How about studying GMAT official giude 11th addition

[JinalShah]

Hi i have just bought GMAT official guide... Is it good book to start on the studies for GMAT.... Please provide the suggestions if any one of you have gone through the book.... I am planning to give by mid Aug...

[lunarpower]

Hi i have just bought GMAT official guide... Is it good book to start on the studies for GMAT.... Please provide the suggestions if any one of you have gone through the book.... I am planning to give by mid Aug...

hi jinal.

yes, the book you hold in your hands is the single best preparation resource you can get your hands on. (at least until the next edition comes out, that is.)

your question is awfully general, so i'll give some awfully general answers back. here are some things you should definitely do with the official guide problems:

* ALWAYS WORK THE PROBLEMS WITH A STOPWATCH.
you have to get used to the time management guidelines. it means nothing if you can solve a problem, but can't solve it within the requisite amount of time. this means roughly
2 minutes per quantitative problem (it's ok to allot a bit more time for harder problems)
1-1.5 minutes per sentence correction problem, depending on length
2-2.5 minutes per critical reasoning problem, depending on length
3 minutes to read a short passage
4 minutes to read a long passage
1 minute to answer each reading comp problem

* LOOK FOR CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PROBLEMS.
do not think of the o.g. as a random collection of hundreds of problems to solve individually. instead, think of it as a NETWORK of problems, all related to each other, from which your job is to draw the CONNECTIONS. see, here's the deal: the actual problems themselves are unimportant, because you know you're not going to see those actual problems again. it's the GENERAL IDEAS AND SIGNALS appearing in the problems that matter, because those are the things you're looking for when you see problems on actual tests.
after you solve problems, then, take some time to look back at similar-looking problems (or problems on which you used similar strategies, even though the problems themselves may not have been similar-looking), and see if you can EXTRACT GENERAL PATTERNS OF STRATEGY for those problems. this is the real point of practicing: you come out with techniques that you can use on FUTURE problems. (you should not take too much time teasing out the specifics of any one problem, because, remember, you're never going to see that specific problem again.)

* DO NOT TAKE THE PROBLEMS AS IF THEY WERE A PRACTICE TEST.
do not group the problems together in huge chunks and pretend that you're taking an entire section of a practice test. the problems won't be adaptive if you do this, and so you'll get a wildly distorted view of proper sequencing and time management.
so, use the stopwatch, but limit yourself to chunks of a few problems at a time. the time to think you're taking a practice test is when you're actually taking a practice test.

if you have more specific questions after you've gone through the book a little, feel free to post back.

[JinalShah]

Hi Ron,
Thanks for your valuable suggestions.... Actually i saw various books in market like Princeton, Kaplan etc.... so got confused on do i need to refer to other books or Official Guide is sufficient enough.... And i will surely use stopwatch while solving problems for better time management...

Thanks & Regards,
Jinal

Hi i have just bought GMAT official guide... Is it good book to start on the studies for GMAT.... Please provide the suggestions if any one of you have gone through the book.... I am planning to give by mid Aug...

hi jinal.

yes, the book you hold in your hands is the single best preparation resource you can get your hands on. (at least until the next edition comes out, that is.)

your question is awfully general, so i'll give some awfully general answers back. here are some things you should definitely do with the official guide problems:

* ALWAYS WORK THE PROBLEMS WITH A STOPWATCH.
you have to get used to the time management guidelines. it means nothing if you can solve a problem, but can't solve it within the requisite amount of time. this means roughly
2 minutes per quantitative problem (it's ok to allot a bit more time for harder problems)
1-1.5 minutes per sentence correction problem, depending on length
2-2.5 minutes per critical reasoning problem, depending on length
3 minutes to read a short passage
4 minutes to read a long passage
1 minute to answer each reading comp problem

* LOOK FOR CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PROBLEMS.
do not think of the o.g. as a random collection of hundreds of problems to solve individually. instead, think of it as a NETWORK of problems, all related to each other, from which your job is to draw the CONNECTIONS. see, here's the deal: the actual problems themselves are unimportant, because you know you're not going to see those actual problems again. it's the GENERAL IDEAS AND SIGNALS appearing in the problems that matter, because those are the things you're looking for when you see problems on actual tests.
after you solve problems, then, take some time to look back at similar-looking problems (or problems on which you used similar strategies, even though the problems themselves may not have been similar-looking), and see if you can EXTRACT GENERAL PATTERNS OF STRATEGY for those problems. this is the real point of practicing: you come out with techniques that you can use on FUTURE problems. (you should not take too much time teasing out the specifics of any one problem, because, remember, you're never going to see that specific problem again.)

* DO NOT TAKE THE PROBLEMS AS IF THEY WERE A PRACTICE TEST.
do not group the problems together in huge chunks and pretend that you're taking an entire section of a practice test. the problems won't be adaptive if you do this, and so you'll get a wildly distorted view of proper sequencing and time management.
so, use the stopwatch, but limit yourself to chunks of a few problems at a time. the time to think you're taking a practice test is when you're actually taking a practice test.

if you have more specific questions after you've gone through the book a little, feel free to post back.

[lunarpower]

the triad of official guides (yellow og11, green quant supplement, purple verbal supplement) should be plenty of work for you. remember, you should not just be trying to do as many problems as you possibly can; instead, you should be trying to ANALYZE the problems, with the goal of finding CONNECTIONS and COMMON THREADS.

for each difficult problem you encounter in the o.g., you can do any and all of the following:
* analyze the problem and find the TRICKS AND TRAPS in the problem. (if you missed the problem, there should always be at least one of these!)
* find the SIGNALS in the problem that give clues to the correct strategy. this is best done via cross-comparisons among similar problems (our mgmat strategy guides contain lists of o.g. problems by content area, an invaluable aid in this process).
* try to CREATE a similar problem.
* try to find ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES that would work for the problem, as well as for similar problems. (always check out the solution in the back of the o.g. sometimes those solutions are crappy and inefficient, but they can still give you ideas as to alternatives if they're different from your own solution.)

if you review the o.g. problems this thoroughly, you could easily take five to ten minutes on each difficult problem, meaning that the hundreds and hundreds of o.g. problems should be much more than enough to keep you occupied.

--

nothing wrong with spreading the love a bit (= occasionally trying your hand at problems from other sources), but just make sure that your review contains at least some depth, not just all breadth.