bkw wrote:I will have a few days off from GMAT now. But then my plan is to work these resources
SC Grail
OG12
OG11
Verbal Review
Quant Review
PowerScore CR bible
RC99
MGMAT SC
MGMAT Number properties
MGMAT Inequalities
(GMAT Premier 2010 Kaplan)
198 Level 700 Questions
Redo all CATs from MGMAT and Knewton, also add the beatthegmat questions.
Have I missed any other useful resources or is this too much?
frankly, i think that's way too many resources. honestly, the problem that most people here have is
studying WAY too much from WAY too many different materials.
the biggest problem is that many, if not most, posters on this forum only consider the problem from the standpoint of the test itself, and fail to consider it from a human psychological standpoint as well.
specifically, what i mean here is that people are approaching the test with the following mentality: "there are thousands of things tested on this exam, so i have to study ALL of those things with exactly the same priority."
the problem with that approach is that the
conscious mind can only hold a few concepts at once -- and so you are going to need to
prioritize the concepts that you learn, so that you have a manageable number of extremely important things in your head when you try to approach the problems. the more material you study, the harder it is to do this.
in general, you can't really keep more than about 5-6 different items or points of strategy in your conscious mind at any one time (and even that is pushing it). so, if you study 100 pages of material, your job is to narrow those 100 pages to 5-6 (or fewer) main points for each different question type.
but -- here is the kicker -- even if you study 1000 pages of material, your job is STILL to narrow those 1000 pages to 5-6 (or fewer) main points for each different question type. as you might imagine, this is substantially harder than it is if you don't study quite as huge a volume of material.
this is ESPECIALLY the case in sentence correction, in which there are hundreds or even possibly thousands of different concepts to be learned (if you count the vast number of different ideograms and unique conventions).
students need to come to grips with the fact that it's just not going to be possible to absorb all of the hundreds (or even thousands) of different facts that govern sentence correction - in other words, it's going to be necessary to PRIORITIZE those facts, and to think consciously about FEWER things when actually solving the problems.
specifically, i've found that a definite majority of the official sentence correction problems can be solved, or narrowed to two different choices, using only the following
five types of considerations: (1) parallelism, (2) pronouns, (3) modifier meaning, (4) modifier placement, and (5) subject-verb agreement. that's only five things, but, taken together, they are actually enough to do the majority of what you have to do on sentence correction.
the problem, then, is to realize that your conscious mind has a very limited capacity for different items, especially when you are focused on a task that involves considerable psychological pressure. therefore, if you struggle with sentence correction, you should try to focus your conscious thought almost exclusively on these five topics - in other words, they should be the only five topics that you should actually LOOK for in the problems - and you should allow all of the other topics you've studied to just come to you spontaneously as you pick through the answer choices.
evidence in support of this position:
i post on these forums a lot, so i'm pretty to a large proportion of the mistakes that posters make.
when i see SC posts from posters who have posted over 1000 times, most of their errors *still* consist of missing basic things like parallelism, pronoun errors, and the like. this evidence shows that doubling down on these fundamentals, rather than trying to learn every little stupid rule of written english, is a better way to go.
analogy:
you ever do one of those word-search puzzles, where you have to find the words in a grid of letters (going up, down, diagonally, or in any other such direction)?
think of the disaster that would result in a puzzle like that if you were trying to look for twenty words at the same time -- you'd be so scatterbrained that you basically wouldn't find
any of the words. by contrast, if you were looking for maybe two or three words at a time, you would have a much higher probability of finding those words within a decent amount of time.
this really isn't that much different -- trying to look for tens or even hundreds of things in an SC problem at the same time is exactly like trying to look for tens or hundreds of words in a word search at the same time.
if you look for everything, you'll find nothing.
