I guess, I can be happy now - 770 (Q51, V42)

Yeah, took the GMAT today and scored quite well.

I decided to take the gmat in late August. I bought the official guide 13 and did all the quant problems. I have always been excellent in Math, and especially the PS questions suited me very well. DS was a little bit trickier for me. I think, I was never able to stop the "silly mistakes" there. But fortunately, they only seldomly occured.

In the beginning of September, I made a 2-week trip to the usa (I'm from Austria) and didn't study at all during that time. When I came back from that trip, I started tackling the verbal part. I had bought the mgmat SC guide and the CR powerscore bible. When I did the diagnostic test back in August, I had like 50% mistakes in SC. English is not my native language. And gmat is extremely strict, when it comes to certain rules. I think, in school I never even learned about stuff like that noun modifiers must touch the noun they modify. And in addition, I am especially weak with idioms. I don't like remembering lists and things, when there is no pattern or logic behind it.

CR and RC was a little bit easier, because I am better with vocabulary than grammar. I was able to understand all the texts, and only sometimes there was a single word that I didn't know. But often, I was able to guess, what that word must mean, so that the text made sense.

Last week, I finished the verbal questions of the official guide and started doing full-length practise tests. I did 2 gmatprep-tests and 4 mgmat-tests.

09/29 mgmat 700 (q48, v37) (almost 1 month without doing quant problems)
10/01 gprep 770 (q51, v44)
10/02 mgmat 730 (q46, v44) (messed up timing in quant, last 5 were wrong)
10/03 mgmat 780 (q51, v45)
10/04 gprep 710 (q50, v35) (this made me quite nervous)
10/04 mgmat 770 (q51, v44)

So my potential scoring range was quite large.

Let's get to today.

I scheduled my exam for 1 p.m. The only testing center here in Austria only offers tests one day a week and only on afternoons. 1 p.m. is the earliest possible time. Woke up at 7 a.m. Reviewed some wrong questions from the tests yesterday. Tried to remember some templates for AWA (yeah, that's a part of gmat, too ). And at 11.45 a.m. I went by bike to the testing center. Arrived there at 12.10. Went into the wrong building at first, because the company has officies in two buildings there. But since I had enough time, I didn't get stressed. That's a really important point. If it's possible, plan with a lot of extra time.

I don't think that AWA went well. First of all, the keyboard was a qwerty. In Austria, that's unusual. We normally use qwertz ones. z and y are exchanged and so I had to pay attention to that, too. I finished my text 1 minute before time was up. Started reading my text and the first sentence didn't make any sense. So I had to rewrite it and finished that with like 1 second left. Couldn't read the rest.

I'm not sure about IR. But I think, scoring is not that tough there. And after all, it's not that important anyway.

Break time: drank orange juice and ate some chocolate. But really, you should eat and drink, whatever you like and need. If you need coffee or an energy drink, then that's, what you should drink. If you don't like chocolate, well, eat something else. Especially the second break is really important, because quant makes me tired ... and the exam has been going on for more than 2.5 hours.

So quant: besides the fact that my pen stopped working at the start of quant, there is not that much to tell. I think, the mgmat problems are way tougher than those on the real test. I was able to solve every question and I probably only did some "silly mistakes" as I always do in quant. Finished well in time. 4 minutes to discount double check the last question.

Verbal: Maybe I was looking at the timer too often. I always was a little bit below "2-minutes-per-question". But in the end, I had 2.5 minutes to solve the last question, because I had some short SC questions at the end of the exam.

So yeah, the result's a 770 (q51, v42). Don't know, why v42 is still enough to score 770. But I'll take it.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.