The results are in! And the score is 720(Q47,V42), 6.0AWA

The ROI I'm talking about is the return on investment of speding the tuition for these schools, the move to attend them, lack of income during the full-time program, and the earning potential when I'm finished with it. My other option is to stick around here and attend the University of Oklahoma. I think that I could probably get a full tuition scholarship with my GMAT. I might have a good shot a scholarship with the GMAT score considering the 10th-90th Percentile for GMAT scores of their fulltime program is 540-708 and for the part-time is 482-668 (and I'd do the part-time to keep working). Even if I wouldn't get the scholarship, the tuition over 2 years for in-state residents is about $15k - $20k (total for everything!) Plus, starting salary is about $75k, when you compare that amount of money's buying power in the midwest to what you have to earn in a city like NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc, it compares well to the starting salaries of other places. $75k a year in Oklahoma is about equivalent to $115k - $120k in NYC. The difference would be my income potential in 10 -15 years rather than right out of school. An HBS, Columbia, Wharton, or other degree will continue to open doors simply because I went there, and then my work history would be analyzed. At OU it would be much less of an issue that I went to OU for my MBA, and they have a much smaller network (less than 100 total enrolled).

This is all IF I don't get into any of the schools I have on my list. I think I might do 3 R1 apps and 2 or 3 R2 apps. Any suggestions on which schools should be the R1? I really like Yale, Columbia, Wharton, Tuck, and Harvard. Was thinking of doing Harvard, Yale, Tuck in R1, then Wharton, Columbia and maybe Chicago for R2. Are there reasons not to do this that I'm missing?

You didn't think I was going give you the score in the subject, where you didn't even have to click on the post? LOL It would be like the hero dying in the first 5 minutes of the movie!

Thanks you everyone (fresinha12, x2suresh, walker, brokerbevo, x-ali-x, apurva1985, raabenb, smkrn, jasonC [shout out to another Okie], gmatnub, bsd_lover, YihWei,, maratikus and anyone else that I may not be able to remember off the top of my head) that has been such an incredible help to me in preparing for this exam. I feel like I've come so far since the 650 at the end of April. I think I could have saved myself $250 if I would have found this place before my first attempt! Man, that would have been another school's application fee!

720 (Q47, V42)

While it's not as high as I think it could have been, I'm still very excited about it. I had been scoring 48-49 in quant, but then again, I was scoring 40-41 in Verbal, so it's a trade-off.

I think I"m capable of mid 700s, but at some point I have to start working on applications. The way I see it is that now, my score is the average or above for every business school in the country (Damn Stanford with a 721 average!) My only concern is that the adcoms would have rather seen a higher GMAT score in order to make up for my 3.05 UG GPA (that's all 4 years, not in major, which was like 3.7 or 3.8. I brought up my GPA from a 2.5 to a 3.05 in the last 3 semesters).

Now I guess it's on to the applications. I'm trying to decide if I should take Harvard off the list (a friend of mine graduated from there and wants me to apply there too). I figure for about the price of the Harvard app fee, I could add 2 other schools a bit down on the list. I'd have a better shot at getting into them, plus I would be adding 1 school.

As for the test:

AWA - Chineseburned is the best! I felt so prepared after reading through that AWA guide a few times. Hopefully the usage made sense, but i put "therefore" and "For example" and other key words in my essays so many times the scores should be good.

The quant seemd rather easy overall. I remember getting 1 or 2 questions that I thought "Holy crap, walker couldn't even answer this one!" I honestly thought that while sitting there taking the test. It may not be true, he probably could answer it, but that's the level I thought those few questions were. I only got 1 or 2 questions that I was able to use comb/perm on. I seemed to get quite a few DS questions, but then again, I don't like DS so they probably stand out in my mind moreso than the others. I got a couple of work problems (DS) and there were 2 questions I used a Venn Diagram on. i was surprised at that. When i was on question 35 i looked at the time and had 5 or 6 minutes left so I knew I had paced myself well.

Verbal

I'm strongest in verbal so I was not nervous for this part, although I really had to work during the break to get my mind out of the quant-mode and into verbal. I spent 2 -3 minutes of the break repeating "Subject-verb agreement, pronouns, modifiers, logical opposites, premises conclusions, weaken, support, " trying to get my mind thinking about those things again when all that seemed to be going through my head was numbers and more numbers!

I saw 4 RC passages, which I was happy about because RC is by far my strongest of all the verbal sections (thanks to all those cases in law school). The second most I think was CR passages and then SC. It seemed that I got a lot of SC passages where the entire sentence was underlines. I thought "Holy crap! I guess they mean sentence correction rather than phrase correction!" Then it struck me that this is easier. There are many more things that the authors have to get correct when correcting an entire sentence. Any error = the entire thing is wrong.

Kelli's advice on improving Verbal is spot on. Approach it very scientifically and use your ear only when you really can't decide. But even then, you should be able to limit the answer choices to 2 by eliminating answers that have obvious errors.

I noticed that the SC tended to have many misplaced modifiers. Like ", which" being used to refer to something earlier in teh sentence, but it was misplaced because the noun directly preceeding it didn't make sense as the antecedent.

Anyway, I've got another appointment at 1:30 (Going to the FAA to participate in a pilot study program and I get paid to fly their simulators! Woo Hoo this is a great day!)

Ask me any questions, and I'll be very happy to answer them. I will probably be back early evening and will get to them then.

You didn't think I was going give you the score in the subject, where you didn't even have to click on the post? LOL It would be like the hero dying in the first 5 minutes of the movie!

Thanks you everyone (fresinha12, x2suresh, walker, brokerbevo, x-ali-x, apurva1985, raabenb, smkrn, jasonC [shout out to another Okie], gmatnub, bsd_lover, YihWei,, maratikus and anyone else that I may not be able to remember off the top of my head) that has been such an incredible help to me in preparing for this exam. I feel like I've come so far since the 650 at the end of April. I think I could have saved myself $250 if I would have found this place before my first attempt! Man, that would have been another school's application fee!

720 (Q47, V42)

While it's not as high as I think it could have been, I'm still very excited about it. I had been scoring 48-49 in quant, but then again, I was scoring 40-41 in Verbal, so it's a trade-off.

I think I"m capable of mid 700s, but at some point I have to start working on applications. The way I see it is that now, my score is the average or above for every business school in the country (Damn Stanford with a 721 average!) My only concern is that the adcoms would have rather seen a higher GMAT score in order to make up for my 3.05 UG GPA (that's all 4 years, not in major, which was like 3.7 or 3.8. I brought up my GPA from a 2.5 to a 3.05 in the last 3 semesters).

Now I guess it's on to the applications. I'm trying to decide if I should take Harvard off the list (a friend of mine graduated from there and wants me to apply there too). I figure for about the price of the Harvard app fee, I could add 2 other schools a bit down on the list. I'd have a better shot at getting into them, plus I would be adding 1 school.

As for the test:

AWA - Chineseburned is the best! I felt so prepared after reading through that AWA guide a few times. Hopefully the usage made sense, but i put "therefore" and "For example" and other key words in my essays so many times the scores should be good.

The quant seemd rather easy overall. I remember getting 1 or 2 questions that I thought "Holy crap, walker couldn't even answer this one!" I honestly thought that while sitting there taking the test. It may not be true, he probably could answer it, but that's the level I thought those few questions were. I only got 1 or 2 questions that I was able to use comb/perm on. I seemed to get quite a few DS questions, but then again, I don't like DS so they probably stand out in my mind moreso than the others. I got a couple of work problems (DS) and there were 2 questions I used a Venn Diagram on. i was surprised at that. When i was on question 35 i looked at the time and had 5 or 6 minutes left so I knew I had paced myself well.

Verbal

I'm strongest in verbal so I was not nervous for this part, although I really had to work during the break to get my mind out of the quant-mode and into verbal. I spent 2 -3 minutes of the break repeating "Subject-verb agreement, pronouns, modifiers, logical opposites, premises conclusions, weaken, support, " trying to get my mind thinking about those things again when all that seemed to be going through my head was numbers and more numbers!

I saw 4 RC passages, which I was happy about because RC is by far my strongest of all the verbal sections (thanks to all those cases in law school). The second most I think was CR passages and then SC. It seemed that I got a lot of SC passages where the entire sentence was underlines. I thought "Holy crap! I guess they mean sentence correction rather than phrase correction!" Then it struck me that this is easier. There are many more things that the authors have to get correct when correcting an entire sentence. Any error = the entire thing is wrong.

Kelli's advice on improving Verbal is spot on. Approach it very scientifically and use your ear only when you really can't decide. But even then, you should be able to limit the answer choices to 2 by eliminating answers that have obvious errors.

I noticed that the SC tended to have many misplaced modifiers. Like ", which" being used to refer to something earlier in teh sentence, but it was misplaced because the noun directly preceeding it didn't make sense as the antecedent.

Anyway, I've got another appointment at 1:30 (Going to the FAA to participate in a pilot study program and I get paid to fly their simulators! Woo Hoo this is a great day!)

Ask me any questions, and I'll be very happy to answer them. I will probably be back early evening and will get to them then.

Wow! I am suprised to know that GMAT score of 720 can be a good asset to earn scholarship. Is it really the case?

It can make a difference, but you need to figure it out for each school. It happens to be true for the University of Oklahoma, but I'm not sure about other schools.

Admissions consultants have to make you think that you "need" them. It's a sales tactic. Don't listen to them. I found a glaring error on the MBAAdmissions website. In the response to me regarding my catching the typo, they tried to convince me I needed them as my consultant anway! I freaking caught a typo on their website and they proceed to tell me how much I need them? Give me a break. I may not get into any school I choose, but at least I'm not listening to someone call me stupid so they can get a high % for their next promo piece.

If the consultants let an applicant hire them and the applicant applies to H/W/S/ kellog, CBS, and doesn't get into any of them, but would have gotten into say a #10 - #15 school, it looks bad on the admissions consultant. It's a stupid game they play to justify their own existence. I would pay good money to someone that told me "What you want to do is hard and you may fail at all 5 schools, but I'll be damned if you and I don't work our a$$es off and put out awesome applications!" No, these consultants cannot actually do what the client wants; they have to tailor their clients to what the consultant can do. Additionally, the consultants try to manage our expectations. Screw that, I already know what to expect. It's hard. I don't need to pay someone $4k to tell me this is going to be hard and I should use West Coast Surfer's University MBA program as my backup so the consultant call it one of my target schools and add me to the list of "clients that got into at least one of their target schools!"

It's a joke, in my humble opinion

--The preceeding rant in no way reflects the views of this forum, its moderators, owners, or anyone else that finds this post offensive.

Here is my opinion of admissions consultants in general. There are exceptions of course, but I do not view them as worth the money they have to charge to make it worth their time.