study progress.

mayonnai5e · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 12:41 pm Post subject: study progress.

so i did my first GMATPrep test today and scored a surprisingly good scored (compared to my first 2 sample tests) and i am very happy with the score because it gives me even more motivation to work harder and more efficiently. my first two scores are as follows:

Princeton Review GMAT 8 Q32 V34 -- 550
PowerPrep 1 Q35 V31 -- 560

today, on the first GMATPrep exam i scored:

GMATPrep 1 Q45 V34 -- 650

this is a huge 100 point increase attributed almost entirely to my Q score increase. what was the most significant change? timing. plain and simple.

during the first two exams, i spent as much time as i deemed necessary to find the answer (sometimes spending over 5 minutes) and often those answers turned out to be wrong. i remember reading a post by Stacy on this board that really changed my view of this particular subject (thanks Stacy!). in that post stacy describes how the CAT is intended to and designed to find the upper limits of one's capabilities. thus at some point you should reach that upper limit and those Q problems will be so difficult that you will probably not be able to solve it in 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes...and if you do spend that much time on that one question then you will have just doomed yourself to miss several problems later on due to lack of time (and those problems could potentially be much easier). and the worst case is missing several in a row because of lack of time (which is exactly what happened on my first two exams where i had to randomly guess the last 30% of the problems in both Q and V sections).

this time around, for the Q section, i focused much more on my timing and refrained myself from second guessing my calculations and answers and just moved ahead as quickly as possible; i still had to guess on the last 3 questions but that is tiny compared to guessing on 15 or so questions in a row. however, on the V section, my timing is still very bad and i had to guess on the last 10 questions. i did notice that my biggest time sink is sentence correction so that will be an area that i will focus on.

i attribute my slowness in math to my engineering background and schooling - you are rewarded for double checking your results and making sure all calculations are correct. in that respect, i had to learn to just TRUST my own math and move forward without double checking every step of the math and verifying the solution.

my V score was the same but that comes as no surprise since i have only concentrated on math since my last practice exam.

i am very happy with this improvement because my goal is 700 and i have not even begun studying verbal extensively. my study plans have been very erratic and unstructured up to now - so much so that i have signed up for a veritas course. i have just started going over the online material provided by veritas and will be receiving private tutoring in the near future.

if anyone is interested, i can post more details about my studying...

Stacey Koprince · Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 9:56 pm Post subject:

That's really excellent - congratulations! I'm really glad that you took my advice to heart about the timing. People tend not to believe it intuitively because we were trained to take tests differently in school, but if you try it out, you'll see the results. We just have to keep reminding ourselves that this test is NOT constructed or sccored the way tests were constructed or scored in school!

Keep us up to date on your progress!