The GMAT journey - Part III

A bad day?

Day before the test, I decided to stop studying at 11 pm. I woke up at 8:30 in the morning. Spent only 15 mins looking at the AWA templates. I had a 2pm appointment and I reached the test center at 1 pm. The lady wouldn't let me take the exam without my passport. I did not expect the officials to be this strict about the passport. But, as it turns out they were. If you are NOT a native of the country, please carry your passport along. I wondered whether this is a beginning of a bad day. But calmed myself and drove home to grab my passport. I reached the test center around 1:45. No more surprises. Started the exam at 2 pm. I spent couple of mins to relax my body and mind.

I was prepared with my templates for the two essays - argument and issue.

Quant: In contrast to others who found the quant section to be tougher, I found it to be at same level as the OG11. I was extra careful in the exam and I caught 2 mistakes. I had one tricky question (between Q30-35), but fortunately I had more than enough time left on the clock. The question had a picture of a square containing 9 squares of different sizes. The size of two squares was given, and had to find the size of one of the squares. This was more of a puzzle than a quant question. As I had atleast 20 mins left, I could afford to spend five minutes on this question. I got it correct. Surprisingly, the questions got simple and not harder which made me worry that I might have answered some question(s) incorrectly. I pressed on and finished the section with 2 mins to spare. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to see a score of 51.

Verbal: The difficulty was on par with the difficulty of GMAT and PR CATs. Got a boldfaced CR after 30th question. I was confident that I was doing reasonably well. 3 of the 4 RCs were short. I followed my strategy of skimming the passage first and then reading it the "GMAT way". The CRs were not any harder than the ones in GMATPREP. My verbal score in my test scores was between 34-39, so I was not too worried. BTW, you can see my GMAT test scores at: http://www.urch.com/forums/406039-post204.html (Practice Tests vs. Real GMAT)

My heart was pounding when the scores were being calculated. I was confident that I'd done good enough for 700+. I almost jumped when I saw ...... 740 (Q51, V38) appear on the screen. I needed few secs to realize and shout woooo hoooooo!!!! Not a bad bay at all!!!