GMAT Strategy

Hi! Welcome to the group!

I would strongly recommend that you take a break from preparing for the GMAT and instead work on your English skills. Take a few English courses and/or get a tutor. You will need to greatly improve your understanding of the language to improve your verbal score, and to gain admission to any university where classes are taught in English. In business school, you will need to do a lot of writing, so you MUST improve your English skills.

I hope this is helpful!

Hello,

Thanks alot mr. fsar45 for your kind response. I think I am not that much weak person in English since I have studied engineering for 5 years in the college. But, you know that English level in the exam is to high. It is not fear to judge about my level in thinking critically and by the way I am not a native speaker of English. However, I think there is a way to be prepared by less than 3 weeks to get a score above 550 at least.

Again, thank you so much fsar45. I am waiting for another responses.

Hey, CBA. I agree with the previous post. Obviously, you're a pretty smart guy if you've been involved in engineering this long. But, your English is somewhat broken (based on your last few forum posts). I think if you were better able to focus on the language, your GMAT score will improve as well. As you've said, part of the exam is being comfortable with the English language.

Good luck!

Hey CBA. First of all, good luck with the studying and taking the GMAT again. One thing that helped me get a better score was understanding my strengths and weaknesses. I had a very solid verbal score and knew that there wasn't much room for me to improve there, so I concentrated most of my studying on quantitative.

Likewise, you seem to have a very good grasp of the quantitative section because of your engineering background. This does not mean to not study at all for quantitative, just concentrate more on Verbal.

In answer to your question about how much time you need, it really depends on a few things. If you have the ability to study with a native speaker of English, it would probably be very beneficial. It also depends on how much time you have to study English? If you are working or still in school, you may need more time to study because you can't study during the day. But if you are only studying for the GMAT right now, and doing nothing else, I would say that you could devote 4-6 hours a day to English comprehension and be prepared in 4-6 weeks.

Of course that all depends again on the amount of time you have to study English and if you can get with a native speaker of English. I am a native English speaker but speak several other languages fluently, and I had to spend all my time with speakers of that particular language to learn it well. Try reading and speaking only in English all day, every day until you take the GMAT.

I know this was a long post but I hope it was helpful. Good luck with all your studies and taking the test!!!!

Hi CBA,
I think you could start by reading English newspaper (you can find plenty from the internet). Another source would be TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) books.
English is not my first language either. These are the two things that have helped me to improve my english skill.
Best of luck to you.

beatthegmat wrote:Just to add to HJ's advice, I recommend the following papers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist.

Mmmm, thanks beatthegmat. I will look at them and hopefully will love them

Thanks again
Regards