The Kaplan Onsite Online Test Drive

I had registered for the Kaplan Online test drive at their facility in New York city. Its was a free event. The test was scheduled at 1pm and started by around 1:30pm. For somebody who is planning to take this test, let me tell you one thing upfront. Its the same test that is found on their website. But i would strongly recommend anybody to go to their facility and take the test. Till yesterday, i had been taking all my practice tests in the comfort of my bedroom. But this test was a very good experience to me. Taking a test at a new place along with lots of people, with the sounds of others clicking and all those distractions makes it similar to the real test day experience which definitely is not going to be in my bedroom!!!

So more about the test now.. The questions in quant were pretty much similar to the one that you encounter in the OG11. But the verbal was really tough. I got 4 monsterous RCs, each atleast 6 paragraphs long. I felt confident while i was doing the quant, and scored a 42, which i think is not at all a good estimate of my score... I got 31/37 right and still scored a 42??? No idea why? But since some of my friends from various forums had told me not to bother about the Kaplan test score as they are scored very low, i didn't care much about the score..

As i said earlier, the Verbal was tough. After the quant section (completed the section with 14 mins remaining) i took a break. Washed my face and came back to tackle the Verbal. The gatorade that i had taken gave me the electrolytes ;) to concentrate on the verbal.. I faced the first RC after about 6-7 questions. It was huge but i did well and got all of them correct. I got 2 wrong answers in the first 15 questions and then it was a downfall from there... I ended up getting only 25 correct out of 41!!!! I knew exactly where i had lost my focus. After the 3rd RC which was the most frustrating of all the passages, i completely lost focus and got 5 consecutive questions wrong. Then a couple right and then again 2-3 wrong. This continued and i ended up with a 32 in verbal, ouch!!!!

But anyways the experience helped me get an idea of taking the test in an external environment. Also i think i can crack the quant section, I've been getting less than 10 mistakes in the past 2 tests and i'm feeling more confident. Verbal is really pulling my score down and I need to overcome this weakness of mine. I've almost completed the MGMAT SC guide with a few Idioms from the list to go. I think i'll revist the Modifiers and the parallelism chapters and review them again since they are the most commonly tested portion in SC. I'll also go throught the kaplan800 SC section to get my self familiar with the tougher sentences. Moreover they have practice sets catagorized into sections. Hopefully this will help me in the SC sections.

So like always here are my goals for this week.
1. Review Modifiers and Parallelism chapter from the MGMAT SC guide.
2. Practice 41 questions in the SC, CR and RC sections from OG11.
3. Review Kaplan800's SC section and do the practice sets.

I'm planning to take the MGMAT CAT this Sunday. Hopefully my verbal would show some improvement!!!!