Bombed by GMAT

Sorry about the score.

You may or may not already know this, but I'll run through how the GMAT is scored.

The computer begins each section by giving you a question of medium difficulty. If you get it right, you get a slightly harder question. If you get it wrong, you get a slightly easier question. All along, the program is essentially trying to determine what your score is. Thus, the earlier questions matter a whole lot more than the later ones. This is because if you miss a medium level question you beging to get easier ones and it takes a very long time to build up enough to get a hard one that will drive your score up. On the other hand if you get the first few right and start getting hard questions, by the middle of the test, if you miss a couple of hard ones, it won't matter all that much because you will already have received and answered correctly many medium and hard level questions.

This leads you to the strategy of spending proportionally more time on the first questions than on the later ones. With verbal, this was very easy for me. I had been finishing practice tests a good half an hour before time was up, so I could afford to really slow down the first few questions (especially the sentence correction ones, my weakness) and be absolutely sure that I got all of the first few questions right. This strategy really paid off for me. I scored in the 97th percentile for the verbal. For math, this was a little harder for me, because I am several years out of math classes. I did the same strategy, but ran out of time on the last three questions and had to guess. This does seem to be that big of a problem though, because by the tail end of the test, it basically already knows what your score is and getting the last couple wrong will only result in a minor downward adjustment compared to the major downward adjustment in score that results from getting the first few wrong. In the end, I scored in the 70th percentile on math, which wasn't terrible. I got a composite score of 710.

Thus, I highly recommend playing to the test and spending much more time on the first few questions to be sure that you get them right and then picking up speed and completing the rest of the test at a normal pace.

Hope this helps. Feel free to message me if you have any more questions.