Currently In Toronto - My GMAT Test Day Experience (07/14/2006)

Well I have an extremely hectic travel schedule this week. I am currently in Toronto for some technical discussions and its quite cold out here (what can I expect January in Toronto). Actually getting to Toronto was quite interesting, it was far cheaper to fly to Buffalo (courtesy Jetblue) and rent a car to drive to Toronto than to fly to Toronto directly. So I and the Sales account executive decided to save the company some money and had an uneventful drive from Buffalo to Toronto. I am scheduled to fly from Toronto to Denver tomorrow for a scheduled meeting on Friday, and I will be taking the red eyed flight on Saturday 0:55 hrs from Denver back to JFK (courtesy Jetblue and I am NOT looking forward to it)
Now back to business, my GMAT test day 07/14/2006 experience!!! Well prior to the test day I took one simulated test available from www.mba.com and was satisfied with the result. On the test day, it was a peaceful walk to the testing center (I must say I was lucky in this aspect, the testing center is two blocks away from my apartment). I went with some of my flash cards to just revise the tricky grammar concepts for sentence correction. In the test center, they had some trouble with signing people in for the GMAT test, finally they got the problem resolved. I got a nice corner room, completely secluded and I was ready to give the test a crack. I was pretty relaxed, considering it was the month of July I knew if I screwed I had another shot at the test. I was a little concerned about AWA section as I did not score well in the Princeton practice tests, so I chalked out some strategies based on the Official Guide. The Official Guide gives you some excellent hints regarding the AWA. The AWA topics were quite gentle and I believed I did a decent job with both of them.
The quants section began with some easy questions, and then it started getting tougher, I got some really crazy coordinate geometry questions and I decided to just guess and skip. I strongly believe that on very hard questions, if you realize that you cannot solve it in less than 2 minutes, just guess and skip. I felt I paced myself very well for the math section and I had 5 minutes to spare for the last question and I took my time.
The verbal section was quite smooth, although I had some really tricky sentence correction and I had one pretty tough reading comprehension. I knew I was doing pretty OK as the questions were becoming progressively tough. For the verbal section again I kept a 90 second limit on any sentence correction or critical reasoning questions, so that I was well paced for the verbal section. Reading Comprehension to me is easy to score so I decided to keep extra time for it, again for RC I believe it is crucial to read the passage completely.
Well I took a breath and submitted my answers and wow I was thrilled with the results (Q50, V42, 760), and it was extremely close to what the simulated tests predicted.
Bottom line, the simulated tests are excellent predictors of your performance in the actual test and the Official Guide is the ultimate preparation book. Also you will feel much less pressure if you give the test in Summer or even earlier, as you would know that you could have another shot at improving your GMAT scores.