MGMAT CAT 2: 710 (Q 46, V 41)

He's Bret Hart. Don't tell me I'm the only guy who used to watch pro wrestling. 😛

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)

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