"Debrief" - 770 (Q51, V44)

Always found the term funny used in this context.

This post is to simply to recount my experience this morning with the GMAT.

I had a an early morning appointment at 8:30 AM. The test center was far so I left @ 7:00 AM to reach at 8:00 AM. Unfortunately, I had a restlessness night and did not sleep too well - don't know why. The effects were going to manifest themselves later. The center was closed even at 8 AM and almost all the test takers were already present. The proctors arrived soon enough and let each one of us in one after another with the usual routine.

770 (Q51, V44) - Woohoo !

So finally I took the GMAT test and managed to score:

770 (Q51, V44)

And man was I excited. Though to start with I was expecting a score like this, I was not so sure when the "Analysis of an Issue" part in AWA left me shaky [more about this later] which then spilled over into my quant section. I took 10 minutes for my first 2 questions! - My God! 10 Minutes ! - and they were easy questions. I just kept making one silly mistake after another. As you can imagine I was completely shaken by this. The next few questions continued to be tough and a dread was all over me. Nonetheless I trudged on and really really focused on the last 20-25 questions and made sure I got them correct [Note: When you have practiced long enough and hard enough, the practice shows in such stress situations]. The irony of it all - I finished my Quant section with 17 minutes to spare - yes, 17 minutes. I wisely used the 17 minutes to calm myself down and tell myself that this was not the end of the world and I should not let the iffy performance in Quants get to me and ruin my Verbal section. After calming myself sufficiently, I took my break - drank water etc. and came back composed. RCs were quite tough; SC was a breeze and CR pretty good. Managed to finish the verbal with 1 minute to spare.

New MGMAT Scores

1I had taken another MGMAT test on 12/07 but didn't get the time to put up the scores. I took a test today too and therefore here are the two results:

12/07 MGMAT 3: 720 (Q49, V39)
16/07 MGMAT 4: 770 (Q51, V44)

You may notice that within a gap of 4 days the score has jumped by 50 points. Well, the jump vindicates my theory about knowing your quant fundamentals inside out and going into the verbal section with a positive frame of mind. Since taking the test on 12/07, I bought 3 MGMAT guides - Geometry, Equations and Word translations. I managed to finish all 3 guides by last night. The guides really helped in driving a lot of the fundamentals and corollaries.

I took the test with a very confident mindset. The quant section was tough as usual and I did struggle in a couple of questions but I largely came away satisfied. Later analysis showed that I got almost 8 questions wrong but it still left me with a Q51. However the larger effect of coming away satisfied with the quant section was that I was relaxed and positive about the verbal section. This resulted in the highest score I have receive till now in Verbal - V44. Analysis showed that I got many questions wrong (equally spread in the 3 subsections) but the happy news is that I still have more than 2 weeks to my test, so there is plenty of time to improve my verbal even further.

I have reset my target score to 780-790; Maybe even 800 ;). Let's see.