I just Beat The GMAT!

Hello everyone

I've been a silent spectator on this forum all this while when i've been preparing for the GMAT so now that it's over and done with, just thought i should post my strategies so others like me could also benefit from these:

Brief background - Engineer from India, WE - 3yrs in IT

Preparation Time - Started preparing in July.Prepared for roughly 2 and a half months

Practice test scores

Kaplan Free test - 760
Princeton Free test - 740
Veritas Free Test - 710
MGMAT Free test - 740
GMAT Prep 1 - 770
GMAT Prep 2 - 760
GMAT Prep 1 (Retake) - 780
GMAT Prep 2 (Retake) - 780

Practice material used

Used the following for both quant and verbal - OG 10,11,12 & Kaplan Advanced

Additionally used the following material for verbal:

SC - MGMAT SC Guide - The best book for SC as is universally acknowledged by all
- Aristotle SC Grail - Found this surprisingly useful book for SC.Very very helpful!
After using both the books above, I was able to nail Sentence Correction questions easily.

CR - Powerscore CR Bible
- Some LSAT practice tests

RC - RC99 -This book has a set of 99 passages across difficulty levels. Helped me improve my comprehension skill as I became familiar with passages from myriad areas. The passages and questions are quite on the lines of the those tested on the GMAT and the explanations are pretty good!

I was always depending on Verbal as my stronger area so worked very hard on improving the same.

Test Experience - Nerves really tend to get the better of you initially. Think I started badly in Quant but settled down after the 1st 8-10 questions. Had a candy bar during the break and started with verbal which went like a breeze. clicked on Report scores and was overjoyed to see a 760 on the screen:)

Nothing much else to add. In case there are any specific queries would love to address those. Also in case any of you need any of the practice materials mentioned above just PM me.

Good luck to all and thanks BTG for all the helpl!

Congrats Rishi,

What is this RC 99..
How is it? Representative of what you get over der?

Congratulations.
Aristotle SC Grail - Hearing this name for first time.
Also RC 99.

Can you write a brief review of these both. Thanks!!

kvcpk wrote:Congratulations.
Aristotle SC Grail - Hearing this name for first time.
Also RC 99.

Can you write a brief review of these both. Thanks!!

Thanks guys......sure here's a review of these two books:

SC Grail - this book has 3 sections
1) Basic grammar review - gives a brief overview of grammatical concepts such as parts of speech, etc.
2) Error types - pretty much the same errors as found in any other book but explained very crisply in bullet point format
3) More like a dos and dont's - when to use if or whether, when to use will or would, etc.

The best part about this book is that it is very crisp and to the point. At times I found Manhattan SC gets a bit too detailed which is not the case with this book..no complicated grammar concepts.....also the 3rd part is very useful as it summarises pretty much all the traps that are there on the GMAT. Not too mention it has one of the best idiom lists i have come across including correct and incorrect usages examples.....the only thing missing is practice questions which this book doesn't have but it does give you links to OG questions for each concept it explains

RC99 - One problem that I had with most RC practice passages (including some in the OGs) is that they ask u too many questions; sometimes as many as 5,6,7 questions per passage.....whereas on the GMAT u will most likely only get 3 questions per passage.....I got 3 passages with 3 questions each and 1 passage with 4 questions.....now to answer 6-7 questions one has to read the passage in much more detail than to answer 3-4 questions....so practicing from these passages kind of ruins your strategy....plus there aren't too many good passages available for practice anyway

The best thing I liked about RC99 book is that it only gives you an average of 3 questions per passage.....at the most some passages have 4 questions....the passages are graded across 3 difficulty levels of 33 passages each and pretty much cover every subject area tested on the GMAT....if u do these 99 passages I don't think u'll need any more practice for RC

To answer adi's specific question about Representativeness, overall I found these 2 books to be very representative of the GMAT and would suggest you guys go through the same.....just do a google search and u'll probably find soft copies somewhere or just pm me

also go through their website - www.aristotleprep.com. It is a very unimpressive website but has some very useful content for Free download; I specially liked the document on tenses that they had put up which is as detailed a document as any that I have come across

Cheers!

Congrats buddy on a great score. Ur verbal score is specially scary. Have been using the SC grail and I agree its a very good book but had no idea about RC 99 book. Have sent you a pm so would appreciate if you could mail it to me. I am taking the GMAT end of this month.

Thanks in advance.

Congratulations for the score..Best of luck for your preparation... Can you please tell whether the difficulty level of Verbal questions in GMAT exams was in comparable to the one of verbal questions in latter part of OG verbal.. Also did you see any idiom usage in SC questions..

Congratulations!

sv77 wrote:Congratulations for the score..Best of luck for your preparation... Can you please tell whether the difficulty level of Verbal questions in GMAT exams was in comparable to the one of verbal questions in latter part of OG verbal.. Also did you see any idiom usage in SC questions..

Thanks.

Yes I think the last 30-40 questions in OG are pretty good representation of what you are likely to get on the real test. And yes I did get quite a few idiom questions but those questions also had other errors apart from idioms.

cheers!

Hi Rishi,

Truely awesome score in such a short time .. thnks for debrief..

All the best for ur applications!!

nice score! how do you suggest to prepare for quant and verbal?

Hi Rishi,

Great score congrats!

Hey I as wondering where could I find RC 99?

Cheers

mj78ind wrote:Hi Rishi,

Great score congrats!

Hey I as wondering where could I find RC99?

Cheers

Thanks buddy.

Here's the link: RC99

Cheers!

Hi ,
Can you please send me RC99 to mail id.

[email protected]

Please i really need them... and my exam is fast approaching.

Thanks in advance.

Animesh

a great score
congrats

Hi Rishi,

Congratulations!!

Were the Quant questions comparable to the ones in OG?