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resilient
GMAT Destroyer!
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Location: Southern California, USA
Target GMAT Score: 710
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 Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008 11:59 pm Post subject: Journey from 650 - 700! |
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I am getting much better in my scores due to a strong analysis of my mistakes. However, I am not really able to get my scores up on the Sentence correction end of things. Everything else is pretty straightforward and self explanatory. Except SC. I have done a good amount of grammar work and also read the powerscore sc bible and manhattan gmat book. I think I am suffering from more of a strategy issue. Do you have any reccomendations on how to make my weakness my strength? Thanks in advance!
p.s. I went from 510 to a 650 (quant 38 and verbal 41) last week. THis week I got a 640 (quant 44 and verbal 3 . I have to fix this SC problem because my minor mistakes in CR are easy to fix!
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Appetite for 700 and I scraped my plate!
Last edited by resilient on Mon Apr 07, 2008 3:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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lunarpower
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 3:23 am Post subject: Re: hello |
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| Enginpasa1 wrote: | I am getting much better in my scores due to a strong analysis of my mistakes. However, I am not really able to get my scores up on the Sentence correction end of things. Everything else is pretty straightforward and self explanatory. Except SC. I have done a good amount of grammar work and also read the powerscore sc bible and manhattan gmat book. I think I am suffering from more of a strategy issue. Do you have any reccomendations on how to make my weakness my strength? Thanks in advance!
p.s. I went from 510 to a 650 (quant 38 and verbal 41) last week. THis week I got a 640 (quant 44 and verbal 3. I have to fix this SC problem because my minor mistakes in CR are easy to fix! |
sentence correction can be a pain, especially if you are not a native speaker of english and thus must learn all the idiomatic expressions by trial and error.
nevertheless, here are a couple of suggestions that might make your life a bit easier:
- try to look harder for the SIGNALS that tell you what sort of problem you're dealing with. an easy example: if you're dealing with parallelism, there will be some sort of construction (either...or, both...and, and, or, not only...but also, etc.) that will indicate the use of parallel structure. if you're dealing with modifiers, their form (including relative pronouns, sandwiched between commas, placed at the beginning of the sentence and separated from the subject by a comma, etc.) can be a giveaway as to their use.
if you can find the signals, then you'll be in much better shape as far as knowing what to look for on problems. to this end, here are some ways in which you can better identify strategies:
* go through the o.g. problems, and pay attention to the boldface headings appearing on top of the answer explanations (such as 'idiom', 'logical predication', etc.) note that you may have to translate some terms, such as 'logical predication', into the more familiar terms of whatever prep guide(s) you've been using; we at mgmat don't use the phrase 'logical predication', for instance. if you need help with this kind of 'translation', post back to this thread.
* for each boldface headline, try to identify commonalities among the problems featuring that headline. some, like parallelism, will have common threads that are easier to spot than others, but, if you look hard enough, the patterns will emerge. some headings, like idiom, will be easy to spot (just look for differing choices of prepositions/verb forms/whatever in the choices), but will be difficult to resolve once you've spotted them.
* make a list, somewhere in a notebook, of the patterns you've discovered in each problem type.
* memorize the templates you find!
--
also, make sure that you read the answer explanations in the back of the o.g. very closely. those answer explanations are sometimes incomplete, curt, and confusing, but they give a nice window into the minds of the gmat writers.
good luck.
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ron purewal
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sampleresume
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| Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 6:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Based on my experience, the best way to improve sentence correction is to summarize the types of error appearing in GMAT. When you find a grammar error, just write down and categorize. You will find there are no more than 12 types of grammar errors. |
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resilient
GMAT Destroyer!
Joined: 06 May 2007
Posts: 698
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Location: Southern California, USA
Target GMAT Score: 710
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| Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 1:23 am Post subject: sc and CR weakness |
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Facing my weaknesses and aiming for perfection has brought my scores up much higher. THe key is to fix the holes in your prep. My 41 verbal dropped to 31. In order to bring this up I focused heavily on SC and CR because CR is not problem.
I am changing my approach and not just trucking though questions but instead working more on getting a lesson on the 80% and can easily correct half of my mistakes. I also went through 65 kaplan sc questions and scored 55 and then quickly fixed 7 out of 10 mistakes right away. However, to keep up on my strenghts I am still solving those questions each day. So far this is working so I am going to solidify this this week and tyring to get max scores possible for verbal but I am having trouble beating the 80 % mark on sc and CR, any help?
ultimate take away- learn all common tested rules and stretch out for the odds and ends in SC grammar. THEN APPLY AND STICK THE SPLITS IN THE ANSWER CHOICES TO GUIDE YOU TO THE RIGHT ANSWER!
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