I just Beat The GMAT!

I just want to thank everyone on this board for being a tremendous help to me and others.
The inspirational stories are what motivated me through out my prep and up till test day.
Thanks to the expert for providing clear and concise explanations for those tricky math problems.
Now onto the experience.

I am a native English speaker, who has an aversion to grammar (I use big words to hide my grammar deficiency in my papers) . Never thought this would be an issue but the GMAT proved me wrong.
The books:
Total GMAT (Math and Verbal)- Math is worth it, verbal is so-so
OG Guide 12 and 13th
Power Score Critical Reasoning and SC Bible- 2 solid books, but the CR one is far superior. SC has some of the easiest questions I have seen.
MGMAT SC- My biggest regret was not READING this book. I brought it under solely for the online CATs.

I have been studying since November of 2012, and leading up to the test I was scoring in the 600-690 range of MGMAT CATs and 580-640 for GMAT PREP (610,620 on CD, 580, 640 on software). I took all four GMAT Prep CATs the week before my exam when I first got sick with my sinus infection. For what is worth, the MGMAT CATs are harder in math but a lot easier in verbal (vs the real test) where as the GMAT Prep was as close to the real thing as you can possibly get (I even took those practice CATs with over sized headphones to mimic the test center environment and the dreaded heart beat sound).

I was hoping that my infection would have subsided by the time test date came along, but no that would not be what the gods had in store for me. I brought 1 banana and 2 5hr energy shots to the test center. The 2 energy shots were worth it, I took one at the beginning and the other before Quant section. I was sneezing and coughing, but I was also wired up and aware. This helped me out in the Quant, but alas in Verbal my dreaded arch enemy grammar showed up and halted my momentum. I know going into the test that SC was going to be my bane. I have done all 140 question in both books about 2 times over. The easy questions I nail 80% of the time, the medium 70%, the hard a dreaded 40%. In my four GMAT Prep Cats on the Verbal I scored 33,35,27, and 35. One thing I noticed is my CR/RC is usually very strong. To the point that I would get only 1 RC question wrong and 3 CR questions wrong in my strongest showing (the two 35s) but I would get 7 SC questions wrong. That 27 I scored was 2 RC , 5 CR, and 10 SC wrong! Therefore I am 100% certain that my 28V on the official test most likely mirrored my 28V performance on my worst GMAT Prep CAT.BTW my math was in the 42-43 Range, the 44 was one point higher.

As a result of both me being sick, and an unusually low Verbal performance I will retake the test later (aiming for August-Sept), therefore my good friends of the forum, besides the MGMAT SC book, what else do you recommend for a high level mastery of the dreaded SC questions?

For what it's worth....On the back of OG13 a quant score of 44 was considered a 66% score, when I took my test on 5/18/2013 that same 44 is now a 63% score. Verbal however has not changed. So I wonder....how long will it take for a 40Q to be a 50% score?

Use the OG, the explanations are very good for SC. Simply google any of the terminologies you see that you do not understand.

I am more or less in the same boat, but I am worst in all the 3 areas of verbal (SC, RC and CR). How did you tackle the RC? most of the time even if I read the passage I end up in guessing, I feel its becoz of my poor understanding of the passage, how much reading will be needed to improve on that?

CR and SC I am making around 5 to 6 mistakes in each and RC around 7 to 8 in prep test.


regds
sachin

Atilla the Hulk wrote:I just want to thank everyone on this board for being a tremendous help to me and others.
The inspirational stories are what motivated me through out my prep and up till test day.
Thanks to the expert for providing clear and concise explanations for those tricky math problems.
Now onto the experience.

I am a native English speaker, who has an aversion to grammar (I use big words to hide my grammar deficiency in my papers) . Never thought this would be an issue but the GMAT proved me wrong.
The books:
Total GMAT (Math and Verbal)- Math is worth it, verbal is so-so
OG Guide 12 and 13th
Power Score Critical Reasoning and SC Bible- 2 solid books, but the CR one is far superior. SC has some of the easiest questions I have seen.
MGMAT SC- My biggest regret was not READING this book. I brought it under solely for the online CATs.

I have been studying since November of 2012, and leading up to the test I was scoring in the 600-690 range of MGMAT CATs and 580-640 for GMAT PREP (610,620 on CD, 580, 640 on software). I took all four GMAT Prep CATs the week before my exam when I first got sick with my sinus infection. For what is worth, the MGMAT CATs are harder in math but a lot easier in verbal (vs the real test) where as the GMAT Prep was as close to the real thing as you can possibly get (I even took those practice CATs with over sized headphones to mimic the test center environment and the dreaded heart beat sound).

I was hoping that my infection would have subsided by the time test date came along, but no that would not be what the gods had in store for me. I brought 1 banana and 2 5hr energy shots to the test center. The 2 energy shots were worth it, I took one at the beginning and the other before Quant section. I was sneezing and coughing, but I was also wired up and aware. This helped me out in the Quant, but alas in Verbal my dreaded arch enemy grammar showed up and halted my momentum. I know going into the test that SC was going to be my bane. I have done all 140 question in both books about 2 times over. The easy questions I nail 80% of the time, the medium 70%, the hard a dreaded 40%. In my four GMAT Prep Cats on the Verbal I scored 33,35,27, and 35. One thing I noticed is my CR/RC is usually very strong. To the point that I would get only 1 RC question wrong and 3 CR questions wrong in my strongest showing (the two 35s) but I would get 7 SC questions wrong. That 27 I scored was 2 RC , 5 CR, and 10 SC wrong! Therefore I am 100% certain that my 28V on the official test most likely mirrored my 28V performance on my worst GMAT Prep CAT.BTW my math was in the 42-43 Range, the 44 was one point higher.

As a result of both me being sick, and an unusually low Verbal performance I will retake the test later (aiming for August-Sept), therefore my good friends of the forum, besides the MGMAT SC book, what else do you recommend for a high level mastery of the dreaded SC questions?

For what it's worth....On the back of OG13 a quant score of 44 was considered a 66% score, when I took my test on 5/18/2013 that same 44 is now a 63% score. Verbal however has not changed. So I wonder....how long will it take for a 40Q to be a 50% score?

That an interesting (& worrying) observation on the quant score trend.