My experience: every test is different.

Let me preface by saying that I'm a medical professional and received my udergraduate degree 20 years go. However I've always tested well, and made a 28 on my ACT test and 97percentile on the SAT in HighSchool. I had a 3.5 GPA during my undergraduate and did as well acquiring my MT.

So, before studying for the GMAT at all I took a practice CAT and made a 530. 34Verbal and 30 quant. I had approximately 4 weeks to study for the real thing. I got the OG and signed up for a month of the Empower course. I put in about 70 hrs studying for the test. I was getting about 80% of the tougher/later page quant questions correct in the OG. Only having a month, any question type that occured rarely in the OG or in the Empower course I didn't study much. (such as strange negative fractional exponents) Also I have a pretty good statistics background, so that I didn't study either. I covered most of the verbal sections in the EMPOWER training, but didn't dedicate much time to it. Quant was my bigger concern. I took another CAT and made a 660 (Q43, V37)with time to spare in both quant and verbal. I was confident that I would get at least a 650 or so. That would put me where I needed to be for the schools I was applying to.

The day of the test my very first quant question involved a strange negative fractional exponent ( X raised to -13/64)!! I tried my best to find a way to simplify it out or get rid of it using some of the techniques I learned during my studying, but to no avail, so I made a guess. By then I was already 3-4 minutes behind! I kept my cool and the very next question was somethiing I had not studied for either! This trend continued to the point where I was only confident with my answer choice on 10% of my answers! So many things that I knew well, that were in the OG and in the empower training were NOWHERE on my test! I then had 6 questions left with only 2 minutes left!

The verbal went OK for the most part, but I started running short on time again and guessed on the last 2 questions.

The result: 530 with 34 verbal and 30 quant. The exact score I made before studying, so 70hrs of studying = nothing?

I was upset. So when I got home, I still had some official practice CAT tests available, and even though I was burned and tired I took one and made a 660!!!!!! V39 Q40!!!! That test had so much more of the material I had studied!!!

Overall Impression: The Empower training and the OG taught me so much in just one month, but unfortunately it wasn't on my actual test. I am confident that if I had taken the test on a different day with different questions, there would be a vastly different score. Also, like many people, by getting rocked by the first couple of hard questions, I wasted time and ran behind. This cost me a great deal I'm sure.

I still released my crappy score and I'm hoping that my impressive resume, experience and GPA will help make up the difference. If not, I will retake and wait out a semester..