Improve my SC- Need Expert advice

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Improve my SC- Need Expert advice

by Awanish Kumar » Sun Jun 12, 2016 3:43 am
Hi,
This question is for experienced GMAT Instructors or anyone with good GMAT score(740+).

My progress in SC so far:
1) Completed all the videos and additional reinforcement questions on gmatprepnow website.
2) Completed the OG15 SC part with around 50-60% accuracy

Still struggling with the concepts and its applications to handle questions. Need to improve.
Please suggest some effective resources to hit the bull's eye. Any suggestions or tips would be much appreciated but please be crisp. I also wanted reviews about Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction as someone has suggested me this book.

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by [email protected] » Sun Jun 12, 2016 10:02 am
Hi Awanish Kumar,

Before I can offer you the specific advice that you're looking for, I'd like to know a bit more about your studies so far and your overall goals:

1) How long have you been studying?
2) What materials have you used?
3) How have you scored on each of your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores)?

4) What is your goal score?
5) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
6) When are you planning to apply to Business School?

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by OptimusPrep » Sun Jun 12, 2016 7:59 pm
Awanish Kumar wrote:Hi,
This question is for experienced GMAT Instructors or anyone with good GMAT score(740+).

My progress in SC so far:
1) Completed all the videos and additional reinforcement questions on gmatprepnow website.
2) Completed the OG15 SC part with around 50-60% accuracy

Still struggling with the concepts and its applications to handle questions. Need to improve.
Please suggest some effective resources to hit the bull's eye. Any suggestions or tips would be much appreciated but please be crisp. I also wanted reviews about Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction as someone has suggested me this book.
The best way to improve efficiency is to find out your pain areas and then work selectively towards them.
Try to drill down deep in the SC questions, the questions test various concepts such as S-V agreement, modifiers, parallelism etc. Find out what troubles you.

As an addition, start preparing an error log and keep a note of all the mistakes you made and the lessons you learnt from the problems. This will ensure you do not make the same mistake again.

I would recommend you to go back to your OG and solve the SC section again after revisiting the fundamentals.
Have a look at this article to understand how to solve an SC problem:
https://www.optimus-prep.com/advertisme ... -problems/

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by Awanish Kumar » Sun Jun 12, 2016 9:25 pm
Hi Rich,
Thanks for your response...

Plese find answers to your queries and suggest me best approach and resouces considering my conditions..

1) How long have you been studying?
-> 3-4 months

2) What materials have you used?
-> Completed all the videos and additional reinforcement questions on gmatprepnow website.
-> Completed the OG15 SC

3) How have you scored on each of your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores)?
-> 500 in Gmatprep practice#1

4) What is your goal score?
-> 740+

5) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
-> August,2016

6) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
--> 2017 batch

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by [email protected] » Mon Jun 13, 2016 8:20 am
Hi Awanish Kumar,

If you're really been studying for over 3 months, then you should have taken more than just 1 practice CAT by now. To properly assess your situation, and come up with a study plan from this point forward, it would help if we had a recent CAT score to analyze. As such, you should plan to take a new FULL-LENGTH CAT (with the Essay and IR sections) sometime soon. Once you have that score, you should report back here.

If your current 'level' is the low-500s, then it will likely take at least another 2-3 months of consistent, guided study for you to hit your goal score.

1) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

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by MartyMurray » Wed Jun 15, 2016 4:07 am
Hi Awanish.

Here's my first question, and it's a key one.

How much time per question do you think that you spent on average when doing the OG SC questions? I can tell a fair amount from your answer, so for best results do your best to answer fairly accurately.
Marty Murray
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by Arie » Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:59 am
I used the Manhattan Prep books (not just the SC, but also all of the others), and they are absolutely OUTSTANDING. I can't express how amazingly comprehensive the answer explanations are. They even have a full section of idioms that were super helpful to study going into the test.

If you're a non-native English speaker (like me), then that book is an absolute MUST.

Good luck!

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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Mon Jun 20, 2016 8:08 am
Awanish Kumar wrote:Hi,
This question is for experienced GMAT Instructors or anyone with good GMAT score(740+).

My progress in SC so far:
1) Completed all the videos and additional reinforcement questions on gmatprepnow website.
2) Completed the OG15 SC part with around 50-60% accuracy

Still struggling with the concepts and its applications to handle questions. Need to improve.
Please suggest some effective resources to hit the bull's eye. Any suggestions or tips would be much appreciated but please be crisp. I also wanted reviews about Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction as someone has suggested me this book.
The one thing I'll add is that when you're reviewing what you missed in the OG, don't rely exclusively on the explanations in the book - if anything feels a bit hazy, type a few key words of the question into the search function here and review the comprehensive explanations provided by instructors. Then make some notes to yourself about why you missed what you missed. Were you focusing so much on grammar issues that you got tunnel vision and forgot to ask yourself if what you chose was actually logical? Were there technical issues that cropped up multiple times (misplaced modifiers, parallel construction issues, etc?) Once you have your analysis, go back and redo the questions. What's nice about SC is that you're unlikely to remember the correct answers, so it proves to be a renewable resource. Do this until you're getting 90+% correct.
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