Hi Everyone,
I finished GMAT on August 29th, got held up with work and everything else that I had been neglecting for the last one month, and that's why my delayed post!
The first thing I would say is that this club is the best tool that can be used in our preparation. Unfortunately, I came across it accidently only in the 2nd week of August. Really wish I had had more chance for participation.
Second, heartfelt thanks to the members who make this club such an interactive forum. I remember that I got replies withing 24hrs to all the Qs I posted, and the explanations were better than what any book or
teacher can provide.
Prep and Test Scores:
I started in about June, 2005 but could not do much during the weekdays because of a very demanding job. Finally, took 10 days off before the exam and gave it my best shot.
I used Princeton, Kaplan and
OG primarily for both Quantitative and Verbal. I had other resources such as LSAT material for both CR and RC but never had enough time to work on them. In the last few days, decided it was better to go over
OG once again rather than do LSAT.
My GMAT scores:
Quant: 49 90%
Verbal 40 91%
Aggregate 96%
Softwares used: PP, PR, Kaplan and additionally, the ETS paper based tests.
PR: Scored 680 - 710 in the 4 tests that are available on the CD with the Princeton review 2005. Also did 2 of the 4 online tests they have recently introduced on thier site and got 720 and 730 on them.
Kaplan: 1. 600
2. 620
3. 640. I felt this test was somehow easier than all the others.
4. 580. Got a popup saying that this test would not be representative as the question bank had been exhausted.
PP: 750 and 760, but this was again skewed(as also apparent from my final results
). This was after completing
OG
AWA: Read a couple of the essays from Arcos 2 days before the test. My advice to those who have any apprehension is to just read all the Issue topics once, there are some of them which are abstract and difficult to exemplify(there are some on advertisements reflecting a society's values and buildings refelecting a country's something...) and it helps to just think of what one could write if given such a topic before the test day.
Test Experience:
This was not a very good one, and I thought I was doing real bad, and was very, very surprised and happy to see my score finally.
In Quantitative, my weakest points were Probability and Perm. Comb. As a result, I was never very confident about these topics. During the test too, I got some probability stuff as my 4th and 5th Qs, but managed to get through those. My real problem was the 10th Q, a very diffcult worded problem on rates. I ended up spending almost 5 mins on that, and when finally got the answer, realised that I was short of time. Although I could complete the section on time, I lost my cool a li'l becuase of the amount of time I wasted on that sad 10th Q, and that must be the reason for my low Maths score. My advice would be that if you feel you are not confident on any particular topic, be sure to spend time on it right in the beginning so that you can dont feel the way I did about probability on test day. Also, it's very important to stay focussed throughout the test and not repent over mistakes made in earlier sections.
My Verbal carried over some of my apprehensions from my Quant experience, and I could have done better if I was more focussed. But that apart, I got a lot of SC, most were easy enough, and except for my last RC, the rest were pretty standard and easy. The most unexpected were the CR Qs, I got 3 weird complete the paragraph Qs!!Also, strangely, no strengthen/weaken Qs. Also, the Qs were not of the types we have in
OG. But since I was limited to only
OG for my prep, I don't know where one could practice for such CRs.
After the test, I realised how important it is to keep your cool and stay focussed, because in many cases, we tend to think that we're doing worse than we actually are, and that works very badly for whatever remains to come up on the test. But in the end, was glad with the way things worked out
Thanks to everyone for the wonderful initiative of maintaining this forum the way it is, it has a wealth of information and tips for GMAT test takers.
Please feel free to ask me any Qs you may have, and wish everyone who is yet to take the test good luck!
Regards,
Priti