Korner Talk

5:47 – Aw man, it’s almost time to wake up. Reset alarm to 6:10.

6:00 – Crap… can’t sleep. Might as well get ready.

6:10 – Coffee and toast ready.

6:15 – Review last minute AWA sample essays. Should have practice more essays, can’t do anything now but wing it.

6:45 – Out the door.

7:16 – Arrive at testing center.  Turns out the place is a huge office building. Some of the offices belong to the University of Phoenix. The hallways reminded me of the San Pedro.

7:30 – Use restroom, drink water, take a bite of bagel. There’s a group of people standing outside the Pearson office. Apparently Pearson administers other tests. From what I can tell, there are people here to take construction, medical, and pharmacy tests.

7:45 – Check in. Read the rules, get ear plugs, empty my wallet.

8:00 – Start test. Selected 5 schools (Kelley, McCombs, Mendoza, Marshall, and Anderson) to send score to. In hindsight, I should have swapped Anderson for Merage.

AWA #1 – Not too bad but not too good. Knew I should have practiced more. Ran low on time in the end so my conclusion was really weak. Arg.

AWA #2 – After reading the prompt, I felt OK about it. Jotted down three points to talk about. Once I started writing, I ran into a wall because I couldn’t think of real examples. Wrote four paragraphs with but in the end, logic was weak and grammer might have been suspect. Double sigh.

Break 1 – Ate my bagel, drank some water, took a leak. Starting to get hungry. Wish I brought a Clif’s bar.

Quant – Alright, here we go! Time for the REAL test. I started off on shaky ground and didn’t gain traction until midway through the test. After problem 14 or 15, I felt like I powered through the rest of the test. There were a few problems where I was making some really dumb mistakes but luckily I caught them before I submitted. Some problems were taking way too long to solve; they took 2-3 separate calculations to solve! That being said, I did pretty well in managing the time, finishing with ten seconds left. Overall, I felt the difficulty of the quant was what I expected; I had to guess on probably 3 problems. There were more %, average, and ration problems than I expected. There was also a stretch where I did 5 DS questions in a row.

One of the rules that a MGmat instructor told us to remember was to stop thinking about our score as we took the test. I didn’t hold fast to the rule and kept thinking, “Oh crap” when I got an easy problem and “Yes” when I got a harder problem. That train of thought was so poisonous. I’ll touch on that some more later.

Break 1 – Ate my bagel, drank some water, took a leak. Talked to some guy about the test. Both shared some frustration.

Verbal – The nemesis. Verbal went as expected. Not able to review the test, I’m guessing that I stunk it up on idioms and critical reasoning. I also got tripped up on this one really horrid scientific passage. I can never really tell how I’m doing on verbal and I really shouldn’t be doing so. The doubt induced by questioning each following question distracted me from reading those long and boring questions. This caused me to rush through parts of the test and kind of screwed up my pace. I finished the test with two minutes remaining, two minutes that would have been better spent getting some more questions correct. Gahhhhhhh.

Score: Lets just say that I didn’t get punked, but I didn’t do any punking myself. I have a feeling my AWA score is going to be bad so there’s one reason to retake the test. The other reason is that I’m just not satisfied with what I got. My practice score has platued and the score today is very much aligned with that platuea (80th %tile). I feel like I can break out and I’m not going to be satisfied until I do. The frustrating thing is that not only have i invested so much time, but also that this test is just one silly part of the entire app component. It’s the sinking ship syndrome and I’m going down with the ship.

Anyways, back to the drawing board the weekend. I’m not taking this bastard a third time!