sudhirgupta93 wrote:
I was so happy and confident after my quant section. I thought I had nailed most of the questions and was expecting a Q50. I honestly found quant easy.
And with verbal it all went absolutely down the hill. I knew I wasn't in my best form with SC but I thought I would live and was confident about my CR and RC but it seems I couldn't manage any of the three. My timing for verbal went from bad to worse and worst when at one point of time I didn't even have 1 minute per question.
I was having such a HARD (DAMN HARD) time understanding RC passages. It has never happened to me before. I agree that in past at times it took me a while to comprehend the passage when the topic was a little off for my taste, but never had I ever got so frustrated that I let go off the passage altogether as I had to do today because time was simply slipping by! I got f**king 4 RCs of which 2 were as long as 4 paragraphs and the answer choices were.. I don't know.. so lengthy, it seemed as though I kept reading the answer choices for most of the time rather than thinking my solution through. I had to go through my answer choices more than once and it happened to me in many SC and CR questions as well.
And SC was all the more bad. I kept getting confused with my answer choices more often than not. I've seriously lost whatever confidence I had in my SC skills. The kind of sentences that I got in the exam were totally different from what I studied here on the club, in
OG and
egmat course. I'll be totally honest that for some sentences I couldn't even understand the intended meaning. So frustrated I got with SC and RC that my head simply stopped working and CR too seemed lost cause. I literally gave up on my verbal exam at one point to just finish it off.
I can relate with the above so much that it could easily be my personal experience with the exam as well. I too gave my GMAT yesterday. My quant went very well. I found the questions much easier than the ones I've practiced on GMATPrep and on GC. I scored a higher sectional in quant - q50 than on any of my mocks (Q49, 49, 48 and 49). Managed time well for the first time too. In my mocks I always had to rush on the last few questions on the mocks.
And answering a couple of your questions - No, I skipped and made a few educated guesses on some pretty hard questions as well. Still scored a Q50. I've learnt that the GMAT isn't ALL that adaptive. Score well in the first 10-15 questions and make sure you get most if not all of the easy (sub 600) and medium (600-700) questions right and you'll cross Q49. You can do that by not wasting time on tough questions which most probably you'll get wrong anyway and ensuring you don't have to rush through the questions you would have and should get right.
IR went well as well. Improved from 4 to 7.
The verbal completely destroyed me though. I scored v36 again on the official exam! My mock verbal scores were v42 thrice and a single v44. I had given the mock exams with settings as realistic as possible to the actual exam. I stuck to the time limit for breaks and completed the essay and IR sections as well.
I found the verbal on the exam to be extremely hard. Much tougher than on the GMATPrep mocks. Some things I noted and can completely agree on with you:
1. Extremely long RC passages. Two with 4 paras, one with 5 paras. I actually cursed under my breath when I got the third RC with 5 paragraphs and I was already pretty short on time.
2. RCs were TOUGH. Condensed with information. Much less fluff. And use of some difficult vocabulary. I am an enthusiastic reader and often read material from the Economist, Scientific American, FT etc. I also watch a LOT of science and history videos so essays on black holes, women's history, economic principles etc usually do not faze me and I can grasp the concepts of the essays fairly easily. Not so on the exam yesterday. There were times I would re-read paras from a passage 3-4 times and still wouldn't be able to clearly understand what it meant.
3. CRs were tougher too. On the mocks I can usually be 90% confident that the answer I've chosen is correct. Yesterday, I would almost always be confused between two answer choices I had narrowed down to. The mocks usually give 1 clear answer and 2-3 answer choices where they directly oppose or are irrelevant to what the question stem asks for. For eg a question where the correct answer choice should weaken, a few answer choices actually strengthen so those can be eliminated much quickly. Much less of these on the actual exam. For a few CRs I had to juggle between 2-3 answer choices that could all be technically correct and had to figure out which would be the 'best' answer.
4. Same for SC. Much more confusing. Not many easy splits. Not many answer choices that you could clearly eliminate. SCs broke my confidence as well. There were times I was going back to reconsider answer choices that I had eliminated because I couldn't figure out grammatical errors that would clearly disqualify a sentence.
5. The average number of mistakes I made on mocks ranged from (3 to 8) in verbal. I would not do more than 3-4 incorrect questions on RC and CR COMBINED. 96 percentile scores made me very confident that I would be able to do fairly well on verbal on the actual exam. A v36 on the exam means I definitely got more than 12-13 questions wrong. Probably even 1/3rd off all questions.
6. All of the above screwed my timing completely. I have never had to struggle on time management on verbal before. But by the time I reached the 25th question mark, I was left with a minute per question for the last 15 questions. I had to blaze through a lot of questions which I probably got wrong.
Barely slept 2 hours in the last 24 hours before the exam. Long story, can't even explain. This just compounded the problem. I felt like I was underwater when tackling some tough questions.
I'm going to start practicing on LSAT RCs now because the average passage is much tougher and I've now exhausted most sources for practice.
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23 Sep 2016, 07:05
