1: Sat my first GMAT test on 6th of December and got 680 (Q48, V35 and IR8). In the test I found the Quant section to be harder than normal and I had to make more guesses than usual, thought I bombed out but to my surprise still got 48 in Quant, for verbal my concern was always around sentence correction so I gave myself up to 2 and a half minutes per question, so I pay for that by having to guess the last few RC/CR questions as I ran out of time. IR I didn't really care as it doesn't contribute towards the combined score, but to my surprise I got 100%, GMAT can be cruel at times...
2: My practice test attempts are below, I only did the official practice tests:
(10th of Nov) Practice test 1: 630, Q43, V34 and IR7, this test was done without any study to get a baseline score
(18th of Nov) Practice test 2: 660, Q48, V33 and IR8, this was done after practicing many Quant questions for a week
(2nd of Dec) Practice test 3: 710, Q48, V40 and IR8, this was done after 2 weeks of intense study on sentence correction. I got really lucky as I got the first 11 questions correct in Verbal, including 5 sentence correction questions, so this mark is probably inflated.
(4th of Dec) Practice test 1 attempt 2: 670, Q48, V34 and IR8, this was to validate whether my sentence correction has improved 2 days before the test, clearly the answer is a big no.
3: Started studying on 11th of November, I work full time so I study on the weekend and for an hour or two after work each day. For Quantitative I just improved via practicing questions and read half of the
MGMAT quant books. For verbal I spent all my time on sentence correction and this was done by doing many sentence correction questions along with the
MGMAT SC book. In that 4 weeks I roughly spent 1 and a half weeks on Quant and 2 and a half weeks on sentence correction. I ignored RC/CR and IR as I was already getting really good scores on those without any study.
4: Yes, if I resit I will apply for MBA next year, no choice as I would miss the R2 window to apply for MBA this year in January.
5: For Quant I feel I am under-prepared, quite a few questions I just don't know the formula needed to solve them and I didn't have time to read through all
MGMAT books for Quant prior to the test, in those cases I had to make an educated guess which dragged my marks down. For verbal my weak sentence correction skills is holding me back as the system won't give me any hard RC/CR questions if I keep messing up on the sentence correction part. Overall I would have preferred to have another 2-3 weeks to study.
Please let me know if I missed anything