Hello all,
I promised myself that I would write on here when I finished the GMAT. Your stories of inspiration have been great and I often come on here and read posts simply for the sense of solidarity.
I posted about a month ago (ok, who are we kidding - 31 days ago) that I had a poor experience at the GMAT. I had been testing quite well and was confident in a 700 score. A number of things happened, namely, the pens that were given to me were chronically inept. I ran out of 'ink' three times. I'm appealing the score (actually just trying to get my money back) because the situation was so unacceptable, but that's neither here nor there.
Prior, I had taken the test last fall without really studying and scored a 680 (90%); M41, V43. I knew I could do much better in the Math portion.
Back to today. I got a 710 (94%); M47(82%), V41 (93%). The test was pretty hard and I took it in the afternoon even though I'm always more on my game in the morning (it was the only slot available).
I didn't spend much time on the AWA because I'm a pretty good writer and tend to get 5.5-6 even if I only spend about 15 minutes on each. The math was decent - a lot more number property questions than I would like and less permutations/combinations than I had hoped. I studied the latter pretty intensely yet I think there was maybe one permutation question. Bummer for me.
The verbal was where I lost my steam. I have a very hard time with the stamina bit and my mind started wandering. I have been diagnosed with ADHD, but I typically don't consider it an issue. Standardized tests are really the only time where I feel I sometimes struggle with keeping my attention for a long period of time. I had a hard time focusing on the verbal and, although I usually finish with 10-15 minutes to spare, I used every second. The reading passages were a little complicated (some bizarre one about engineering), the sentence completion was a little more convoluted than I remember, and the CRs seemed about average. I admit that I haven't spent much time studying verbal.
For my studying, I'm probably not a role model. Because of my competitive nature, I find it better (read: bearable) to do practice tests. After reading the forum, I did start to study my errors more closely, but I didn't keep an
error log. My practice tests were, for the past month, almost all above 700, highest at 770 and one lone 600 score at 680. I was confident going in today that I would score over 700, but as we know, anything can happen. After my zone-out on verbal, I was almost inclined to cancel my score. I'm glad I didn't.
So, that's it. Feel free to ping me with questions about the experience or anything else.
Thanks to everyone.