Hello,

First off, wanted to thank the owners of this awesome website. Good job guys !!

My only regret is that I did not find the website earlier. I have been reading the posts for a week and the material discussed here has helped me a great deal.

I took the test today morning (8am to 12 noon). Here's the breakdown
=============================================
Quant - 49 (90 percentile)
Verbal - 41 (94 percentile)
Total - 730 (97 percentile)

Some demographic information
====================
28, Indian, Male, Engineering degree from Bombay University. Over 7+ years of progressive work experience in information technology industry. Last 3 years as a senior analyst in the retail sector.

My GMAT preparation
==============
Total 6 weeks preparation. Used Kaplan 800, Kaplan and Princeton Verbal Workout. Also bought 800score tests, but gave only 1.

Studied every day for at least 2 hours + gave a full length test every Saturday morning and spent sunday analyzing the results and the mistakes from the test.

Did not keep a results log. In hindsight, this would have helped a great deal

Practice Test Scores (in order)
===================
PowerPrep1 - 650
800Score - 630
Kaplan1 - 590
Kaplan2 - 610
Kaplan Diagnostic - 660
Kaplan 3 - 660
PowerPrep2 - 740 (one week before the final test)

I did not take any tests in the final week, only practice tests and studied the lessons from Princeton Verbal review.

What helped me the most
================
The grammar review from Princeton Verbal Workout book. Amazingly relevant info in a very compact format. Two thumbs up.

Lesson on Data Sufficiency on this website. Especially the part that mentions writing all the equations and not trying to solve the DS questions in your mind. Believe me guys, this one suggestion improved my quant score from 41 to 49.

AWA template - didnt have one explicitly written down, but had a "gist" in my mind. Used a mixture of Kaplan, PowerPrep and Princeton samples. In my opinion, the essays on 800score are not worth the paper I printed them on.


My GMAT experience
=============
I'm a morning person, so the 8-12 time slot worked great for me. Unfortunately, I could not sleep the entire night. So I went to the exam with a headache and two tylenols.

Food - took two powerbars and water with me. No coffee, I did not want to be jittery, just calm. Ate oatmeal at home for breakfast (something that sticks to you).

The AWA topics were a piece of cake. In fact, I had practiced almost similar topics two weeks before (kaplan).

The math section was tougher than I expected. Got a bunch of median, range, average questions right away. Got 3 multi event probability questions. No Standard Deviation. On question 14 I got a geometry question which was pretty straight forward, but none of the answers matched !!! I panicked and wasted 5 minutes. Again, I cannot discuss the exact question, but I believe it was one of the "dummy" questions that ETS puts in now and then to survey the candidates.

The verbal section was "ok". I think I messed up the first question... rest all was easy, what suprised me was that I got one Reading Comp. essay 95 lines long !!! and only 3 questions to boot !!!. CR was a breeze, SC tougher than I hoped for.

All in all, I am very satisfied with my score, now the second leg of the long journey begins !!! Wanted to wish every one best of luck.

I'll be around if anyone has any specific questions

Congrats on scoring massive marks!

You did not use the OG. that is surprising.

Out of all the prep material what is the best representative of the maths and the verbal questions.

bhai,

None of the bookstores that I went to had the OG in stock. I did not think I had enough time to go through all the three books i had purchased + the CDs and the OG.

When I mentioned 6 weeks prep, I forgot to mention that first two weeks I hardly studied and then I picked a date and reserved the time, which is what motivated me to study. So, 4 weeks was never enough time to study anyways.

hope this helps ?

hello Satya

Congratulations. I am glad you found this website useful. This was a very useful post.

I have a request. Can you tell us how you prepped for tougher concepts like probability, combination, stats? any recommendations for arithmetic problems? A 41V is outstanding. Can you share your strategies for solving RC/CR/SC?

I am sure our members can use advice from such high scorers.

Hope to hear from you soon
Praetorian

Hello Praetorian,

I mentioned that my undergraduate major was Engineering, so quant has always been one of my strengths.

Specifically for GMAT, I solved all the problems in Kaplan800, Kaplan, Kaplan CD and power preps.

In my earlier post I mentioned that I did not get a single Standard Deviation or Combinations problem on my actual GMAT. I did however, study these two topics and Probability from the lessons on this website which I believe are adequate.

For verbal, I used Princeton Verbal Workout. I especially reviewed the grammar section (grammar rules and idioms) in the appendix several times. I cannot stress the importance of reviewing that secion enough. I will highly recommend this textbook just for this section. Another neat trick that this book teaches you is to mentally try and categorize / recognize each Sentence Correction problem (subject-verb, tense, idiom etc...). You dont have to do that on the actual test, but if you are just starting to study for the GMAt, it is a good technique. I tried to solve all kaplan SC exercises using this method. It's like a drill........ you see a sentence and you go through your checklist (Does the subject match the verb, are all modifiers in place etc..). After a while, it becomes more or less automatic that you scan the sentence for all types of typical mistakes

I found the Reading Comprehension strategy suggested in kaplan CD useful, where you try and gauge the "purpose" of the paragraph. Once you get the main idea, the individual questions become much easier.

Another golden technique that I learnt from this website was for the Critical Reasoning section. Somewhere in the posts or the lesson, someone mentioned this equation

Evidence1 + Evidence2 + (hidden assumption) = conclusion.

Every CR question has a hidden assumption or missing evidence. While you read the stub, try and consciously look for or identify the missing piece. Once you have ALL the individual components of the above equation, the rest is easy.

hope this helps ?

Congratulations. Now, your khoj for satya ended ,I guess
(for those, who donot understand, satya ki khoj = search for truth).

Also,, thanks for the tips and strategy.

Got the envelope from ETS yesterday.

Scored 5.5 on the AWA, was surprised to find that ETS does not give you a breakup of the Analysis of an Issue & Analysis of an Argument sections.

Now, I begin the uphill battle for distinguishing myself from other 5,142,187,904 other Desi, Systems Analysts who scored 700+ in the GMAT and also "happen" to be applying to the same schools as I will

(extra points if you can point out the mistakes in the above sentence)

-satya

congrats on the awesome score and thanks for your studyin' regime...i'm basically in the same time frame as yourself, planning on taking the exam in about 6 weeks...hopefully i get a score around yours too, haha...

Thanks for sharing that detailed info.