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Congratulations on INSEAD! I know exactly what you mean about RC ... the GMAT seems to choose the most boring things in the world for these questions. When I was taking the test, there were some paragraphs I spent 5-10 minutes on because of that ... and I still ended up with a 47, which just shows you that what you experienced isn't an indication of your ability. I think it really helps if you can find a way to be interested in the topic ... try to convince yourself that you care about the passage. Also, I agree with the previous advice of reading editorials in newspapers like the New York Times on a regular basis ... it will definitely help!

That's funny. I live in Canada, and I am flying to Germany in a last minute decision on Sunday. I like riding bikes, but not so much in the rain. And I have green eyes and brown hair. How is your trip to Canada going?

Find the roots of the closest squares that you know and then approximate based on the magnitude of the differences... 20^2 = 400 25^2 = 625 576 is much closer to 625 than to 400 so it will be between 20 and 25, but much closer to 25. ... Difference between 625 and 576 is about 50 Difference between 400 and 576 is about 175. 175 is more than 3 x 50 ... So ... intuitively it should be somewhere around 24. Which happens to be the exact answer. By the way, there is a trick for finding the square of any 2-digit number ending in 5. You multiply the first digit by the digit that follows it, and add 25 to the end. ex. 15 x 15 = (1x2)25 = 225 35 x 35 = (3x4)25 = 1225 75 x 75 = (7x8)25 = 5625 ... a little trick from Russian elementary school.

Congratulations on the perfect AWA score ... 6.0 is in the 95th percentile and it shows that you are a good communicator, which is still important, especially if your application is in the gray area. Way to go! Hey, what happened with that girl you met at the testing centre?

Congratulations! Well done.

I have to agree with the statement about analyzing your mistakes to look for patterns. Clearly, if your score isn't improving with practice, you are falling into the same traps over and over again. Look for patterns, and figure out which types of questions you get wrong and what your particular mistakes are. Know what to look for in the correct answer for those types of questions. So I am with gmatnaive on this ... practice is great, but it's all about practice and analysis so that you can improve. Practice alone will help your pacing, but not your hit rate.

Cancelling your score is almost never a good strategy, unless you lost 10 minutes on one of the sections because you were throwing up or something. It's nearly impossible to tell how well you are doing based on how you feel. In your position, I would go over my review materials, do practice tests to get into it, and just do your best during the test. You can never be perfectly ready ... and most of the time, a little bit of incremental prep only makes a small difference in your score... your score can even go down, depending on how you feel that day.

Join the GMATNetwork group in Yahoo!Groups. Then go to Files > Full Length Test

I found all the major books had a few of these, with good explanations of how to do them. For more questions, I would suggest doing a search on these forums. I just tried a search for "average" under the category "GMAT Math" and got lots of problems. Good luck!

It depends largely on which questions you get wrong. The first questions count for more - after the first 10 or so, the GMAT has decided on your approximate score and is mostly fine-tuning. If you get the first 4 in a row wrong, you can get the rest of the questions right and still end up with a crappy score. So it's not about how many questions you get wrong, it's about how hard the questions you get wrong are. It's better to be getting hard questions wrong than to be getting easy questions right!

In the sets, I probably averaged as many as 5 wrong answers.... it really depended on whether I was paying attention to the question, as silly as that sounds. On about 1-2 questions, I would learn something new content-wise as I looked up the solutions. On the other ones, the mistakes were purely due to not reading the question carefully. I really found that a lot of doing well on the GMAT is about relaxing, concentrating on the question, and getting into GMAT-Mode. Practice really helped me, especially the questions I did in the couple of days leading up to the exam when I focused on reading the question carefully and solving everything in an average of 2 minutes. For Verbal, my only Prep was to solve the last few questions in the OG... I got all the SC and RC questions right, but messed up on one or two of the CRs. That's when I realized that the hard CR questions actually require you to treat the argument's assumptions as part of the argument, because only using the data given in the question made all of the answers seem outside of the scope of the argument. If I had more time, I would work on questions of this level, probably by going through the LSAT practice questions. In my GMATPrep tests, I got 7-11 wrong on Math (including a couple wrong within the first ten) and 2-3 wrong on Verbal. Sorry for the delay in posting files guys, I am just going to post links to them instead one day when I find some time (hopefully soon).

Hi guys, My official scores came in and it turns out I got 6.0 on the essay :) I was trying to upload some problem sets in this post, but it turns out all my files are too big and I have 0 days left on my WinZip trial. I will download it and try again. So Chris, tell me about you.

Hi Shake, I was wishing you luck on test day ... but hey, I guess you got a hot date out of it, so it wasn't all bad! I am sure you will have no trouble cracking 700 next time, after learning from this first experience. However, I have to say that 660 is still a high score and the rest of your profile has serious B-School appeal, so don't let it get you down!

Hi Sandeep, I am uploading some files I got from other posts that helped. I think I got them from Clintonn's posts? I also found the explanations to the questions here really good: http://questionbank.4gmat.com/mba_prep_sample_questions/number_systems/ Most of the Number Properties questions in the Sets have also been posted in the math forums, with some great solutions by very intelligent math whizzes. I found that the key was to learn to think in a structured way about numbers. For instance, if you have an expression like n(n-1)(n-2) in the question stem, you know that at least one of those numbers will be even (only one will be even if n is odd and two will be even if n is even) and at least one of them will be divisible by 3. So if the question asks you whether the product is divisible by 12, you have to ask yourself under what conditions it would be true. You can figure out that the number will be divisible by 4 if n is even because n(n-2) would then be divisible by 4, as long as n>2. You don't necessarily need to plug in different values for n(n-1)(n-2), as that would eat up time and hopefully, by G-Day, you have learned to think strategically and algebraically about math. This kind of thinking saves time. This dawned on me the day before my GMAT, and it would have been nice to have more time to practice, but if you have time, this is what I would recommend. Try to comprehend what the equation "tells" you so you don't need to plug in every possible value, thus eating up valuable time.

Ok, now for the actual test. 1. AWA The topics were all right. My issue topic was deeply uninteresting, but I found plenty to say, since I was already in essay-writing mode after the Analysis of an Argument. I took the entire time and look forward to getting my score. 2. The Break. I accidentally took a 15 minute break. You are not allowed to have a watch, and I could have sworn it was 5 minutes. I was the only one taking the test, so I really had nothing by which to gauge the time. 3. Quant I was a little panicked after realizing that I lost nearly 5 minutes of my valuable Quant time, since I always use the entire 75 minutes, in contrast to Verbal, where I always have at least 10 minutes left! I was also starting to feel the effects of not sleeping on my concentration, but I tried not to let it get to me. The first question was one of those weird functions with a made-up symbol. I don't remember the exact ordering of the questions, but here's a general breakdown: - Number properties were the single most common type of question, especially among the DS questions. - Algebraic word problems were the second most common, and of about the same level and style as the OG. - A few times on the Number properties questions, I had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere in the previous few days ... either because the actual questions are floating about, or because the question type is pretty standard. - I had a couple of remainders problems - A couple of geometry problems, only one of which was tricky - I only had ONE probability problem ... it involved very basic permutations. - A couple of problems involved difficult-ish square roots (Jaybird, one of them was like a problem you solved for me) and equations involving exponents. - One word problem about ratios - A couple of progressions (one arithmetic, one with a made-up formula). - A couple of problems about sets of groups (one of which I solved with a Venn diagram, the other with a 2x2 decision matrix. You know the type). On the whole, it was very much like the GMATPrep tests. I was in the process of clicking on Next on the last question as my time ran out, so I think that question counted as Blank. I also suspect I didn't read all the questions very carefully (again!), since the topics covered did not exactly stump me. It would have been great to have that 5 minutes back and a good night's sleep to crack the 50 barrier, but I am still satisfied with 49, since it's still a great score for 2 weeks of prep. I have two major things to say about prep for quant: -> Ignore what Princeton says about plugging in. Learn how to make equations, as well as Venn Diagrams and decision tables. It will make your life easier. -> Make sure you study number properties and understand well how remainders and exponents work so you don't spend 5 minutes on those questions, since there are quite a few of them. 3. Verbal I have very little to say about verbal, except that it was similar to the GMATPrep tests. The really hard CR questions get into arguments which back up / weaken the assumptions in the argument, rather than the actual argument. In retrospect, I do wish I'd practiced those a little bit so that I could bring up my score a little bit more. Anyway, there were no surprises content-wise. A lot of SC problems seemed suspiciously easy. My one suggestion would be to make sure that you re-read the sentence with your new chosen solution. This is because they will sometimes put the "best" solution into a fragment which, when inserted back into the sentence, makes the sentence incomplete and ridiculous. Do watch out for that. 4. Final Thoughts Honestly, a part of me does want to take it again just to crack 50 on Quant, since I finally know that I can do it. However, the part of me that is in touch with reality knows that taking the test again just to crack 760 is insane. Anyway, if you guys are interested, I could include some of the online materials I thought were good, or a list of things I would do if I had more time and could take it again. Thanks a ton to everyone in this forum! Your insight has greatly helped me to set the bar high and develop a deeper understanding of math. There are many people on this forum who really deserve to be in the 700s and I am sure you will be. Just make sure you are comfortable with all of the major topics which are covered, buy some sleeping pills, and stay calm and focused during the test.