TOEFL - T-3 days

I did my first practice test in the OG yesterday. First 2 sections back to back and the next 2 after the gym break

For those of you who have their exams in near future, here's a run down of the exam

There are 4 sections. You can score a max of 30points in each section (TOEFL iBT is for 120points)

1) Reading - Takes about an hour to complete. Will have around 45 questions with very long passages. The GMAT strategy will not work here - you don't have to understand the passage, you just have to look at the portion where you can find the answer. So, the prudent thing to do is read the question first.

2) Listening - Takes again around 50 minutes. Will be a bit unsettling if you don't pay attention.The trick here is 'memory'. Few questions, but not all, are based on memory. So, note taking while listening is very important. Other than this, there's nothing which is worth mentioning

BREAK

3) Speaking - A Sucker of a section despite being the shortest( 20mins only). There are some 6 tasks which more or less require 60 secs of speaking after 15secs of preparation. These taks are basically a combination of (Listening, Reading, Reading+ listening)and speaking, which is your talk. In other words, you'll hear some lecture or a conversation for 1 min and you'll be asked to speak something. The craziest thing is the response time. 15 secs is not sufficient for me even to begin thinking about a topic forget about coming up with points.

Since there is no option to guage your own 'talk', the best option is to record your voice in the voice recorder which comes with Windows and compare it with the sample 'high level', 'medium level' and 'low level' responses provided in the OG. And I hear that people who have been expecting 30 have got some of the lowest of scores and people who thought they did poorly got above 25. So, the idea is to prepare for the worst and well hope for, you guessed it right!

4) Writing - If you manage to maintain your sanity by the end of 3rd hour, you'll be asked to write 2 essays of about 1/2hr each. One section is similar to the Issue topic of GMAT, while the other, in which you have to reconcile the points mentioned in a lecture and a reading passage, requires a bit of preparation.

By the time you are finished with the exam you'll not know how you did on the exam. You'll either be very happy that you 'nailed it' or be devastated that you 'screwed up'. You'll have to stay put with this feeling for 3 weeks until someone from ETS grades your responses and sends you the score report. Then you'll know whether the 'nail' did the job or the screw's threads were rough