Today was an interesting day, it came and it went. Last night I slept at around 11pm but somehow was up around 5:30am. Knowing that I had to take the GMAT at 9am, I tried to go back to sleep so that I wouldn’t get tired, but I had no luck. After unsuccessfully trying for an hour I gave up and decided to start the day. After shower and a very nice breakfast I was out the door at 8am headed towards the testing center. On my way there I debated whether I should get coffee to get my concentration level up, thinking that I especially needed it since I was missing some sleep from the day before and since I got up so early. After two traffic signals I decided to skip on the coffee and go straight to the testing center.
Once I got there I had to check in, which included things like presenting the ID, getting my picture taken, finger printing, and DNA verification. OK, the DNA verification part is not true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a standard procedure in a few years 🙂 A few minutes later I was sitting in front of a Dell OptiPlex staring at a CRT monitor that was running a full screen Java based application; also known as the GMAT test.
After concentrating on the quantitative section a few weeks ago I decided that it was time for verbal section. So, I spent quite some time brushing up my grammatical skills and practicing those questions. My last few days before the exam were spent on the verbal section so my quantitative side started to lack a little bit. Thinking about it now, I would have done even better if I would have spent a little bit more time on the quantitative section in the last few days.
Anyways, back to today. The next few hours went by without me realizing, and around 12pm or so I was finishing up the Verbal section. Surprisingly I had exactly three minutes to finish my last verbal question, which ended up taking almost two and a half minutes. I was really surprised that I did so good on the timing of the verbal section; unfortunately, the quantitative section was a different story 🙂
All in all, when the program asked me whether I wanted to cancel the score, I reflected upon the last few hours and decided that I would go ahead and see how I did. The next thing I said was “Yeah!” Well, not really, because that wouldn’t have been fair to the other poor souls that were still taking whatever exams they were there to take. I did better than I had done in the practice exams, but very close to what I expecting and hoping 🙂 This concludes the GMAT chapter of my MBA book. Next up is the actual admissions process.
On a side note, one of my friends mentioned that the captcha image for the comments on this site isn’t showing the actual text. Looking at the production log I didn’t see any errors, and tracked the problem down to a recent RMagick installation issue. I am working with Site5 on getting that resolved, but until then I am thinking about putting in a workaround, which I hate to do because then I will have to manually cleanup the comment spam.