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Little Diagnosis of my prep, Need a plan

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Little Diagnosis of my prep, Need a plan

by pepeprepa » Tue Aug 19, 2008 7:43 am
Hi guys,

I have been sutyding for more or less 1 month actively, I take the gmat on 5th September.
I would like to get some tracks of studying because I no longer have many ideas, I do not have any schedule indeed... therefore, I need your objective vision of the situation. Thanks...

For math, I did total questions of OG11, Kaplan 800 (was disappointed by the level honestly: I find maths much easier than verbal in this book) and many questions on BeatTheGmat forum. I preserve the quantitative green one OG because it seems so small I want to preserve some questions. Every hard or tricky questions are quoted and I rewrite all maths rules I do not know.
Concerning the verbal, I did most of CR and SC of OG11 and some of the purple one. Nevertheless, I only did very few RC ones. I have problems to work Verbal and I do not feel a strong progression, especially with CR and RC. If I am right it is ok but if I am wrong I do not feel that the debrief I do will help me for the next questions. I hope I will progress only by practising RC/CR again and again.
For the time management, I learn not to focus a long time on a maths question if I am not sure of the result because it penalized me a lot spending 7 or 8 minutes on one or two questions during a training test.
For the verbal, I think I have a stamina problem, my results would be greater if I were fresh for verbal... I am thinking about new kind of exercices to work this point, it seems the most important for me.

Here are my test results:

7 august: Gmatprep 1 - 640 - Q49 (10 wrong) - V27 (14 wrong)
14 august: Powerprep 1 - 640 - Q49 (3 wrong) - V28 (13 wrong)
18 august: Powerprep 2 - 710 - Q50 (1 wrong) - V35 (11 wrong)
(Wrong errors in V are impossible to interpretate, one time 2/3 are SC another time it is RC)

Thanks a lot men...
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by mayonnai5e » Tue Aug 19, 2008 3:57 pm
As I read your post, I thought to myself, "Hmm this person writes like my French coworkers." Then I noticed that you are based in France; I'm currently based in Paris myself.

In all honesty, your grasp of English seems rather weak and I think you should take steps to improve your English for the exam. Unfortunately, with your test only two weeks away, you may not have time to do this. Verbal is definitely the harder of the two topics to improve as English can take years to learn; however, it has been said that SC is the one area where improvements can be quickly made. If you have not already, I suggest buying the MGMAT SC book and working through it; it's an excellent book especially for someone with a different native language.

The good thing is that your quant is very strong and that should help buoy your score. You can't really boost your Quant much higher so you can refocus that energy on verbal, but be sure not to let your quant fall behind.
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by pepeprepa » Wed Aug 20, 2008 3:57 am
First, thanks for answering me.

You can daily infer that most of French people do not master English very well, I think it is part of our culture...

For the gmat, I don't consider it as a heavy burden, except for some CR and RC that I cannot understand totally. If I am not so good at English but if I understand the tips and the spirit of gmat questions, where do you think I could go in Verbal? Indeed, I would like to targer 40. Could you tell me which kind of concepts I have to work on for getting 40?
Are they basic things, like all grammar points or are they complicated things that I cannot master in two weeks?
In maths, for example, I think that if you master all basics exercices, with simple properties, you have upper 40.

For the MGMAT, I will have it too late, but for my retake I will use it sure.
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by LSB » Wed Aug 20, 2008 4:05 pm
Hi pepeprepa - No surprise that your quant is so good given some of your posts in the math forum.

I hear you on the stamina issue for verbal. I have the same problem and am finding that the issue is very similar to a sports game where you consistently run out of breath. In that case you can only improve your game if you do a lot of cardio exercise and long runs. Same with verbal: Large question sets at the end of a practice day are my approach. Of course, the trade off is that during practice you will get quite a few questions wrong b/c you're tired. But it's better to do that in practice than during the test.

Finally, I agree that verbal mistakes are difficult to analyze. I have moved away from overanalyzing these and only focus on SC errors when reviewing the questions that I have worked on (in my opinion SC is the one patch that is somewhat scientific). I don't focus on RC and CR too much during error review (but my V is somewhat OK and I need to allocate more time to Q)

Not sure if this helps. But thought I'd share my experience. Good luck
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by pepeprepa » Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:06 am
I agree with your comparison with sports especially running, you need to combine speed and stamina, you need to work stamina first to be able to support your future hard training hours for speed. The problem is that for gmat we have a tendancy to do the opposite, I can make many questions very quickly but after 2hours at this pace I am no longer fresh. I don't think there are a lot of ways to solve that, just making exercices during hours at a pace a little below what is required during the exam, that's what I am gonna try.
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