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30 Nov 2016, 16:26
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Hi, I just want to share my GMAT experience to contribute to the club as this forum has been an amazing resource for my study effort. I mainly want to post this to motivate people who are thinking of retake the test. If you think you can do better, my suggestion is go for it.
I was in the same boat about 3 weeks ago after taking my first GMAT exam. My last 3 GMAT Prep Exam score were all 750+ so I had high hope going into the test center. In some ways, I think this had mentally messed with my performance during test day. The night before, I kept dreaming about able to do even better and that caused me not able to have a good night sleep and not focus during the test. After seeing 710 score, which considered fairly good score, I was deflated. After I got home, I kept browsing multiple forums, posts on whether you should retake the test after getting 700+. The feedback were mixed and many would say it's good enough, don't risk retake the test and score lower, focus on your essay. But it didn't feel like good enough for me, and it bugged me as I know I can do better and because I'm aiming for top school, even though I've heard GMAT isn't everything, if I can improve one aspect of my application, why shouldn't I.
So I scheduled to retake the test, and I didn't want to wait long as I already put in a lot of times in study and didn't want to have gap. 16 days is the soonest you are allowed to retake the test, so that what I did. I ordered the ESR, which has mixed reviews here but I thought it was useful as it let me know how I did in a bit more detail (turned out I didn't do too well on RC and SC). I spent the next 2 weeks reviewing SC basics - modifiers, parallelism, idioms were tricky for me (as I learned English with not very good foundations so a lot of my knowledge of idioms came mostly from conversation which often grammatically incorrect) and I read 2 books that I enjoyed. Believe it or not, reading a book (especially by British writers) significantly improved my RC (I scored 51 on my 2nd effort).
On test day, I ate good breakfast, drove to test center 40 mins early along with 2 red bulls (take this advice carefully depend on whether you are used to drinking red bull or not as I've heard of its negative effect for test day). I drank half a can before going into the test and half a can during each break.
Anyway, I'm happy with the 760 score and would like to share my story for those who are in the same boat. Go for it!
I was in the same boat about 3 weeks ago after taking my first GMAT exam. My last 3 GMAT Prep Exam score were all 750+ so I had high hope going into the test center. In some ways, I think this had mentally messed with my performance during test day. The night before, I kept dreaming about able to do even better and that caused me not able to have a good night sleep and not focus during the test. After seeing 710 score, which considered fairly good score, I was deflated. After I got home, I kept browsing multiple forums, posts on whether you should retake the test after getting 700+. The feedback were mixed and many would say it's good enough, don't risk retake the test and score lower, focus on your essay. But it didn't feel like good enough for me, and it bugged me as I know I can do better and because I'm aiming for top school, even though I've heard GMAT isn't everything, if I can improve one aspect of my application, why shouldn't I.
So I scheduled to retake the test, and I didn't want to wait long as I already put in a lot of times in study and didn't want to have gap. 16 days is the soonest you are allowed to retake the test, so that what I did. I ordered the ESR, which has mixed reviews here but I thought it was useful as it let me know how I did in a bit more detail (turned out I didn't do too well on RC and SC). I spent the next 2 weeks reviewing SC basics - modifiers, parallelism, idioms were tricky for me (as I learned English with not very good foundations so a lot of my knowledge of idioms came mostly from conversation which often grammatically incorrect) and I read 2 books that I enjoyed. Believe it or not, reading a book (especially by British writers) significantly improved my RC (I scored 51 on my 2nd effort).
On test day, I ate good breakfast, drove to test center 40 mins early along with 2 red bulls (take this advice carefully depend on whether you are used to drinking red bull or not as I've heard of its negative effect for test day). I drank half a can before going into the test and half a can during each break.
Anyway, I'm happy with the 760 score and would like to share my story for those who are in the same boat. Go for it!
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