Thanks everyone for your kind words.
My background: I'm an Indian national and have been living in Germany for over 4 years now. A Mechanical Engineering by qualification and will have over 8 years of work experience by this fall. Straight out of college, I worked with a start-up for 2.5 years and then joined a global software house where I've been working for the past 5 years. Functionally, I've been involved in Software design and development, Project Management, and Consulting. I shall be switching to Product Management this May.
Honghu - I'm planning to apply this fall, so I have plenty of time on hand. It's just that I wanted to get the GMAT out of the way as I wanted to concentrate on other aspects of my application.
Venksune - Thanks for your words of encouragement. However, my background is such that it gets exceedingly difficult to bring in a differentiating factor. Yes, I belong to the dreaded pool of Indian IT applicants. I shall be taking up activities which would otherwise strengthen my overall application and I am due next month for a change in my job profile. Moreover, B Schools will not consider the big difference between my Quant and Verbal percentile in good light. I need to bridge this gap. All these led me to decide on retaking the test.
A rough recap of my test experience: I reached the test centre at 0800 in the morning. After completing the paperwork, I started off with the test at 0840. A note about the test centre - I took the test at Prometric, Frankfurt and the facilities there were simply fabulous. The examinees were provided with a very good headphone which practically blocked all the ambient noise.
AWA was a breeze - I had looked up on some templates last evening and stuck to them. Although, I feel I analyzed the argument better than I did the issue. Nevertheless, I'll have to wait for a couple of weeks before I receive my official score alongwith the AWA score. I finished the each essay with about 5 minutes to go and reviewed them for
grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Some pointers on tackling
the AWA:
- Always brainstorm on how you're going to approach the topic.
- Make a list of your thoughts and prioritize them
- Think of appropriate examples to support your arguments
- Start of well and end well: make sure you have a strong introduction
and a sound conclusion
- Always make sure you have the time to edit your essays. You might
have given compelling arguments, but a couple of grammatical errors
and spelling mistakes might take away those points for you.
Quant: Took the 5 min break and walked aroung in the waiting room while sipping on some water. Went back to my desk with a fresh set of scratch papers and started off with the Quant section. The first question was one involving addition of numbers raised to fractional powers. The next was a division problem - again on number properties. The third was a probability problem involving basic counting principle. I was extremely careful on the initial 10-12 questions and always back-calculated my answers. The problems became visibly difficult and by the 15th questions, I had encountered a couple of tough DS questions and an extremely convuluted geometry problem. However, geometry has always been my strenght (thanks to my Mechanical Engineer degree) and had no trouble navigating through it. I think I did a mistake on one of the DS questions on number properties and again one on the 34th / 35th question involving divisibility. I got stuck on the penultimate question - a percentage problem which I misread and ended up wasting 2.5 minutes on it. When I actually did solve it, it turned out to be a very simple problem. All in all, I had a good feeling when I took my second break.
Verbal: The verbal section started off with an easy SC. This was followed by another SC and a CR. Towards the 5th question, an 65 line RC with 4 questions popped up with. I felt elated as I thought I must be doing well. Right after the RC, GMAT threw a couple of CR's and they were visibly tough. I think I answered one of them incorrectly. I got a mixture of SC's and CR's till the 15th questions when out came a bold-face. Not that it was difficult - in fact I find BF's quite easy to crack. However, by this time, I was loosing heavily on time. As if this was not enough, I got 2 back-to-back RC's. One was a 50-liner and the other was a 65-liner. This is where I got my timing wrong. I guess I spent way over the allocated time in reading through the passage and had to revisit them a couple of times while answering the questions. All the RC's I had encountered so far dealt with social sciences and the impact of historical events. I guess the ETS simply loves these topics and their only objective in throwing such passages is to numb your brain to the maximum extent possible. Well, so far, not so good. The RC pair was followed by a barrage of extremely difficult CR's. I cannot judge the level of difficulty objectively because of my eventual failure in answering them correctly, but they were comparable to questions I'd encountered in the Kaplan LSAT. All the good feeling I had so far was slowly diminishing. My time management was going haywire. I had barely 9 minutes left for the last 10 questions. What came next was some sort of a devilish ploy to bring to the proceedings to an end - an 80-line RC on the mechanism of social evolution. I panicked and it did me in. I hastily read through the passage and tried to scan through the options while I tried to look out for the correct answer. This never works. I knocked down the 5 RC questions and what do I get next? Yes, another BF. I scanned the first word each of the first BF and the second and blindly clicked on the option which related these two words. If I got that right, it must have been due to some divine intervention. The remaining questions were SC's and they'd got pretty easy by then. I didn't have a good feeling when I ended the section.
This was followed by an irritating survey which I foolishly volunteered to participate in. After 5 minutes of randomly clicking on demographical questions, I saw my score - 660 (86%). I was dejected. Right then as I comfirmed my score, I had decided that I'll be taking the GMAT again.
Preperation: With a full-time job, I decided to start off at least 3 months in advance. Booked my test date for the 29th of March considering the 4 days I'd get for the Easter holidays.
Quant: I brushed up on the quant concepts: Probability and P&C were rather rusty so I made sure I tackled my demons first. I routinely did the quant
OG and simultaneously worked with Kaplan. A note about the number properties - the concepts governing these problems are very easy and all one needs to do is practice in order to retain and actively use these concepts. I was quite comfortable in Geometry so didn't let that bother me much. MBA Farbe lent me some of her books - and they definitely came in handy. One of the most fabulous resources for the quant section is Kaplan 800. I simply loved this book.
Verbal: Completely solved the
OG and then referred to Kaplan 800 (the SC explainations are really good). Did a couple of LSAT tests and had a good overall feeling. Maintained an
error log for both the verbal and the quant section and religiously revised it.
My scores in various practice tests:
PP (cold) - 700
Kaplan diag - 640
Kaplan 1 - 630
Kaplan 2 - 590
Kaplan 3 - 570
Kaplan 4 - 640
PP (after
OG) - 740 (irrelevant as was done after I completed the
OG)
Manhattan 1 - 680
Manhattan 2 - 720
The forum was one of my regular virtual hang outs and I can only understate how beneficial this has been to my preperations. Now that I've decided to retake the exam, I'll be actively participating over the next couple of months and hope to do better this time.