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dalillama
- Junior | Next Rank: 30 Posts
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Sun Jun 06, 2010 8:34 am
- Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Thanked: 2 times
- GMAT Score:740
Took it Friday, July 30th. It was a 710 (92%) / 41Q (56%) / 46V (99%)
Right off the bat I want to say that I know this is not a bad total score. I know many are (rightfully) happy with a 710. However, that 41Q is just not good enough given my particular circumstances. I will be retaking the test.
Also, and trying not to sound conspiratorial, in this forum we usually see many awesome write-ups of people who start with Quant in the high 40s, and have their struggle in getting their Verbal up. I think up until this week I can recall maybe two reports of people with High V/Low Q splits. I took the test on Friday, July 30th. Right now if you look at the forum I see two reports of people who took it I think on the same day and got the same rare splits. I have no idea what conclusion (if any) I should reach about it, but the fact that we see three splits like these on the same day while I personally only saw 2 or 3 splits like these in the past six months did pique my interest. Hopefully someone can tell me I'm just a poor user of the "search" function.
While I don't think I have the cachet to do a Quant debrief, I'll try to see if my Verbal can help anyone. Hopefully I'll be able to write a great quant recovery debrief in a month. =)
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The "one-line takeaway": Read as much as you can as often as you can.
Reading Comprehension:
-I think the key to RC, as echoed by others, is to "get into" the passage. Especially if you're at the higher CAT levels, you might be seeing some passages which are outlandish. It's easy to lose interest and focus. Lock0ut's advice about reading the NY Times is dead-on, only I would personally (and snobbishly =) recommend The Economist instead. Don't just read what you like. You can be a finance guy, but read the science and technology section. If Homer Simpson can, you can too.
-I found that the "author intent" questions can usually be solved by stepping back from the passage for a few moments (IE: don't focus on the facts or the logic), and then look at the first paragraph and the last, looking for "conditional" statements ("However,..." or "In fact,..." for example).
-Be on the lookout for extreme statements and things that may very well be true, but are not germane to the question. I think many questions in RC try to catch "lazy" readers who look for an easy "true or false" answers.
-I don't know how to "practice" interest, but one (perhaps odd) exercise that I do is to go on Wikipedia and find a random Featured Article and read it thoroughly. It may be something that you're not interested in, but most likely it'll be well-written and carry a historical tone which you can't find in current publications (but you'll definitely see on the GMAT). Thankfully they provide a link for random featured articles.
-Materials: Kaplan was okay, but OG is king. Also, GRE materials are exceptional for RC, as it tends to be great "high altitude" training.
Sentence Correction:
-Again, I think the greatest determinant of your success here is the amount of reading you do. I never took formal English grammar in school. Doing the OG, while I got 95% of the RC/CR questions right, my SC always lagged behind in the low 80s. I kinda learned grammar by reading and having a plethora of "ah" moments when I saw an idiom being used. This is another reason I recommend the Economist over others, as they seem to be more colloquial while maintaining the same level of grammatical correctness (and I kinda enjoy the occasional wit).
-One thing that got me in the beginning of studying SC is the "justified change"--if an alternative will change the meaning of the sentence. I had a tendency to be conservative about this--if an alternative is grammatically flawless but changes the original meaning of a question which I think is right, but just awkward, I tended to stick to the original sentence. This is kind of a personal gut-feeling thing which may not work for everyone, but certainly worked for me.
-Materials: I cannot say I got much out of the Manhattan SC guide. I know people worship it, and I'll certainly sing their praises when I do a Quant writeup, but I just didn't get anything out of it with the exception of things such as verb tenses. Having said that, I would endorse MGMAT on the SC questions in their CATs.
Critical Reasoning:
-This is tough. CR is one the one thing about the GMAT which I actually enjoyed, but it's tough to give tips. Try to find a method that works for you, but CR for me was usually obvious at first--the alternatives are very predictable. I usually flew through CR and RC. That gave enough time to do SC and still finish the test with 20 minutes left on the clock. I can't think of any great revelations here, other than maybe working on recognizing the usual patterns in alternatives.
-Materials: It was hard to find good materials to practice CR outside of OG. The one thing I'll say is that the MGMAT CAT's critical reasoning was infuriating. When I did OG and even on the test itself, the CR was straightforward. On the MGMAT CAT's I often got a feeling that there was a right answer and the answer that they wanted me to pick. After the test, I would feel like picking up the phone and calling someone at MGMAT to argue why my "wrong" answer still worked. I think the approach they take to writing the questions themselves is different from the GMAT, so the questions look similar, but the alternatives are out of whack. I never got above a 41 on the MGMAT CATs, and got 46/47s on the two GMATPreps.
-On the flipside, I would recommend going after some LSAT CR materials, which tend to be harder and based on more "pure" logic--they're not comparable to actual GMAT questions, but they help you get beyond the content and at the logic of the issue, which is a great help for the actual GMAT.
---------------
That's it for verbal! Hope you've found something useful here. I will be retaking the test on account of that 41Q.
On a final note: Don't get intimidated by the verbal on the GMAT. I'm a non-native English speaker with ADHD-PI. If I can get a 99% percentile on the verbal, you can too. It's a question of finding out what is the right strategy for you.
Right off the bat I want to say that I know this is not a bad total score. I know many are (rightfully) happy with a 710. However, that 41Q is just not good enough given my particular circumstances. I will be retaking the test.
Also, and trying not to sound conspiratorial, in this forum we usually see many awesome write-ups of people who start with Quant in the high 40s, and have their struggle in getting their Verbal up. I think up until this week I can recall maybe two reports of people with High V/Low Q splits. I took the test on Friday, July 30th. Right now if you look at the forum I see two reports of people who took it I think on the same day and got the same rare splits. I have no idea what conclusion (if any) I should reach about it, but the fact that we see three splits like these on the same day while I personally only saw 2 or 3 splits like these in the past six months did pique my interest. Hopefully someone can tell me I'm just a poor user of the "search" function.
While I don't think I have the cachet to do a Quant debrief, I'll try to see if my Verbal can help anyone. Hopefully I'll be able to write a great quant recovery debrief in a month. =)
---------------
The "one-line takeaway": Read as much as you can as often as you can.
Reading Comprehension:
-I think the key to RC, as echoed by others, is to "get into" the passage. Especially if you're at the higher CAT levels, you might be seeing some passages which are outlandish. It's easy to lose interest and focus. Lock0ut's advice about reading the NY Times is dead-on, only I would personally (and snobbishly =) recommend The Economist instead. Don't just read what you like. You can be a finance guy, but read the science and technology section. If Homer Simpson can, you can too.
-I found that the "author intent" questions can usually be solved by stepping back from the passage for a few moments (IE: don't focus on the facts or the logic), and then look at the first paragraph and the last, looking for "conditional" statements ("However,..." or "In fact,..." for example).
-Be on the lookout for extreme statements and things that may very well be true, but are not germane to the question. I think many questions in RC try to catch "lazy" readers who look for an easy "true or false" answers.
-I don't know how to "practice" interest, but one (perhaps odd) exercise that I do is to go on Wikipedia and find a random Featured Article and read it thoroughly. It may be something that you're not interested in, but most likely it'll be well-written and carry a historical tone which you can't find in current publications (but you'll definitely see on the GMAT). Thankfully they provide a link for random featured articles.
-Materials: Kaplan was okay, but OG is king. Also, GRE materials are exceptional for RC, as it tends to be great "high altitude" training.
Sentence Correction:
-Again, I think the greatest determinant of your success here is the amount of reading you do. I never took formal English grammar in school. Doing the OG, while I got 95% of the RC/CR questions right, my SC always lagged behind in the low 80s. I kinda learned grammar by reading and having a plethora of "ah" moments when I saw an idiom being used. This is another reason I recommend the Economist over others, as they seem to be more colloquial while maintaining the same level of grammatical correctness (and I kinda enjoy the occasional wit).
-One thing that got me in the beginning of studying SC is the "justified change"--if an alternative will change the meaning of the sentence. I had a tendency to be conservative about this--if an alternative is grammatically flawless but changes the original meaning of a question which I think is right, but just awkward, I tended to stick to the original sentence. This is kind of a personal gut-feeling thing which may not work for everyone, but certainly worked for me.
-Materials: I cannot say I got much out of the Manhattan SC guide. I know people worship it, and I'll certainly sing their praises when I do a Quant writeup, but I just didn't get anything out of it with the exception of things such as verb tenses. Having said that, I would endorse MGMAT on the SC questions in their CATs.
Critical Reasoning:
-This is tough. CR is one the one thing about the GMAT which I actually enjoyed, but it's tough to give tips. Try to find a method that works for you, but CR for me was usually obvious at first--the alternatives are very predictable. I usually flew through CR and RC. That gave enough time to do SC and still finish the test with 20 minutes left on the clock. I can't think of any great revelations here, other than maybe working on recognizing the usual patterns in alternatives.
-Materials: It was hard to find good materials to practice CR outside of OG. The one thing I'll say is that the MGMAT CAT's critical reasoning was infuriating. When I did OG and even on the test itself, the CR was straightforward. On the MGMAT CAT's I often got a feeling that there was a right answer and the answer that they wanted me to pick. After the test, I would feel like picking up the phone and calling someone at MGMAT to argue why my "wrong" answer still worked. I think the approach they take to writing the questions themselves is different from the GMAT, so the questions look similar, but the alternatives are out of whack. I never got above a 41 on the MGMAT CATs, and got 46/47s on the two GMATPreps.
-On the flipside, I would recommend going after some LSAT CR materials, which tend to be harder and based on more "pure" logic--they're not comparable to actual GMAT questions, but they help you get beyond the content and at the logic of the issue, which is a great help for the actual GMAT.
---------------
That's it for verbal! Hope you've found something useful here. I will be retaking the test on account of that 41Q.
On a final note: Don't get intimidated by the verbal on the GMAT. I'm a non-native English speaker with ADHD-PI. If I can get a 99% percentile on the verbal, you can too. It's a question of finding out what is the right strategy for you.
