750 (q:50, V:41)

[skarya]

congratulations!!! very nice verbal score.


Good luck for phase 2

[chatru]

congratulations!! great verbal score.Please share your strategy to crack the VE part

Take care
Chatru

[suchax]

Folks,

Thanks to all of you for the kind notes. Here is a quick summary of how I had prepared for the test. Hope others will find my experience helpful.

Time: I studied for 2+ months, but between working on my highly demanding full-time job and helping my wife with her applications I could only spend about an hour everyday, 5-7 hours in an entire week. Since I had expected that I would not have enough time to prepare, I only concentrated on the areas that I believed I was weak in.

Quantitative:
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Books: Manhattan Prep, GMAT Official Guide

Preparation: I would highly recommend the Manhattan series books to anyone and everyone. Being from an Engineering background, I did not sweat much about quants, but I still needed some material to learn a few advanced tricks, tips, etc. to beat the clock. The Manhattan books, especially the ones on "Word Translations", "Geometry" and "Number Properties" were really good. I loved the exercises and the three full GMAT practice tests that come with any Manhattan book. In particular, I learnt a few neat tricks to solve problems on number properties and overlapping sets.

Exam: The quant section on the real GMAT was harder than I had expected it to be. I believe I was really high strung early on and did make a couple of silly mistakes. But, once I had settled down I did alright. One thing I must mention, especially for all the people with strong quant background, time is always a factor in the quant section no matter how confident you might be. You will be surprised how fast the clock runs when you are working on the quant section on the real GMAT.

Verbal:
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Books: Manhattan Prep, GMAT Official Guide, Princeton Review Verbal Workbook, Kaplan Verbal Review, My own notes (40+ pages) on Sentence Correction

Preparation: Like most others, doing well in verbal was my biggest challenge. I was especially scared of SCs and RCs. So, I created my own notes on SCs based on a grammar book, PR and Kaplan verbal books and from a few other online sources. While preparing, I kept updating my notes which proved very useful. I also completed about 600 SC questions from the list of 1000 SCs. I completed all SCs, CRs and half of the RCs in the GMAT OG book. I did not have time to work on the 1000 CRs or any other reading comprehension problem set.

Exam: I found the verbal section alright. I faced an unusually high number of SCs, and most of them were pretty complex and long ones. The RCs were not so bad, because (believe it or not) I did get a couple of interesting ones, such as one on planets and comets, etc. I did not get too many CRs (my strongest point in the verbal section), but I believe I got a few convoluted ones. Overall, I was not too pressed for time in the verbal section and actually finished 4-5 minutes early.

Practice tests:
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Kaplan CAT 1: 660 (October 21, 2006)
Manhattan CAT1: 700 (October 22, 2006)
Manhattan CAT2: 710 (October 25, 2006)
Manhattan CAT3: 770 (October 26, 2006)
PowerPrep1: 770 (October 27, 2006)
PowerPrep2: 770 (October 28, 2006)
GMATPrep1: 780 (October 28, 2006)
GMATPrep2: 760 (October 29, 2006)

Finally, I am selling the entire Manhattan Prep series, the GMAT Official Guide, Princeton Review and Kaplan Verbal workbooks, etc. Please drop me an email at chakrabartis@yahoo.com if anyone is interested to buy any of these "like new" books.

Thanks,
Sid.