Michelle: I Finished the GMAT!
August 06, 2013 :: Admissionado Team
I’m finally finished with the GMAT!
I’m finally finished with the GMAT!
I’m finally finished with the GMAT!
I have wanted to say that for such a long time, and it feels absolutely amazing. I didn’t hit the magical 80/80 split, but I did boost my score to a respectable 730.
I’ll be honest and admit that I was a bit depressed for the first day or so after finishing the test. I never imagined that I would hit the 96th percentile overall and yet still have feelings of discontent. I was, of course, psyched that I no longer had to think about data sufficiency, probability, or combinatorics, but I really really wanted to hit the 80th percentile in quant. I had dreamed about that moment; I would finish the exam, see my score, unicorns and rainbows would appear, and I would merrily skip out of the test center as the Pearson Vue administrator guy would wave and congratulate me on my amazingness. Instead, I finished the exam knowing that I had messed up my timing on quant; I walked up to the front desk to get my score report printout, which the Pearson Vue guy handed to me while checking someone else in – alas, there were no hearty waves or congratulations or confetti canons.
But, it’s now been 12 days since I finished my exam, and I’m done wallowing. 730 is a great score! I’m above the average for all of my target schools, and I’m truly proud of what I accomplished.
However, I still need to have a mini-rant about this whole 80/80 thing. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t hit that threshold, but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. The 80th percentile for quant is now a 49 raw score. The highest possible score is 51. That’s insane! Seriously, think about it. For real, stop and do it… INSANE! Plus, average GMAT scores are continuing to increase. Eventually, something’s gotta give, right? It doesn’t seem possible that this trend can continue—this trend is the whole reason that people like me earn a solid score and still, somewhere in the back of our minds, feel like somehow it’s not enough.
[At this point, my cooler alter-ego would step down from her soapbox and drop the mic.]
Michelle’s what we like to call a “non-traditional” applicant. You know, she’s not a banker or a consultant, and she doesn’t want to BE a banker or a consultant. So she’s different. And her goal, which is the goal of ALL non-traditional applicants, is to show how she’s different (in a good way) but not THAT different (as in…not right for business school.) Follow along with her as she tackles this process.
