GMAT ONLINE Experience - 750 (Q50, V41)

Hi guys!

I am going to tell my experience taking the online Gmat.

First of all, the check-in procedure can be quite long if something goes wrong (which happened to me, since the system was not accepting the photo of my passport for some unspecified reason), so be sure to log in 30 minutes before the scheduled time for your exam (as the gmat website suggests) to avoid unnecessary sources of stress.

You have no contacts with the proctor before the start of the exam: after you click “begin exam” and upload photos, you wait for a proctor to start your exam (10 mins more or less), but he does not ask you to show the inside of your room, your ID or anything else in live (which is something that happens for example with TOEFL online). Also, you have no contacts with the proctor during the exam unless something happens.

Yes, the online whiteboard glitches quite often, and everything you wrote disappears: it happened to me 2/3 times during quant and 2 times during verbal: fortunately, it did not happen while I was doing calculations or something like that, so it did not create any problems, but it could be an issue if you are less lucky than I was.

Quant section was neither harder nor easier than expected for me (compared to official practice exams). The only issue I had is this: I finished 6 minutes in advance, so I decided to wait 5 minutes before submitting the last question, so that I could take some rest before verbal: however, with 1 minute remaining, the proctor contacted me to ask if everything was fine, and I risked not submitting the last question because of that. Again, everything went fine and I managed to submit it, but it was another potential source of stress.

Verbal: In my opinion, RC was a bit harder than expected, SC was very easy, CR was normal. I feel that overall it was a little bit harder than expected, but I think it mainly depended on the fact that you have no break after quant.

IR was absolutely fine.

At the end, no unofficial score was displayed and no option to cancel score/exam appeared. Also, you are not asked to choose universities to send scores.

I feel that the main issue may be the absence of an optional break between quant and verbal, rather than the online whiteboard (especially if they will solve glitches).

My opinion is that all considered (glitching whiteboard, no break, potential technical issues), you should take the online version only if you really need a score immediately. Otherwise, do not renounce to those potential 30/50 more points you could get in normal testing conditions.

Feel free to ask anything if you have any doubts.

Posted from my mobile device

EDIT: I received my scores!

GMAT Online Exam Date: 4/20/20

Your Official GMAT™ Online Score Results:
Quantitative Section Score: 50
Quantitative Score Percentile: 85
Verbal Section Score: 41
Verbal Score Percentile: 94
Integrated Reasoning Section Score: 8
Integrated Reasoning Score Percentile: 92
Total Score: 750
Total Score Percentile: 98