alakshma

The classroom courses are aimed at getting you to 700. If you are already scoring ~700 I doubt if a Princeton/ Kaplan class is going to do you any good. If you have identified that you are weak in a particular area (say SC or DS) then I suggest you take private tutoring in that particular section from Princeton/ Kaplan/ Veritas/ MGMAT. If that is not your case I suggest you participate actively in the forums and work hard on the areas you are relatively weaker on.

CONGRATS!!! Guys we are on a roll. Keep this up!

I agree with this one. Working at Mckinsey is stressful enough and you might as well make it count as a Consultant rather than an Analyst:) It looks like you have a WIN-WIN. You either get into H/S and then go to McKinsey or get bumped at H/S this year, go to McKinsey and then go to H/S two years later. Gee, I would like to be in a situation like this. :) HAVE FUN!

That is one hell of a post. Not to be demeaning in any way, but considering your age (19 years) I should say that your level headedness and insight is simply spectacular. Most of us here have a few years of work experience under our belts and that does help us give different perspectives and (for a lack of a better word) "mellows" us down. I cannot imagine writing this when I was 19. KUDOS!!! Good luck on your apps. I am pretty sure you have thought through this well, but you may want to consider working for a couple of years and then applying to B-school. Sometimes work experience can be an eye opener on what you want to do with your life. I am not sure what kind of a career you have in mind but with your skills you may not find it too hard to knock your way into companies like Mckinsey/ Goldman Sachs after undergrad and then with 2 years experience you will have a great shot at H/S/W. Either ways, Good Luck!

That makes it two of us. I had not mentioned this in my debriefing but I did take in a shot of Nyquil too. Not sure how much it helped me sleep but definitely helped me calm down. I felt strangely serene in the morning. Again just to emphasize what TwinSplitter said, this may not be for everyone but if you are really really desperate you could give it a shot. Excellent debriefing, TwinSplitter. I am sure a lot of people will benefit from this.

This is absolutely amazing! Fantastic achievement. CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Actually I have been noticing this. This is the second time somebody has Q50 V42 and scored 750. I wrote the GMAT in March and I had same section scores and percentile as Obelixous and scored 760. Maybe ETS is scaling down the total scores because a lot of people have started to do well. But again, this doesnt make sense if it does not reflect in the percentiles. So it is a bit perplexing as to how ETS comes up with the scoring.

Received my AWA score. It is 5.5. Conclusion is that as long as you follow a standard template you should do just fine on the AWA.

Congrats BManoj on crossing the 700 barrier! You efforts on verbal seem to have paid off. Hope you get into the schools of your choice.

I started doing the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] 20 days before the test. These were the details SC: 242/268 (~90%) CR: 193/205 (~95%) RC: 110/120 (~92%) The problem I faced in the test was not so much in getting the questions right as in doing them on time. If I had 15 mins more I would have probably got a lot more right. The real test is in the fact that you do not have that extra 15 mins. For all [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] questions I spent atleast 2 mins per question. I did not have the 2 mins time in the test for many questions. Another factor was that I did most of the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] when I was very fresh, early in the morning. In the real test you hit verbal after 2:15 of a very demanding test.

If you do not want to do the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] again, you should start doing questions from the forum. You can look at the archives in the verbal section and start solving them. 2 weeks before your test you can do the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] again. Your timing seems to be off quite a bit. For the next few tests you may want to concentrate on getting questions right than to race through and get a few wrong. Finishing 15 mins before but still getting a bunch of questions wrong does not serve your purpose. Also, look at PP1 to see where you made more mistakes. If it is is in the earlier questions slow down there as they kind of determine your range.

Those questions are good for practice but I do not remember seeing any of them on the test. Ofcourse, I did not do all the questions exhaustively. I did about 500 questions or so and many of them were repeats from forums etc.

Agree with your point about uniformity. Well, all is fair in love, war and GMAT :-) We do not have a choice, do we. Btw, wristwatch was not allowed in the San Jose centre. I am still undecided on Part time vs Full time and also debating between '06 and '07. Need to give it some thought in the coming months.

Since Mba05 has raised a valid point here, I want to share a couple of more things on the "untimed" breaks to make sure I am not misleading someone. 1. Please do not assume that your test centre also follows this. You may end up losing valuable time on the clock. I only know this was true for my test centre because of the following 2 reasons a. When I came back from my AWA break the computer showed 0:00 and I panicked thinking I had missed time. However, when I started the Quant (after someone unlocked the keyboard) the timer showed me 1:15. b. When I signed out at the end of Quant the lady told me that it is OK if am a couple of mins late, since it is not timed by the computer [Now I was sure it was not]. When I left the computer, it was actually counting down from 5:00 and it seemed as if it was being timed. 2. Please do not try to take undue advantage of this. If test proctors feels that way, they may report it to ETS officials who may penalize you/ cancel your scores. My point was not to overly stress yourself to be back in 5 mins if you know the break is not timed. You can politely ask the proctor if it is. I still recommend being back in 7-8 mins which was what I did.

I agree it does. But there are so many other small factors involved that it is never possible to give the exact same conditions to all test takers. For example, I do not think the test centers in many places give noise cancelling headphones, the restrooms in the centre I gave the test are farther than they are in other test centres making it difficult to take a break in a short time, some test centres are so empty that it is so quiet (the test is also a test of concentration). What the heck, even these forums give un undue advantage to people who read them as opposed to people who do not. Your point is taken, but you win some you lose some. While the break may be an advantage in this test centre there may have been other not-so-ideal factors. This reminds me of a recent controversy in the game of cricket (not sure how many of you follow it). Do you walk when the umpire gives you "NOT OUT" but you know you are "OUT". The argument against this is that sometimes you are on the other end of the deal [when you know you are "NOT OUT" and the umpire gives you "OUT"] and this is the time to compensate for that.