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.

With your scores of V26 M18 it would add up to less than 400. I suggest you prepare for sometime atleast and improve your math to atleast around 30 if you want a 600. It may be enough just to do the Official Guide for the GMAT to get to this score.

GMAT: 760 (99 %ile) Q 50 (95 %ile) V 42 (96 %ile) Practice tests Week Test Q NumberWrong V NumberWrong (SC/RC/CR) Score 1 Princeton Diagnostic 48 2 39 7(2,4,1) 730 3 Kaplan Diagnostic 47 2 40 9 (6/2/1) 720 4 PP1(before OG) 51 0 42 7(2/3/2) 770 5 Kaplan1 50 3 37 12 670 6 Peterson1 50 3 57 7(2/3/2) 790 6 Kaplan2 50 3 36 12(2/5/5) 650 7 Kaplan3 50 1 35 13 650 7 Peterson2 50 3 39 7 690 8 PP2(after OG) 51 0 45 3(2/1/0) 780

Background Bachelors in EE in India (BITS, Pilani), Masters in Comp Engg in the US and 3.5 years work experience in microprocessor design in one of the well known semiconductor companies in the Bay Area. Preparation Two years ago, I wanted to give the GMAT and started studying vaguely. Tried to improve my verbal but without much success. My diagnostic was 690 and my PP practice tests were 710 and 730. Most importantly I had no confidence in the scores and felt that on a bad day I could end up with a 690 or so. I just gave it up at that time as I did not have any immediate requirement to give the GMAT. Recently, I had a quite period at work and finally decided to take another stab at the GMAT. This time I had an invaluable resource that I did not have the first time, the forums. I would attribute a 30-40 point jump to the forums and most importantly it ensured the consistency I was so lacking the first time. Diagnostics: First off, I took the diagnostics. The Kaplan and Princeton ones online. I found that my quant was pretty strong and identified that I was rusty in P&C in quant. Verbal was definitely weaker and I felt very uncomfortable with SC's and RC's especially. CR's seems much easier. These were my diagnostic scores. Week Test Q NumberWrong V NumberWrong (SC/RC/CR) Score 1 Princeton Diagnostic 48 2 39 7(2,4,1) 730 3 Kaplan Diagnostic 47 2 40 9 (6/2/1) 720 Weeks 1 and 2 were spent mostly in trying to identify resources, scrouge the forums, read a few Just Finished the test posts and formulated general strategy for preparation. From the third week onwards I started full scale preparation. It involved atleast 2 hours every night and 5-6 hours every weekend day. First I concentrated on SC and P&C. P&C: I had done similar problems a long time back, so I knew I could start doing them well. I just needed practice. For this purpose the Math forum is excellent. I started solving questions from there and over time gained immense confidence. Doing problems like counting number of words that can be formed by rearranging letters of a word (and variations like vowels need to be together) strengthens the basics tremendously. After you start understanding the basic concepts the rest follow pretty intiutively. I was never weak in probability but I still did some for practice. Other math: I found that I was strong in geometry, algebra, measurements, work problems etc and relied on the practice tests for practice on these. One method to find interesting problems is to sort the math forum by number of replies. The hardest and trickiest problems in the archives show up on top. I found that I was making mistakes in number theory and then fixed that by substituing [-2,-1,-0.5,0,0.5,1,2]. I never relied on backsolving, plugging in answers etc since I could solve the problem by multiple ways and doing so increased my confidence on the correctness of the solution. I typically found that I never made too many careless mistakes since I solved each problem in atleast 2 different methods. This practice helped me blaze through questions in the real test when I had time pressure with relatively good confidence on the solution. Surprisingly, I never made silly mistakes in conversion etc since I was always on the lookout for the tricks. Sentence correction: Here comes the biggest focus in my entire preparation. I knew that I had to master this section if I wanted to get the 99 percentile range. There is simply no way to crack the GMAT by having a glaring weakness in one of the sections. I knew that the SC questions showed up a lot in the earlier questions in verbal and would be key in determining my range. I started by reading Grammar Smart by Princeton. Believe it or not, when I started my preperation I did not know what an adverb was. I meticulously did all the exercises and slowly the difference between a participle, gerund, infinitve, subordinating conjunction and independent clause dawned on me. Though these concepts are not tested in the GMAT it is imprtant to understand what each means when the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] talks about them in the solutions. Also, in general it increases your confidence on sentence structures and subconciously helps you identify mistakes faster. The next step was to start from the oldest posts in wikigrammar.com and work my way backwards in the archives. Here is where I gained the most in terms of what is being tested on the GMAT. For example, here is where I learnt when to use "that" and when to use "which", what is the difference between "like" and "as", when can "one" take a plural verb, when is "each" singular and when is it plural. These are all subtle concepts that you will be definitely tested on if you are above the 85 percentile. Make no mistake. This process is long, painful and a very hard route. But as far as I can see this is the surest way to crack this section. I did about 500 questions, before I started seeing repetitions and my ROI was much lower and I stopped. If you are focussed you can do 50 posts a day and you can get this done in 10 days. Does not seem very unreasonable, does it? The key here is not to move on if you got the question right. It is to read explanations written by various people and understand the concepts. Reading Comprehension: Surprisingly, I got 7 RC questions out of the first 10 questions in the real test. Q 2-5(business) and Q7-10(native American) were RC's and I cracked both. This was where I probably lifted my level even though I had missed the second question. This section looks to be increasingly important nowadays. When I started prep I was very weak on this one too. I used to skim the passage not understand it well, look at it with hatred and muffed up the questions. Then I changed my attitude. I started to read the RC's with relish. I looked forward to reading RC's as a way to improve my knowledge on different subjects. I started taking an active and curious interest in the passage. Consider the caffeine example in the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip]. As soon as I see the passage, I tell myself that it is a good way to understand why people are addicted to caffeine and how does it really stimulate the body. As I keep reading I get excited by the information the passages and by the time I an done I have a clear picture of the passage. This improved my RC hit rate and timing tremendously. For most questions I did not have to go back to the passage and I could easily sense the answer. Maintaining scope is very important in RC's and you cannot add your views on top of what the author says. It is good to do about 20 passages from the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip]. Once I understood the concepts I did not have to spend much time preparing for the RC's. Critical Reasoning: I never had much trouble with this from the begining. Basic strategies like reading the stem first work here. If you practice from the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] and if you fell comfortable you are good to go. It is important to have a clear mind for this section. One thing I found useful was to make an answer grid and score out choices that are totally out of scope. This helped me prevents re-reading the choices just to be "sure" after you find the right choice. This saves a lot of time. In the real exam I did not have time to read all choices in many questions and relied on my mental map of what should be the right choice. You can try to make similar mental maps. Practice Tests: As I kept preparing, I took the practice tests though I never cared much about the scores except for the powerprep ones. The practice tests are only good for stimulating a 4 hour mental marathon. None, except the PP mimic the GMAT. I would recommend not trying to estimate your final score based on the practice tests and focus on concepts you missed in the tests. Here are my practice test scores. Week Test Q NumberWrong V NumberWrong (SC/RC/CR) Score 4 PP1(before OG) 51 0 42 7(2/3/2) 770 5 Kaplan1 50 3 37 12 670 6 Peterson1 50 3 57 7(2/3/2) 790 6 Kaplan2 50 3 36 12(2/5/5) 650 7 Kaplan3 50 1 35 13 650 7 Peterson2 50 3 39 7 690 8 PP2(after OG) 51 0 45 3(2/1/0) 780 Kaplan: Excellent for math. Terrible for verbal. I sleepwalked the verbal sections Peterson: Math was good again though had some wrong answers. Verbal is OK for practice. PP: Math is much easier than real test. Verbal is pretty similar to real test. After PP1 I felt pretty good. After PP2 I did not feel so confident as I was not solving most of the questions as I remembered them. Still it was good to get a feel of the real test just before the test. Another good thing is that the lack of confidence in the verbal just before the test, kills even the smallest overconfidence you might have! Preparation Material: - Forums are the best for Math and SC - [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] is best for RC and CR. - Kaplan is good for math - I cannot stress the importance of [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] enough. I recommend doing the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] in the last 2-3 weeks if you are already scoring well. You remember the last material the best. lf you are not doing that great, you may want to do the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] in the very early stages once and do it again towards the end. Some random notes - You will do yourself a favor if you do not underestimate the psychological nature of the test. It is more of a mental marathon than anything. - Use a practice answer grid and keep reviewing the questions you made mistakes on (especially in the OG). Staple all the sheets so you do not lose them. - If you burn yourself out with overpreparation you will not peak at the right time. - There is NO shortcut to the GMAT. You have to practice, practice and practice your weak points. Learning the concepts rather than shortcut strategies is the best way for a 700 plus score. Over time these concepts are embedded in your mind and this is very important when racing through the sections. If your aim is less than 650 the basic books like Kaplan, Princeton may be good enough.

I canot quote the exact statistics questions. It involves finding if SD of A is greater than SD of B given median, range, mean etc in a DS format. I saw several similar in scoretop and TM forums but failed to pay proper attention. I did not see the exact type of question you are alluding to. There were a few mean based questions based as word problems in DS. As far as timing goes, I always tend to be slower in the begining of the section. I triple check all questions. This happened in PP and Kaplan too. My timing in practice tests was roughly same as in the real test. So do not read too much into it. However if you are not used to blazing through last 15 questions, I would recommend speeding up in the begining and taking a few risks there to save time. You will desperately need it in the end. I tend to take risks in the end. After Q25 or so I do not stop to even double check any question. By that time I am usually in a good "quant" mood and find that I make very few mistakes. There were no "seen" questions in quant though some did seem familiar. For geometry this forum looked pretty representative when I was following it. I did not follow the discussions in the last 2-3 weeks. Also, quant in Kaplan is very good for practice especially in the >49 range. Triangle properties seems to be the ETS favorite. I did not really "prepare" for boldface. Infact till I got the boldface I totally forgot about it. There was a good collection of bold face problems I saw in the TM CF forum once. You should be able to find it for searching. It looked good. However, I got just one in the test and it may have been experimental. So I would'nt break my head on it.

Ok, here goes. Long post warning. Wanted to give an overview of the test before the details start to fade away. I will hold off on the "How I prepared" part of it till I get a bit more free time. One note before delving in: The debriefings are all individual-specific. What works for me may not work for you and vice versa. So take it in with a pinch of salt and as a guideline, not as a bible. You will have to customize the debriefings for yourself. I think this is true for almost all the debriefings I have read. Scheduling the test: I scheduled the test 2 weeks in advance and wanted a Monday so that I could have the previous day off. It is good to schedule the test when you think you are about 80% done. This gives you motivation to wrap up your preparations and most importantly peak at the right time. If you start thinking about scheduling a test a week after you think you are ready, you will probably burn yourself out before the test worrying about the test. Night before the test I had the worst night ever, tossing and turning and barely sleeping. I estimate that I probably slept for about 2 hours in total and even considered rescheduling my appointment! What saved me was that I had been sleeping for a good 8 hours every day in the previous week. I would recommend not studying too much in the last week and taking plenty of rest. Chances are you will gain very little by studying at the end. If you can, try not to follow my example and try to sleep well the night before. Even if you do not sleep well, do not despair. I was able to retain razor focus during most of the test even though I had not slept well. Test centre: Not many people have given input on this and I wanted to share my 2 cents on the centre I wrote the test in. It was the Prometric Centre in San Jose. It is an *excellent* idea to visit the test centre a week before the test. You will feel a lot more comfortable about the test experience. I asked a few inane questions such as "How much earlier should I come for the test", "What ID" etc when I went there last week. You can note the general topology of the place and kind of visualize how you will write the test. It reduces one unknown from the test. This test centre was pretty good, busy but peaceful,and the best thing was the "noise cancelling" headsets they gave. It was excellent and totally blocked out ambient noise. This is especially important since not all test takes are giving the GMAT. There are many who give other tests that need constant keyboard use. If you are like me, it gets on your nerves after some time. If your test centre does not have these headphones, I recommend practicing with an earplug and using it on test day. Try to learn how to use earplugs. I remember the time when I gave the GRE and I didnt know what to do with those earplugs. A few things that surprised me about the test centre that you may want to know 1. You cannot choose your seat (in this centre). You get assigned to one. Not a big deal, just FYI 2. You have to sign in and out everytime you leave for breaks etc. Again, not a big deal, just FYI. 3. The breaks are *NOT* timed by the computer in this centre. Someone will unlock the keyboard between sections. That means you do not have to restrict the break to 5mins. That does not mean you can take a half hour break, but I did take a 9 min break between Q and V. Even then, I barely had time to splash cold water on my face, eat and drink some stuff. Btw, cold water splashing was very refreshing. Try it in the breaks. 4. Wristwatch was not allowed inside. You have to follow the wall clock in the lobby for timing your breaks. Now for the test Pre-AWA: When you choose the 5 schools to send your score to, do not press next after entering the first one like I did. I believe there should be another choice for next school or something. Look carefully. I thought "Next" will let me add the Next school. No such luck. It took me to the next section. Then I had to manually fill in the codes after the test and give it to them. AWA: First was an "Analysis of Argument" Usually I am more comfortable with arguments than I am with issues. But this particular one was not my cup of tea. But still I managed to find 3 invalid assumptions and flaws. I wrote 5 paragraphs, proof read it and finished with 2 mins to spare. Nothing spectacular. I found that it is best not to drain yourself to write the best essay of your life. Your energy is better spent on Q and V. "Analysis of Issue" was closer to my heart and as soon I as I saw the topic gazillion points leapt to my mind. I made merry and wrote 6 paragraphs and finished with 5 mins to spare. I was becoming visibly tired towards the end of Analysis of issue which brings back my original point of not burning yourself out for the essays. Break1: In my opinion it is better to take the breaks and rejuvanate yourself, even if you feel you are on a roll. Cold water helped me start thinking about DS and PS even before the section. I found it useful to get into this mode before the section. I kept a few cookies and had them for instant energy. I felt hungry even though I had eaten a good breakfast. So, do carry something to eat even if you feel you may not need it. I took a mountain dew with "caffeine" incase I zoned out (as I had not slept well) but did not need to use it. I also took a Gatorade but did not use it. Just sipped water. Quant: Echo what everyone else wrote in the forum. Way harder than [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] and some were even harder than Kaplan. In both powerprep tests I finished Q with 0 mistakes out of 37. All my Kaplan's had scaled score 50 for Q. Even in the famed last 100 DS questions in [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] I got only 2 wrong. I think Statistics did me in. I got 2 questions on standard deviation and 2-3 on mean, median etc. I did not pay too much attention to statistics and probably got the statistics DS questions wrong. I half-guessed Q36, a DS on statistics. There were some tricky number theory questions that I enjoyed solving. I used to get a lot of these wrong in the earlier stages of my preparation and then arrested the trend by substituting these numbers for all such problems [-2,-1,-0.5,0,0.5,1,2]. This method works well. P&C and probabilty were very easy questions in the early stages (before Q10). There were couple of arithemtics using decimals. Geometry questions were also challenging, but since I enjoy geometry I found them interesting but not impossible to solve. Overall I should say that I really enjoyed the Quant section and was pretty disappointed not to have scored a 51. I would recommend not solving too many quant problems in the last few days just to keep your mind hungry for solving them during the test. Timing wise I was: 10Q 25 mins (a bit behind) 15Q 37 min 20Q 50min ( a lot behind) Then I raced through and consistently maintained 1.5 mins/q till then end which was why I guessed on the statistics DS. Break2: I felt pretty good during the break, but I knew the killer section was coming. Verbal was always a make or break for me since my Quant was pretty consistent. More cold water, more cookies and an apple too! Verbal: The first SC was long but of medium difficulty. I knew I nailed it. The second was another SC testing concept of "each" being singlur/ plural. I wavered and finally selected. Immediately I knew I had got it wrong as I got an RC. I read somewhere that high scorers typically got 3-4 SC's in the begining. This was my lowest point in the whole test. I felt a bit down and desperately tried to recover. I had told myself a thousand times before the test to focus on the question in hand and it finally helped. The RC (35 lines about high tech industry) was very easy and I am pretty sure I nailed it. When I started prep I was weak in RC, but I improved it tremendously towards the end. After the RC I got a medium CR and then another RC (45 lines). This one was a lot harder and I felt better. Maybe I had recovered.I believe I cracked this RC too. 10-20 some SC and CR's, nothing too different from [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip]. I may have got a ac ouple wrong here. From 20 onwards it was a race against time. I had 27 mins for 21 questions. My time management was and has been very poor. I got an involved RC (65 lines Womens reform kind) with some hard questions. I tried to do my best to answer this. After this it was 16q in 21 mins. From now on I raced through the SC's and for the CR's I read the stem, stimuli and formed a mental picture of what could be a possible answer. Then I searched for the answer among the choices. Sometimes I did not even read the other choices. Things were happening in a blur though I maintained my compusre throughout and made educated guesses. Q33 and the 4th RC popped up. A hard biology one but comparitively easier questions. I may have missed one here. SC's and CR's continued. I just got one boldface around 26 or so, was not very hard. Finally I felt very diffident about the verbal section. I estimated that I got about 10-12 questions wrong. However, I had felt the same after PP1 (before OG) and I got the same scaled score (42) then too. I had made 7 mistakes then. However, I cannot conceive the possibility of making just 7 mistakes in the real test. I am pretty sure I got a lot more wrong, or maybe not... Who can say! Most important learning from the verbal is not to try and double guess the CAT. I think it is in your best interest not to estimate how you are doing, however irresistable it may seem. One question at a time IS the key. Sometimes ETS throws easier ones at you, maybe to throw you off track or it could be that you may find the question easier and others may not. Also, back yourself to solve questions correctly if you have prepared well. I may not have got as many questions wrong as I am estimating. One interesting thing was that 2-3 question I got were the exact same questions I saw in one of the forums. Though I did not remember the answers I was pretty surprised to see the exact questions. Just FYI, not that you can depend on the forums to give you all the questions. Post test I did not feel too excited about seeing my score as I was expecting something like a 720-730 or so based on my verbal performance. During the preparation phase here were my expectations. Q: Bad day: 49 Average day: 50 Good/ very good day: 51 V: Bad day: 37-38 Average day: 39-41 Good day: 42 Very good day: 42+ Expected score: 720-770 [ PP1 (before OG)=770 (51,42) PP2 (after OG)=780 (51,45)] But after the sleepless night before the test, I was willing to even take a 700 !!! Finally I blazed through the survey questions and past the multiple "do you want cancel" screens and stared blankly at the 760. Pumped my fists a couple of times and waltzed out feeling great!!! More questions, shoot!

Short answers: 6 weeks, Non-native speaker. How I improved Q and V, and detailed note will follow (soon) when I can catch my breath:)

Overall: Thrilled :D Q: Little dissapointed on missing 51 :hmm: V: Pretty happy with 42 :) Lots of inputs to share, I promise to put up detailed notes. Suffices for now to say that the test is a marathon and definitely saps you out. Have to get back to work I have been putting off for a while now. Will be back!

This question tests the difference between linear velocity and angular velocity. They are related as v=r*w (w is pronounced omega-greek alphabet) Here v1=v2 Hence r1*w1=r2*w2 r1=28 ; w1=x ; r2=35 Find w2 and convert it to minutes, Hence 48x.

Assuming there is no differentation due to companies, there are 18 people Hence number of way they can shake hands is 18C2 (one handshake involves choosing 2 people from the 18). However you are not allowed to shake hands with people from your company. In a company there are 3 people and one handsake involves 2 people. Hence there are 3C2 ways of handshaking within the company and 6*3C2 ways of handshaking within 6 companies. Hence 18C2-6*3C2=135 PS: oops just saw comp_bos's post.

Actually there might be a reason for this perception and your observation could actually be true. The MATH section might "feel" harder for majority of the candidates who write the test in India. And this is because the test is computer adaptive. The better you do, the harder your questions are. So, even if you get harder questions in India the final MATH scores are probably higher (on an average). The problem in this case seems to be that people only talk about getting the harder questions, and not about getting the higher scores. An average person in India will probably say the questions were harder than what an average American student would say and hence the perception (and hence the difference in scores).