I just Beat The GMAT!

skins81 wrote:Is doing the OG problems in Quant enough for the test?

That's a definite NO.

neo_one wrote:I would say that quant is tougher than the prep so you might surprised on the test day. But my mantra is not not get bogged down by one question; If you are not getting it, leave it and move ahead. Its important to complete the test with time to spare. I have also found that it is really important to get the last few questions right. It really takes your score higher.

The interesting thing about this is that the actual scoring mechanism is a "black box"--at least to me; I'm sure there's someone somewhere who has reverse-engineered GMATPrep for their own benefit. The interesting thing about the MGMAT CATs is that you can actually see the CAT at work. If you notice the percentile scores, you can see that as you progress to the test, the effect (both positive and negative) that a question has is also progressively reduced, where question no. 4 may throw your percentile up or down by 10 points and the last three questions maybe by 2 points.

How comparable MGMAT's CAT mechanics are to the actual GMAT, however, I don't know.

I found the early OG problems to be too easy compared to the real thing. If you want to be scoring in the 700's the later problems presented a comparable difficulty. If you can ace the MGMAT math on the CAT tests, you will be just fine.

Mo2009: Don't give up! You don't have to be a verbal whiz kid to score high on the GMAT. You just have to learn HOW to get to the right answer. For the CR, I found the best approach for me, personally, was to think to myself "what is the argument here" and simply by grasping the argument I was able to often predict what would strengthen, weaken, or help to explain etc. before even seeing the answers. Based on this I used the simple process of elimination. This often reduced the answer to 2 plausible choices. When I was down to 2 answers, the correct answer was almost always the one that attacked the argument directly, and the incorrect answer was almost always outside the scope of the question.

Incidentally, i was often able to erase 1-3 possible answers due to total irrelevance.

For sentence correction, you have a similar approach. Try to spot the error in the sentence without looking at the choices, or use the choices to isolate exactly what the question is trying to test you on: is it tense? (has / had / had been, etc.). Is it parallelism? Based on this, the correct answer is almost always the answer which is the most succinct without changing the meaning, and retains its meaning.

which books should I use for Quant other than OG?

-One thing that got me in the beginning of studying SC is the "justified change"--if an alternative will change the meaning of the sentence. I had a tendency to be conservative about this--if an alternative is grammatically flawless but changes the original meaning of a question which I think is right, but just awkward, I tended to stick to the original sentence. This is kind of a personal gut-feeling thing which may not work for everyone, but certainly worked for me.

Could you explain what do you mean ? I didn't get it completely.

GMATMadeEasy wrote:

-One thing that got me in the beginning of studying SC is the "justified change"--if an alternative will change the meaning of the sentence. I had a tendency to be conservative about this--if an alternative is grammatically flawless but changes the original meaning of a question which I think is right, but just awkward, I tended to stick to the original sentence. This is kind of a personal gut-feeling thing which may not work for everyone, but certainly worked for me.

Could you explain what do you mean ? I didn't get it completely.

I'm not 100% on this--in fact, not even 70%, so I hope someone more well-versed on the GMAT will help me out here.

Basically what I meant is that some alternatives may change the meaning of the sentence (for example, having an adjective modify one subject in, say, alternative "A", and the same adjective modify another subject in alternative "B"). When i say "Justified change" I'm referring to whether the original alternative needs to change this sort of thing to make sense.

Thanks , I get it. I believe many of us have this issue , and I certainly have .

Could you share more about RC ? Especially, how did you train yourself and what were your major strategies for each question type ?

Thanks.

GMATMadeEasy wrote:Thanks , I get it. I believe many of us have this issue , and I certainly have .

Could you share more about RC ? Especially, how did you train yourself and what were your major strategies for each question type ?

Thanks.

(sorry for the delay in replying)

The thing about RC for me is that it came very naturally. I read copious amounts of books and magazines every day. But I also admit that just saying "read more" is kinda of a cop-out. =) So let me take a crack at it:

I had no set training routine for RC--that is to say, I did not train my reading skills. But I did train the "RC" section--looking for common alternative patterns, etc. So you can say I focused much more on "getting to know RC" than anything else. I think even focusing on individual question types in my case (with one notable exception) was counterproductive, because I tried to understand the passage holistically.

I also did not have individual strategies for question types, as I think that was very counterproductive for me. Unlike some people, I did not do a superficial reading and then try to answer the questions by looking for the answers. If you have a timing issue, I think that's a valid strategy with the caveat that you will get questions wrong, because, as I stated in my original post, you might find alternatives that are almost verbatim in the text, but the correct answer is actually a synthesis answer (IE: an alternative isn't a line in the text, but two ideas together). In my case I tried to really understand the passage and what the author was trying to say.

The "notable exception" were questions dealing with author intent and tone. These can be incredibly subtle. The best way found to answer these questions was to avoid the natural instinct of asking "what is he trying to say", but to look at each major factoid or logical argument and actually ask "Why did he say this", then step back and look at the balance of his choice of arguments.

Overall, I think "Reading Comprehension" is a misnomer. It should really be called "Critical reading". Try approaching a passage with that in mind and see if it clicks.

If you're having issues with anything in specific, by all means shoot and I'll see if I can help.

Thanks , it is interesting what you say . Surprisiingly, I have been an avid reader too but somehow I take longer in RC and miss infer questions. I beleive I had developed bad habits over years and now it is time to fix that.

GMAT specific :
Earlier I used to read RC completely and many times I was missing infer questions those which really use links from two different places in passage. Currently, I have been practising a bit with LSAT question set with active/ strategic reading method and logical structure of passage (function of each paragraph) . I guess, I am trying to adopt hybrid of both the stratgies a little that is full reaing but not much in detail and with focus over purpose, author tone and passage structure. Will incorporte some of the points from your strategy as well.

Let's see how it goes.

So on account of the overwhelming support and questions I got from people, as well as a few PMs saying that they were frustrated as well, I figured I should follow-up and share my 2nd round results

740 - 47Q/45V/6.0AWA

Like I said from the beginning: If I can do it, so can you.

Hi:

Many congratulations on your brilliant score.

I've a query regarding how scaled up scores are actually calculated in GMAT. Different books/websites give different mappings between raw and scaled up scores. Do you get a detailed break-up in your GMAT score card w.r.t the number of correct/incorrect answers in each section? When you say Q41 and V46, can you please let me know the raw scores for each of the section (or any rough idea about it)?

Thanks and many congratulations again.

prakhag wrote:Hi:

Many congratulations on your brilliant score.

I've a query regarding how scaled up scores are actually calculated in GMAT. Different books/websites give different mappings between raw and scaled up scores. Do you get a detailed break-up in your GMAT score card w.r.t the number of correct/incorrect answers in each section? When you say Q41 and V46, can you please let me know the raw scores for each of the section (or any rough idea about it)?

Thanks and many congratulations again.

Hi prakhag,

Thank you!

No, the GMAT does not tell you the "raw score". "Raw score" was a measure used, if I'm not mistaken, only for the paper tests. And these varied between different tests. In the CAT, no raw scores are informed, since an approach like "20 questions right out of 37" would not be accurate.

To give you an example, when doing the GMAT Prep official CAT, I got a 48V by getting only two questions wrong, and a 47V by getting 3 questions wrong. That seems reasonable. But in the Quant section, I got, in both cases, 13 questions wrong, but got 44 and 46, as the distribution of those errors affects the result.

My gut feeling is that when I got my 46V, I got 3 questions wrong, and that when I got my 45V, I got 4 questions wrong. But again, gut feeling. I suggest you look up "GMAT CAT mechanics" here in the forum or on Google.

Best of luck,

Many thanks...this is really helpful.

In other words, it means that I'll have a breathing space of roughly 5 incorrect answers, so to speak, to achieve a good score:)

prakhag wrote:Many thanks...this is really helpful.

In other words, it means that I'll have a breathing space of roughly 5 incorrect answers, so to speak, to achieve a good score:)

On Verbal, I think so. On Quant, probably a few more. But again, don't approach this as "how many I can get wrong". The right approach is paying attention to when you get them wrong and which you get wrong. This counts far more than how many.

skins81 wrote:Is doing the OG problems in Quant enough for the test?

You are kidding right? Coz the OG problems [quant] are the problems that appeared in GMAT paper tests.Yes I checked to confirm,and I must tell you that back then GMAT quant was a joke.These problems are outdated.It is better that you expect real gmat quant no easier than MGMAT quant! [okay slightly easier but definitely tougher than GMATPrep].

Your quant score on real gmat will be more in line with your MGMAT quant score[if you took quant section untimed in MGMAT CAT] and couple of points higher than MGMAT CAT if you took them timed.

I am telling you for I have taken GMAT 2 times.

Even verbal is pretty much obsolete.The RC passages would be similar to GMATPrep[the tougher RC's 40+ level are similar in difficulty to LSAT RC passages] .CR would be slightly tougher than GMATPrep and SC would be similar to MGMAT SC.

LSAT RC passages are beneficial for the following purposes:

1) They are way more devious
2) They are ,on an average,as long as the longest GMAT passages.OG has barely 4-5 long passages [hardly enough practice]
3) They build your stamina
4) You are way more focussed and won't have the trouble while looking for info in passage especially for infer questions.

I got to admit that LSAT CR is slightly different from GMAT CR,but nonetheless,they provide you quality official material to work with.