Anyone else have pen problems during the real test?

[StaceyKoprince]

Good idea! You could even test out the pens while you're standing behind the proctor waiting for them to unlock the computer. That way, you can tell them before they walk away (if there's a problem).

[Black5879]

Good idea! You could even test out the pens while you're standing behind the proctor waiting for them to unlock the computer. That way, you can tell them before they walk away (if there's a problem).

Totally agree, if you have your hands free though. I remembered that I was holding onto my passport, the ear plugs, the pens and the pad all at the same time whilst following the proctor. I could still manage flipping the pad, but uncapping the pen to test it out may be a stretch...

[StaceyKoprince]

Yeah, true. Do what you can.

[GülbinG382]

I justed wanted to share a similar experience...

Couple of hours ago, I took the GMAT test and I believe the problem which occured during the exam affected my Quant score very much. In the first minutes of the Quant part, both markers that I was using stopped working. I've raised my hand for supervisors to see and waited for some time. Then I realized that the supervisors were on something else and didn't see me, so I waved my hand in the air. One of them replaced my markers with the new ones. When I finally got back to the exam, I realized the new ones were also not working. I raised my hand and about 30 seconds later, they gave me a brand new marker, not a refilled like the older ones. I believe I lost about two minutes in total with this hussle, and stressed out, tried to speed up on the questions.

4 months ago, I did 49 on Quant on real GMAT, without any exam preparation and today I did 41 on Quant, according to the unofficial results. I highly accuse the supervisors for not checking the markers beforehand and use only refilled markers for the exam.

I wrote about this to the GMAC Customer Services, but I doubt that they will make this up in some way.

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm sorry that you had a frustrating test experience.

For future: I think it's a good idea to expect that at least one frustrating / unexpected / surprising thing will happen on test day. If you assume that something will go wrong, then you won't be so stressed out when it does—and you will hopefully be able to get yourself back on track.

Losing 2 minutes is definitely not ideal—but that's ultimately the equivalent of just 1 problem. If you are so stressed out that you are still thinking about the situation 5, 10, 15 minutes later, then, yes, that could definitely be enough to drop your score from 49 to 41—but just one problem can't do that. So it's a good idea to know ahead of time that you can't 100% control the testing conditions and that something unexpected could happen—and you're just going to take a deep breath, guess on one single problem at some point to catch up, and then let it go and start taking the test. (You can tell yourself: I'm going to complain afterward, but this is ultimately only one question, and one question is not going to hurt my score. Deep breath. All right, let's go!)