No, I’m not ready to break out the champagne bottles just yet, but I can tell you one thing for sure, the first time you break 700 on a practice CAT is an awesome feeling! This is a marked improvement from my dismal 630 score on my previous CAT. I guess my Manhattan GMAT course really works. ;) My percentile rankings were 79%, 93%, and 94% respectively.
I skipped the AWAs for this test, simply because of personal time constraints. I also haven’t studied the proper outlines of the AWA essays. I’ll definitely do that section on my next CAT.
What surprised me most was how well I did on the Math section. Given, I didn’t break the 80th percentile, I still was pleasantly surprised by my score. During the test, I ran into a number of problems that I simply could not solve. Rather than dwell on those problems and waste valuable time (like I did last time) I listened to my instructor’s advice and guessed to move on. This was definitely the key difference between my two math CATs: I timed myself much better on this exam and finished with time to spare. On my previous test I felt I was fighting a losing battle throughout and it definitely made it harder for me to concentrate.
I wonder if every CAT is going to be like this, with seemingly impossible problems to conquer? Every time I run into a problem that I have no idea how to solve, it definitely brings me down emotionally and has a negative effect on subsequent performance. I took a really long break between the Math and Verbal sections just because I thought I had bombed on my quant section.
When I got to the verbal section, overall, I thought it was breeze. Some of the sentence correction questions towards the end were extremely tough and rather obscure, but that only motivated me because I knew I was doing well. I started off sprinting through the material, but when I noticed that I was so far ahead from a time to question ratio, I slowed down a bit to focus more on Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. Looking back at the results, I definitely made quite a few dumb mistakes, many falling into the RTFQ category. But to me, that just means my Verbal score can potentially go even higher. I just need to get better at reading the “you know what.”
I’m going to review every CAT question I did on this test and make sure that I can at least solve the “wacky” Math problems I encountered in this test. I wasn’t very thorough with the last CAT because it made me so depressed. This time I feel motivated.
Below is my CAT progression thus far. I have at least 7 more that I am planning to do. Here’s to hoping that CAT number 2 wasn’t a fluke. 😉
- MGMAT CAT 1: 630 (Q 41, V 35)
- MGMAT CAT 2: 710 (Q 46, V 41)
