The following Monday, she asks Juan for her day off so that she takes the GMAT at a testing center, which she feels is more secure than taking it online from home.
"Come in!" Juan instructs Imélie.
"Hi Juan" Imélie greets her boss.
"Hi Imélie"
"As part of this agreement, I need to take the GMAT, but it's not about getting reimbursed for it. Tulane asks for it" Imélie pleads with her boss.
"Good. I was afraid you were asking for reimbursement, so what is it that you would like to ask about this test?"
"Getting a day off for it, on the sixth of March, a Monday. I'll be fresh by then and I will be able to do my best"
"What you can do is that you work from home that day after the test ends. So you won't get an actual day off because taking the GMAT is a prerequisite for work-related training and I consider such being at work"
"Thank you"
And the answer from Tulane has arrived regarding the status of the analytical writing section. "Because a significant number of applicants take the GMAT online, which does not include the analytical writing section, to avoid unduly penalizing applicants doing so, we do not consider analytical writing scores in our evaluation of PMBA applicants. P.S.: GRE writing scores are also ignored for the same reason"
Phew! One less thing for me to worry about. Over the weekend, I tacked on more verbal questions because of the study group than simply sticking to the daily sets, and I even gave them old AMC12 and modified Purple Comet questions, with some of the latter being rewritten as integrated reasoning questions. Might be a little hard for GMAT practice but poorly calibrated practice is better than no practice, Imélie sighs while her colleagues in the open area have no real idea of why Imélie sighs all of a sudden, but that's mostly because everyone is on everyone else's backs.
But when she looks at other business schools that also deal in quiz bowl and might like women in IT, she realizes that Tulane is not very holistic in comparison, especially if she compared part-time with part-time, or full-time with full-time. It seems that, at Tulane, GPA and especially GMAT counts for a lot, then again, it's a very regional B-school.
However, her job made the bed for her and she is forced to sleep in it because of it; often MBA applicants lost jobs, or are unhappy with their current jobs or employers, and she feels better off waiting for round one next cycle if that's the case and she gets rejected at Tulane this time around. She feels like her current professional circumstances make it not worth it for her to leave her current job over a degree.
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Over the days to follow, she diligently studies not only sentence correction questions, but also other questions because of the study group posting questions in other areas of the test that she feels obligated to answer, and none of these are analytical writing questions.
In effect, she knows she can safely ignore analytical writing if she just wants to attend Tulane, and feels confident she can attend, but a retake could be warranted for it if she wants to wait for another cycle and apply elsewhere in the event of a job loss.
On March 6, she also feels like there is no going back. As she leaves home to go to the testing center on that day, after taking an early morning breakfast and a good night of sleep...
"There's no going back now; for better or for worse, honey, good luck" Sun makes his wish for her.
"This is going to be my Rubicon crossing"
On that day, she needs to present her ID and take a palm vein scan because the GMAC, or Graduate Management Admissions Council, deemed fake IDs a problem. And that's on top of the photos and the signing of an affidavit stating that she understands and agrees to the testing rules and agreement.
And then, upon taking a seat in the testing center, she decides to take the test with each part in the same order as she used to during the diagnostic test weeks earlier. Now it's do-or-die time and, even though Tulane ignores the AWA, I will still take it seriously nonetheless, as a safety net if I need to apply elsewhere a few months down the road if push comes to shove. All I really need to do is have three cogently supported arguments, transition words used properly, and write an introduction and a conclusion, which is all the advice I was even given regarding it in the study group, which I know other people in it take it way more seriously than I, she starts thinking before the AWA even starts. Just do well and I can make these quiz bowl dreams come true!
On the real test, fortunately for her, no parasitic memories from her time in high school or undergrad; she could answer much more confidently especially as the questions get harder and harder in the second half, while taking great care to review the questions properly before answering.
It's entirely possible to get a M7-worthy score with a question or two wrong especially if you hit one snag after a string of correct answers because, unlike quiz bowl, hoses and the like are all too common at the highest levels of the GMAT, especially on verbal, Imélie muses while the difficulty of the verbal section is near the maximum of what the daily question sets gave her as well as what the study group posted.
In the end, upon completion of the test, she sees her raw and estimated scores, an 8 on integrated reasoning, a 51 on quantitative, and a 40 on verbal. However, no estimate is provided for analytical writing, not that she attached any particular significance to it. What matters to her is the number at the bottom of the scoring screen, the score estimate: 730-760. At the exit of the testing center...
"If the estimated score holds, the only reason why Tulane would even reject me would be if they already filled all PMBA seats by then!" Imélie exclaims while laughing manically, but she has no way of knowing whether there is even space remaining in the PMBA. As much as she hoped to move to the next phase of her plan, everything she cared about depended on that score: her career trajectory, her quiz bowl dreams.