600 - (39Q - 57%; 34V - 72%) on 2/7/04

[thedilleyo]

I took the GMAT this past weekend and was pretty scared about how hard is was going to be. I was actually surprised at how comfortable I was with the test (not that I loved it). Everything was pretty straight forward, except the math was harder than expected. I got to question 35 with about 2 mins to go, and read through the question and thought I could solve it without too much hastle. When I finally solved it, time was up!!!. I didn't even get to guess on the last two questions. How much could this have hurt my score? I've always been pretty good at math, and I didn't do as well as I had wanted. My target score is a 650 so I'm definitely going to take it again. In the official score report, do you get a score break down of the specific areas (ie. sentance correction, reading comp., etc.)? I've struggled with the sentance correction part on all the practice exams, and I'm sure it hurt me on the real test. What's the best strategy to study for sentance correction? Any and all help would be great.

[desperateguy]

Indeed, after experiencing the GMAT I can assure you that the test is not evaluating your intellectual abilities, but rather your capacity to work under unfavorable circumstances. In my personal experience I believe that it is all about time and stress management.

The best you can do is to pace yourself through the test and try to not spend more than 3 minutes on a single question. It is important to note that most quantitative questions have a shortcut, so you should try harder to find this shortcut in order to save time.

Verbal is trickier, especially if you English is not your first language, but try to practice as much as you can and you will be fine. For SC I suggest you do all OG questions at least twice. Kaplan has a compilation of the most important rules you should look on the sentences, so I recommend you to buy or at least borrow this book. This forum is a fantastic reference for SC as well; you will see that many of your doubts about proper English usage are shared by other tesk-takers.

And yes, your score was definitively affected by not finishing the Quantitative section. It is impossible to estimate how much your score would have improved, but OG is pretty clear about this: unreached questions will penalize your score. When the 5 minutes warning blinks on the screen you should have no more than 3-4 question to answer, otherwise you should reserve some 30 seconds to guess all the remaining answers.

HTH

[thedilleyo]

Does the official GMAT score report give you a break down of the different sections (ie. DS, sentance correction, etc.)?

[anita678910]

The official GMAT score report gives you a score break down for verbal and quant . It does not give breakdown for each part of the verbal (SC, CR and RC) or each part of quant( DS and PS).