aakfar

Guys, Just got my my official score report. AWA is 5.5. I think that should be good enough now. I didn't do any significant preparation for AWA. The only time I practiced essays was in my last Powerprep. But this was bcoz I was fairly confident of my writing skills. Because there is not much weightage for AWA, I didn't worry too much about it. I just customized a few templates listed in twinnsplitter's post. I'm glad that he took the test 3 days before I did. Otherwise I might not have been able to get my hands on some good templates Thanks twinn! and thanks to others who actually prepared the templates. Ok other thing: In my GMAT, while I listed the schools to report the score, I accidentally clicked next after I selected the first school. So the other 4 schools I wrote in a form provided by the center. These schools are not listed in my official score report. Does anyone know whether these schools that you write in the paper, actually receive the score or not. If yes, do we receive any notification from ETS saying that the scores were sent.

AULAKH: There is no perfect strategy for GMAT. Lot of people feel that Princeton Review is a good book to start off with. I followed that advice and I felt that it worked quite well for me. It introduces the GMAT in an interesting manner. Participate in the Math and verbal forums of this website as much as possible. Share and learn. Its an excellent way to prepare. Twinsplitter's post http://www.www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26097 is excellent and he has organized the information very well. You can use this as a guide as well.

One I used to go thru science passages was http://www.scientificamerican.com/ The length of articles on this site is roughly the size of GMAT RCs

Paliwal800: You didn't mention studying from the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] yet. You definitely need to get hold of the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] to improve on your verbal skills. Get hold of the 10th edition and work on the verbal questions in there. Read explanation for every single question, including the ones you got right. You can improve your SC significantly if [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] is used well, in tandem with verbal forums on this website and wikigrammar.com. I assume that you already have spidey's notes with you. Keep going back to them whenever you have some time. You'll definitely see some improvement. Next, try to work in a timed environment every time. One idea is to answer questions in bunches of 41 questions with 75 minutes. Or with fewer questions as long as your queston to time ratio is 41:75. This really helps in improving your timing. Also when you take tests, be aware of the time you're spending on the questions. Divide the verbal section into three parts of 25 minutes each. Try and complete 13, 14 and 14 questions in each part.

Great job Nidhia....it's a neat score

Imran: You should be able to find plenty of advice in the Just finished my GMAT test! forum. Please browse thru there

Erin, Your announcement on the forum says the chat is on 25th June. But I guess it's scheduled for May 25th. Can you please correct this date. We don't want people logging on a month later :) gmat168: You can confirm my participation as well. Just managed to sneak into the 750 bracket :grad:

Neat job dgnana. Congratulations...

Great job ronakcs. 97 percentile in V is damn neat

I knew I was decent at math. It was just getting used to the pattern of DS that needed to be done. This was one type of question, I had never done before in school or in any other test. So kinda struggled in the beginning.:yuck: My overall math strategy was to solve as many questions on the forums as possible. In the last three weeks before the test I made a schedule. One day was for Math forum and the next day was for wikigrammar forum. I followed this pattern until the weekend before my test. That definitely helped. Initially, when I started with DS, I realized that most of my mistakes I made were because I fell into the trap of the question. The information in (2) would be sufficient, but because I read (1) first, I would assume that both are needed. So I decided to go one at a time. To force this harder, I covered the options that I'm not reading, with my hand. First I covered the options and read the question. Then read the first option, having the second one covered. If the first one answered the question, I would put a check mark on my scratch pad, else a cross mark. Then covered the first option and read the second. Again a check mark or a cross on my scratch paper. If both didn't answer, I read both options as a single question. This strategy, although seemingly silly, definitely helped improve my DS skills. After a while, I didn't need to cover the options with hand. I knew how to read a DS question carefully. As for SC, there is nothing like [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip]. When I first did [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip], I just reviewed the questions that I did incorrectly. It's only in the last month I realized that I needed to review even the questions I got right. So I did 50% of the SC questions on the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] once again. It's very important to read every word of the explainations that [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] provides. Apart from that Spidey's notes and Erin's explainations are fantastic. :tup: SC was one area where I saw huge improvements. I read Spidey's notes whenever I needed to get away from doing practice questions.

Great score BlueMartini. I totally agree on the Quant section. The questions are definitely [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] level. I had the same kind of feeling when I saw the questions weren't getting hard. But it just turned out that we tend to solve much harder problems here that the real GMAT looks quite easy. Congrats once again......

I used powerprep on Windows XP. I have the Windows XP home edition and I didn't have any problems using it. Powerprep uses a different screen resolution and it automatically changes the screen, the moment you run it. And once you quit the software, the resolution is back to your original one. But no. I didn't have any problems using Powerprep on Windows XP.

Arranged by date PR 1 (19-Nov-2004) - 570 PP 1 (12-Feb-2005) - 610 PR 2 (09-Apr-2005) - 700 PR 3 (16-Apr-2005) - 730 Kap 1(17-Apr-2005) - 560 Kap 2(23-Apr-2005) - 690 Kap 3 (24-Apr-2005) - 560 PR 4 (30-Apr-2005) - 690 Kap4 (05-May-2005) - 590 PR 1 (07-May-2005) – 710 PP 1 (12-May-2005) - 780 PP 2 (14-May-2005) - 760 GMAT (16-May-2005) – 750 (51Q, 39V) My Peterson scores were about 670 average. But I didn’t take these seriously

Scoot, My RC strategy was unlike what was suggested by Kaplan and Princeton. Browsing through the passages to get the gist didn't work for me. Active reading and understanding what was written was much more important for me. When I read the passage I tried to imagine that this really interested me. Every passage was a source of information to me. I paused for 2 seconds after I read the first paragraph. Just to make sure that I understood what I read. I didn't want to go through the motions. Although I didn't take notes, that might not be a bad idea just to be sure that you know what you are reading. When I reached the questions, I tried to be in a position that atleast for 3 out of 5 questions, I don't have to go back and browse thru the passage to find the answer. Science topics with a lot of biological terms freaked me out initially. But skipping the jargons and understanding the base helped me. I used a couple of sites to practice reading science passages.

Parabola question was very simple. The question gave an equation of a parabola and 5 parabola figures as options. Each parabola was drawn on a x-y co-ordinate scale. All you need to do is replace simple values for x and y in equation and compare it with the choices. I tried with x=0, that narrowed me down to two options and with y=0, I found the right option. We tend to get over excited about some math questions. P, P and C especially. Let's not add parabola to that. The GMAT tests very basic forms of probability and P&C. Same is the case with parabola. You dont need to know parabola equation to solve these problems.