I took the GMAT for the second time today and scored 650 (Q47, V33). Overall 80 percentile. Although it is an improvement from my 600 (Q45, V28) in july (
8-t66792), but needless to say that I am disappointed. I had hoped to reach the 700 mark this time but that was not to be as I bottled for the second time. I can almost see the dream of doing my MBA from a reputed school vanishing. I have two options. Either to apply to the 2nd tier schools here in Europe or to muster some courage for one final flourish knowing that most of my effort can be invested towards verbal should I decide to retake. For the time being though, I feel totally drained out and sapped of energy. Now I am going on vacation tomorrow and I hope the next 10 days away from anything remotely related to study/work/GMAT should help me reenergize and help gain some perspective on my current situation and on my next steps.
Back to my test day experience in case it is of help to someone.
I had my appointment scheduled at 8.30 in the morning. Reached the centre about 1 hour in advance. Had a good breakfast and came to the reception at 8. Went through the formalities of photo/fingerprinting etc and was immediately allowed to start. AWA was fine. Never had any trouble with it. I had got 5.5 on my first attempt and hence decided not to spend too much energy on stamina on the essays.
Quant started with a fairly simple question and up until question 13/14, I was fairly confident with my answers. After that, started getting nasty DS questions which involved loads of calculation. I started loosing time and hence ended up guessing a few of them between 20th and 30th questions. Finished quant barely on time and thought I could not do as well as I had planned. Anyways, took some confidence from my first 14-15 questions hoping that a few of the problems I had guessed on might turn out to be trial questions.
Took the break again, and was back for verbal knowing well that this section had the potential to make or break my final score. Strated with a couple of SCs and nailed them under 2 mins. Then two CRs and a short passage. I thought I was doing ok as most of the questions on RC were inference/suggest types. Midway through the section, I strated to feel the stress and had to take a few deep breaths to regain composure. Overall, I thought SC was way tougher than GMATPrep with quite a few questions with 2-3 split of answer choices. CR and RC were OK but I obviously ended up getting quite a few of them wrong.
Final score again left me staring at the screen for the next few minutes. Finally took the stuff out from the locker and went back to the office
.
Now some thoughts if I decide to retake:
For Quant, GMATClub challenges should help me with time management and raise my score by another 1-2 points. Its verbal which I seem to have hit a dead end with. 33 was again one of the lowest I have scored on verbal. Although I have not really gathered my thoughts yet but feel I need a lot of practice on all the three segments of verbal to raise my score by another 5-6 points.
I know there are masters of both quant and verbal on this forum and advices/suggestions to plan my strategy, mainly for verbal will be greatly appreciated by this mere mortal.
Thanks for reading through my post guys!!