Monday, June 8, 2009

My 2nd GMAT score: 640/800 !

Yipeeeee ! Yay !! I just completed GMAT today and I scored 640/800 !

This is a decent score, around the 76th percentile. And that should guarantee acceptance into any business school in Canada and perhaps into most business schools in the US too (if I had tried)! Plus enhance my chances of scholarships too! Fingers crossed for the acceptance letters in a few weeks! This was a huge improvement over my last score of 530/800.

Breakdown is as follows:-

Quantitative section:----------Scaled score: 41 & percentile: 61
Verbal section:----------------Scaled score: 38 & percentile: 83
Total:-------------------------Scaled score: 640 & percentile: 76
For the 2 essays, I expect to score 6/6 like last time.

Tips from today's experience:
  • Timing (pacing yourself during test) is very important
  • As you answer correctly and tougher questions are given to you, it becomes more difficult to manage time.
  • Computer Adaptative Test is not as user friendly as paper and pen test for the reason that you can not jot notes during the test. The erasable pad is lousy and the marker pen keeps drying up if you do not keep the cap of the pen on. I wonder why they would not just give us paper instead.
  • You have the option of using ear plugs during the test - use them to prevent distraction! You need to pay 100% attention to the test.
  • For the reading comprehension, you have to really focus hard so that you do not make mistakes. It is a real test of stamina and you keep wondering to yourself when the test is going to end.
  • The night before the test, I happened to pick up Kaplan's guide for GMAT from my big pool of books and was amazed to find out that it is an excellent guide for GMAT. Too bad, I had not spent more time on Kaplan. If I had known the importance of GMAT earlier, I would perhaps had taken Kaplan coaching to attempt a score over 700. I hear that every year, about 50 people manage to get a perfect score of 800/800. How they do that is beyond my imagination! I salute those guys with utmost sincerity!
  • To repeat, the summary of mathematical formulae in Kaplan are awesome! That is basically all you need to perform. What the high scorers do is not just learn Math, they learn how to manage the problems with minimum effort using shortcuts.
  • When I wrote it for the first time, I used to attempt to solve the Math using the big picture. I used to try solving it at once! As I practiced, I learnt to break down the problem into smaller bits, I learnt how to form equations for everything and that helped a lot!
  • There is a saying that sometimes, you do not know what you do not know. You can find that out only throught practice tests. These tests help you to indentify your common mistakes and correct them.
  • Regarding Verbal section, I used to be arrogant that my English is good. But for some reason, I performed poorly in the Verbal section in the first attempt. But with practice, I was able to pin point my mistakes, correct them and secure a better score!

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