souvikotr

Friends, I managed 1400 only. I only prepared for a month seriously.There are few very interesting things that I want to share with you you. First and foremost, my test did not go at all as well as I would have liked to.I was nervous and at the same time casual when I entered into the center.First the administrator told me to sign in some documents and guess what ! she pointed out that my signature is not matching with the one in my passport!!!!:eek: I tried nervously again only to manage a reluctant nod from the administrator. The test started in a deceptively friendly manner with easy issue and argument questions.Easy in the sense that, I could at least have some opinion about the topic unlike some of the other very abstract topics and specially politically flavoured ones since I can hardly write a line about politics. I moved on.Then came the verbal section and here came my first surprise.Guys I dont know about you, but I found the verbal sections in almost all the preparation books like Barron, Kaplan decently laid out and sample tests those came with the books had moderate difficulty if not very difficult. Compared to these standards the verbal section was very very easy!Well that is not reflected in my score because I am weak in reading comprehension as I take too much time to read and understand the contents.Also unlike popular suggestions I read the passage totally first time,without skipping any portion because I am comfortable with that approach.Anyway,the point is the antonym and the sentence completion questions were tremendously easy!!(thank God it was that way:D)It took 1-2 seconds for me to answer them each and I am not a native speaker of english, not had english as my first language ever,not an avid reader,not a literature student and my only defense was barrons wordlist. All the words except one was from barrons in the antonym and analogy sections.Where I was let down is in the RC section.There was 3 RC's with two of them almost back to back towards the end.I have reda in this forum that an early RC is not a good thing and thankfully didnt get one. The first 5 questions are very very crucial as you already know.Its really really important that you get your first 5 questions correct which I did because all them were either antonym or sentence completion(what a relief:D).In all the mock tests that I gave the ones with low score had a RC in the first 5 questions.So my verbal could have been worse...... I was feeling confident by this time because I knew certainly that my first 6-7 questions were absolutely correct and moved on to the next section which was quants. To give you an example,I took 5 800score tests.In one of them I got 740 with 4 incorrect and In the other one I managed 800 with 4 incorrect,i.e. same as the previous one!! The difference was I got first 7-8 questions correct in the second one and got 1 incorrect in the first five in the first test.So, keeping this in mind I moved very very cautiously perhaps a little more than was required.And then came the second surprise.Now,I know every one of us has different opinion about the difficulty level of a math problem.Some hates tricky problems,others hate lot of calculations and there are other things as well.The problems which I got were difficult in the sense that they required a lot of time for intricate calculations and process of elimination simply wont work.The wordings of the problems were juxtaposed in a way to intentionally confuse the reader However it didnt require difficult and abstract math concepts.In one problem that particularly irritated me ,the information given in form of an equation was unnecessarily repeated in words(in lot of words actually:mad:)For example If I tell you x=y+5 and then tell you a story about x and how he jumps,plays,eats and then give you one more boring description of perhaps y's latest electronic gazettes and finally telly you y is 5 years younger than x its bound to irritate you.Apart from the time it took it confused me. Anyway, I again made sure I got first 6-7 questions absolutely right and increasingly lagged behind the time.There wasn't a single problem in the first half of the exam which was straightforward and of the form I was familiar with (I studied NOVA's quants thoroughly as they are the best in quants, and also Kaplan and barrons math section).DI's were relatively easy and there were two of them one towards the fag end.I marched very fast as had only 2 ,minutes for the last 4 questions but used up all those time for the q no 25 with 3 left unanswered.Even in q no. 25 although I marked one option I was not sure so I was still thinking and could not click next when time went out.To my surprise The test was kind enough(I must be joking!) to ask me if it could take that as my answer and I said yes please and prayed it would correct. O, by the way ,to catch up with time I made two educated guesses in two problems whose calculation was very lengthy.So in all I had 3 problems unanswered and two guess and god knows what about the rest.So ......:hmm:tell me how I should have felt that time?It was complete despair,frustration,rage and depression.I was almost certain to take it again next month and almost ended up canceling my scores.But then gave it a shot and voila! I saw Verbal 640,Quants 760 !!!! it was unbelievable for me.I had set 1450 as my target.So this is not bad.In fact after the disaster it was a blessing from god.I guess my "first 5 correct" strategy worked.I dont know where does this 1400 fit,as I frequently see 1500+ scores in this forum. Thanks for numerous posts in this forum and sharing your experiences.I really got a lot of useful information from them.And all of you preparing for the GRE, my best wishes for you,and keep in mind get first 5 absolutely correct,then it wont hurt much if it goes wrong later. Best of luck and cheers to all:tup: