 3 and 4 and got a 690 and a 680(in this one I even lost a point in quant). At this point I stopped what I was doing and tried to get back in to trusting my ears to solve questions, although that might have brought me back to square one.

Coming to the test day, I packed myself a water bottle, a couple of Snickers and got to the test center an hour early. The center was closed since it was too early for it, so I sat down and read a couple of sub 600 RC paragraphs to warm up. As soon as I sat down I put in my ear plugs and headphones and started with verbal, because I wanted to get it over with. Everything was fairly simple and I was making great time with all my questions. With 16 minutes left I had about 7 questions left in the verbal section. Then came a long 4- question passage. I could not for the life of me make any sense of what the author was trying to convey. It had three paragraphs, and way too much fluff, at least that's what I thought.

I noted down a few things in my scratchpad and went for the questions. But I was unable to eliminate more than a couple of options in every question, and had to resort to guessing on them. I knew I had the time for maybe skimming through the passage one more time, but for some reason I just kept moving on to the next question. I'm pretty sure that passage cost me at least 4-5 points.

Took a break and had a sip of water and ate my chocolate. Time ran so fast during that break. I sat back down after what felt like a couple of minutes, but I'd apparently taken 7 minutes already. Started my quant section, and just kept solving whatever I could. I finished the section comfortably within 50-55 minutes and skipped my optional break. The IR was smooth, and although the keyboard was painfully crappy, I completed my AWA section.

I had this false assumption that I could get a way better score than my highest mock. And I probably could have gotten it if not for that one RC. But I guess the ceiling got too high for me that day. I am now waiting for my official score to show up in the mba portal so that I could get my ESR and retake the exam in a few weeks.

Any advice about retake strategy appreciated!