GMAT Strategy

stairclimber wrote:Getting back to recent attempt's ESR, I am actually very surprised that my CR was so low. I always felt that my CR ability is good because of my Quant and logic abilities but clearly the data shows something else. I am not sure what went wrong or what I am missing.

Could be missed details. I have seen people get smoked by CR questions because of things such as blowing off one word at the end of a prompt, too quickly eliminating an answer choice without considering certain angles, and not noticing that what's said in an answer choice may be valid while not really answering the question at hand.

So it may be that to your logic skills you need to add vision skills and more attention to details.

Overall, when people's CR hit rates bounce around, generally it's because there are flaws the ways they handle the questions. The ways aren't tight enough, and so they work sometimes and don't work others. In your case, it sounds as if it could be that you are seeking to do something along the lines of using certain marker words as shortcuts to understanding what is going on rather than just REALLY understanding what is going on. Put it this way. If you were to really understand the logic of an argument and how it is supported, why would you need to use transition words to identify the argument's components? Yes, noticing those words can be helpful, but something about what you said seems to indicate the existence of some kind of emphasis on things that are not at the core of what you need to do to get right answers.

Also, to generate a high hit rate on GMAT verbal one needs to be pretty intense. Using myself as an example, I am pretty strong in verbal, and yet if I am just slightly distracted or if I am too cavalier in how I handle a question, I can get smoked anyway. You have to give the questions a healthy respect. They are designed to trick you, and if you are the least bit unmindful, they just might.

Experts, I have another question. This time it's Quant related.

What can/should I do to improve my Quant score from 50 to 51?

Thank you!

stairclimber wrote:Experts, I have another question. This time it's Quant related.

What can/should I do to improve my Quant score from 50 to 51?

Look over your past practice tests and find the types of questions that take you longest or that you otherwise are least strong in, learn more about how to answer them and practice by doing dozens questions of each of those types.

Increase accuracy by noticing what types of silly little errors you make, and learning to catch yourself before you make them. Silly little errors can lead to wrong answers, and even if you get a right answer after having first made a silly mistake, recalculating to get the right answer uses up time that you could have spent figuring out how to get to the answer to a challenging question.

As you are doing with verbal, learn to notice more key details in quant. I suspect that if you are missing key details in verbal, you are missing some in quant too.

Make sure that you are skilled in doing certain things such as handling certain types of triangles and finding the prime factors of integers. That way when you need to do those things on the test you will do them quickly and accurately. Here's an exercise you could do.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/07/ ... r-problems

To get ideas and insights, read over how experts handle quant questions on these forums, and post questions to see what kinds of methods people come up with to get to answers.

Focus on figuring out how to get right answers more than on how to answer questions. Getting right answers is all that matters.

You could use the quant question bank here, https://bellcurves.com, by going to the GMAT area and signing up for a practice account. The questions are categorized. If you go through the categories and carefully do lots of questions of types you could be better at, you will become expert in handling pretty much anything the quant section throws at you. Given that you want to score Q51, you will need to achieve a hit rate above 80% when you are doing practice quant questions. 85 to 90% would be better.

Anyway, every time you get better at handling a type of question, you both increase your chances of getting right answers when you see that type and save yourself time for handling other questions. In my case, some of the types I found easiest were the ones I needed to work on most to get to Q51, because since the questions did not seem that difficult to answer I hadn't spent much time learning how to get to answers to those types of questions quickly and efficiently. You may notice something similar, and overall there is always something you can learn to do faster and more accurately.

Thanks, Marty! Those are some very helpful suggestions.

Based on my ESRs, looks like there's a lot more imbalance in the recent exam than the imbalance in my old exam. I am not sure what to make of such an observation. I think two data points is just not enough for any meaningful conclusion.

Based on my old exams and regular practice questions, I know that DS questions are very hard for me. I will also work on those.

Experts,

I have two more weeks for the exam and I took a mock test this morning. I took the Veritas Prep test and got 650 (Q47, V33). I am not concerned about my overall score because I think Veritas' Quant questions were harder than typical Quant questions in GMAT. I feel that I am going in the right direction because my V29 is now V33.

I have a few questions and need some expert advises. So far, your advises have been extremely helpful during my preparation!

How accurate are the Veritas exams? What's the standard deviation on the Verbal score? I want to gauge if I am really improving on my verbal. At this time, I am not very concerned about my Quant score. I will work on my Quant closer to the exam.

Here's a snapshot of my performance. Any help or tips on what I should do to improve my verbal score further? Particularly, what can I do in the next two weeks to have a maximum impact on my verbal score?

Thank you in advance! Hope you had a good holiday!

stairclimber wrote:How accurate are the Veritas exams? What's the standard deviation on the Verbal score? I want to gauge if I am really improving on my verbal.

In my experience, people's Veritas verbal scores pretty well match their official verbal scores. If anything, people have a slightly easier time with official verbal questions than they do with Veritas verbal questions.

Here's a snapshot of my performance. Any help or tips on what I should do to improve my verbal score further? Particularly, what can I do in the next two weeks to have a maximum impact on my verbal score?

Go over the results and figure out what you needed to see more clearly in order to get right each question that you didn't. Figure out, preferably without looking at the explanations, why the right answer is right and why the answer you chose is wrong.

For each sentence correction question that you missed, determine whether it involves some rule or concept that you could be more clear about. Make a list of any such concepts, make a research project of each one, and find more questions that incorporate them.

Given what you have written, one thing maybe you could learn about is when to use if and when to use whether.

Also, for SC, figure out how by being better at hacking the questions you could have gotten more right answers. I bet without learning anything new you could have gotten at least two more right had you hacked them a little better. Maybe you could have gotten them all right had you hacked them better.

Clearly there is some low hanging fruit in RC. It's likely that in going back over the questions, you will find that you chose trap answers, ones that sounded like something that the passage says but actually don't match what the passage says.

Did you refer back to the passages when you answered those questions, or did you choose answers based on your initial impressions of what the passage said?

RC is not really very difficult. You just need to be more careful, or something along those lines, and to give the questions a healthy level of respect. They are meant to trick you. So if you are at all casual in how you answer them, it's easy to get smoked.

Beyond that, just keep doing questions and getting better at seeing, hacking and eliminating your way to right answers. For CR and RC, notice what about your processes could be better. One thing I see people do a lot in CR is eliminate the right answer first, LOL, because it sounds weird or does not initially make sense to them. Eliminating an answer choice just because it sounds weird is a good example of a flawed process. For SC questions, see what rules or concepts trip you up and learn more about them.

Probably it makes sense do some more official questions at some point, maybe using the Question Pack or the other two GMAT Prep tests, so that you get some more experience handling the types of patterns and tricks that the official questions incorporate.

Thank you for the detailed response, Marty! I really appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

For all the questions I got wrong, I am always trying to figure out the right answer myself without looking at the solution and this is helping at lot.

I did go over the results and I slowly realizing all things you say. Regarding SC, there are a few more concepts that I have to improve on. I am using MGMAT books. I really like their books. I used them is the past as well. I agree with you about if. Thanks for pointing that out. I am realizing that it is very hard to abide by all the GMAT (English grammar) rules in my day-to-day conversations.

I did refer back to the passages when I answered those questions but sometimes I was just not able to hack the questions. I am not sure why that was the case. After going through my answers, there were at least a couple of questions that I could have gotten right if I paid a little more attention to what the prompt was saying or what the passage was actually saying. I am working on my ability to pay attention to the details.

For CR, I definitely missed a couple that I could have gotten right because I was able to see the right answer without looking at the solution. Now, I am also realizing what you mean by patterns. I can see some patterns in CR and that definitely helped me during Veritas exam. I am able to see such patterns with SC questions also. When it comes to RC, I am not there yet. I actually got 4 RCs on the Veritas test.

I agree with your suggestion about being able to identify the types, patterns, and tricks on the official questions. I am going to invest in those. One thing I know I am not good at is picking the right answer if my brain hasn't seen something like that before. My brain just doesn't do well with anything that is new. So, patterns and experience are what I need to improve.

Thanks again!

PS: I tried the quote feature but I failed to quote your statements. I will try it some other time.

Marty,

Probably it makes sense do some more official questions at some point, maybe using the Question Pack or the other two GMAT Prep tests, so that you get some more experience handling the types of patterns and tricks that the official questions incorporate.

I have a full OG Review.

I have three options: OG for GMAT Verbal Review with 300 questions, GMATPrep Q Pack 1 with 180 verbal questions, and GMATPrep Exam Pack 1.

Given that I have OG Review, should I get the Verbal Review and/or Q Pack and/or Exam Pack?

Thanks!

stairclimber wrote:Marty,

Probably it makes sense do some more official questions at some point, maybe using the Question Pack or the other two GMAT Prep tests, so that you get some more experience handling the types of patterns and tricks that the official questions incorporate.

I have a full OG Review.

I have three options: OG for GMAT Verbal Review with 300 questions, GMATPrep Q Pack 1 with 180 verbal questions, and GMATPrep Exam Pack 1.

Given that I have OG Review, should I get the Verbal Review and/or Q Pack and/or Exam Pack?

Thanks!

OG Review and Verbal Review are two different things. The Verbal review has much more wider scope than OG Review. In my opinion, Getting question pack and exam pack both makes sense and I call it a smart purchase of official resource.

I hope that helps!!!

Experts,

I need help with RCs. While doing Veritas' Question Bank RC questions, I realized that I am getting many of the questions that are above CAT 65 percentile wrong. Please advise me on how I can improve my RC ability.

I have now exhausted Veritas' free QB RC questions. I still have GMAT Question Pack 1 questions that I am yet to do. I intend to do them in the next few days. Before I do them, I want to fix my process/approach.

Here's the process I use to answer RC questions. First, I read the whole passage. Try to understand the structure of the passage, take a few short notes and try to answer the questions. While going through the options, if a question is hard, I tend to go over all the options more than once because an answer choice is not very evident. Sometimes, I pick the next popular choice (although a wrong one) because I got tricked by the question. My accuracy on questions that are below CAT 65 percentile is about 80-90%. While doing all of this, I am sometimes slow at answering RC questions. Even after removing the time constraint, I am getting the harder questions wrong. Any advice on this matter is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

stairclimber wrote:Here's the process I use to answer RC questions. First, I read the whole passage. Try to understand the structure of the passage, take a few short notes and try to answer the questions. While going through the options, if a question is hard, I tend to go over all the options more than once because an answer choice is not very evident. Sometimes, I pick the next popular choice (although a wrong one) because I got tricked by the question. My accuracy on questions that are below CAT 65 percentile is about 80-90%. While doing all of this, I am sometimes slow at answering RC questions. Even after removing the time constraint, I am getting the harder questions wrong. Any advice on this matter is much appreciated.

From what you said, it is not clear that you are referring back to the passages when you are working on answering the questions. If it is the case that you are not referring back the passages, looking for information to help you precisely identify the correct answer choices, then you pretty much definitely need to start doing so.

Generally what gets people when they are doing RC questions is answering the questions based on what they thought they read rather than what a passage actually says, and the best way to make sure that you match your answers to what a passage actually says is to refer back to the passage to find information that supports your answer choice.

Important for RC success is being good at finding in the passages the exact information you need. When you first read the passages, you don't need to commit to memory every detail. What you do need to note are how the passage flows and basically where certain details lie. Then when you are doing the questions, you can go back to those details and confirm which answer choice is supported by them.

To get better at RC, if you miss a question, go back to that question and figure out how you got tricked and identify what you needed to notice in order to get the question right. While some of them are not perfectly constructed, overall those Veritas RC questions are GREAT for teaching one to be very precise and to really be careful to notice what the passages actually say, aren't they?

Thanks, Marty!

Yes, I do refer to the passages when I am trying to answer an inference, detail, or any other question that requires me to refer back to the passage.

Veritas RC passages are really good. They showed me that I need to improve my RC ability, particularly on the hard ones. I am looking for more hard but good RC questions. Let me know if you know of any such source.

Thanks and happy new year!

Experts,

I took my GMAT this morning and got a 740 (Q50, V40)!!! Ironically, my Quant percentile is lower than my Verbal percentile I never imagined that something like that would happen given my strong Quant background. I am very happy with my score although not so much with my IR score but I will take what I have.

I cannot thank you all (experts) enough for all the valuable suggestions and feedback during my preparation. Particularly, Marty and Dave have been instrumental during my preparation. Dave's comment about paying attention to linguistic detail and numerous Marty's comments rang in my ears every time I answered a verbal question.

Thank you very much for all your help and suggestions!

Trying to climb the stairs of life,
Stairclimber.

Haha. Another Beat the GMAT smashing success.

Awesome. Nice work!!!!