From 570 to 640, another 70-80 to go

vineetbatra: Master | Next Rank: 500 Posts; Posts: 355; Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2009 12:42 pm; Thanked: 2 times; Followed by:1 members

by vineetbatra » Tue Sep 01, 2009 1:41 pm

Hello,

I will begin with my background; I finished my studies in finance about 8 years ago. I am a non native English speaker, but have been working in the US for almost 3.5 years and worked in the UK for about 2 years. I am currently working full time, about 10-12 hours a day with weekends off.

My study style is that I would rather do 1 thing 10 times instead of doing 10 different things. I believe in making sound fundamentals, so that makes me a relatively slow starter, but my application of knowledge improves really well with my understanding.

My GMAT venture
Early June - Took GMAT PREP test 1 570 (V36, Q24), surprised with Quant for low and with verbal for high, I had 7-8 mistakes in SC, 1 in CR and 1 in RC. In Quant I just ran out of time and had to guess last 6 Q's (all incorrect)

July 7th MGMAT Test 1 - 590 (Q44, V29), more like my kind of score, again SC was a disaster with 9 incorrect out of 15. In Quant, amongst others, I did a few silly mistakes

August 8th MGMAT Test 2 - 610 (Q40, V34), again SC had 9 incorrect. Some improvement in CR

August 22nd MGMAT Test 3 - 640 (Q44, V34) improvement in SC with 7 incorrect instead of 9, CR went down by 2 and RC improved by 2. Quant nothing much changed.

Some stats on the above MGMAT Exams
Verbal
RC - 50% strike rate
CR - 52% strike rate (Biggest culprit Strengthen and Weaken, best score in bold face)
SC - 47% strike rate (GMC the worst and Odds & Ends the best)

Quant
PS - 52% strike rate (Worst are number properties and word translations, best Geometry and FDP)

DS - 50% strike rate (Worst are number properties and word translations, best Geometry and FDP)

My coverage

Quant

Finished 249 PS OG 11 with following stats
Q 1-200 83% Strike rate with average time 1:33 minutes
Q 201-230 73% Strike rate with average time 2 minutes
Q 231-249 68% strike Rate with average time 2:14 minutes

Worst strike rate in Number Properties and Geometry.

Verbal

I started reading MGMAT SC guide about a month ago and have covered 60-70% of it; I have done OG questions on Pronouns, Subject Verb, Modifiers and Parallelism. In all these topics I am hitting in 70's except Pronouns where my strike rate is 56%.

In CR my Strike rate for first 20 questions is 85%, in RC my strike rate for first 20 questions (short passages) is 63%

Well I have given a lot of statistics, so to sum it up, my worst areas are SC and RC, however when I took my GMAT Prep test 1 my RC score was really good.

My questions are as follows:

1. I just can't apply the SC strategies, when I see a question I just don't know where to start from, though MGMAT guide has helped me but I still have a lot of ground to cover, there are so many rules to remember, it just becomes very difficult to remember everything.

2. I don't know what to do with idioms, there are so many of them, it's very difficult to remember every idiom and its usage.

3. I started reading MGMAT CR Guide and I have 2 questions

a. Making notes -making notes takes too much time, especially in trying to figure out what to write. Well I can try to train myself in doing so, but is it imperative to make notes?
b. I read in another book that one should not read the stem before reading the stimulus; I seem to like this more, any thoughts?

4. I have started reading a little from MGMAT RC guide and have the same problem with making notes, I just cannot make notes from an RC, is it absolutely critical to make notes, I just seem to loose a lot of time making notes. What is the best way to train myself in making notes.

Over the next 6-8 weeks I intend to finish the following
1. MGMAT SC guide
2. MGMAT Number Properties
3. MGMAT Word Translations
4. MGMAT/Powersource CR guide/Bible
5. MGMAT RC guide
6. MGMAT FDP guide
7. Finish all OG 12 questions, Verbal Guide questions, OG 11 Questions and maybe OG 10 questions. ( I am not planning to look out of OG questions except MGMAT exams)
8. Finish all MGMAT Exams
9. Retake GMAT Prep 6-7 time in order to exhaust all questions

I am planning to take the exam in another 6-8 weeks, maybe even 10 weeks, and targeting to get 710+ i.e. another 70-80 point improvement.

I would really appreciate if someone could look into my progress and plan, and share his or her pearl of wisdom. The more detailed the better it is.

Thanks in anticipation,

Vineet

Quote

Received a PM asking me to respond.

You've made some great improvement already - nice work!

I notice in your discussion of strengths and weaknesses that you concentrate heavily on percentage correct. That is less useful than you think as a measure of your strengths and weaknesses. For instance, would you rather have:
1) 50% correct with an average difficulty level of 700
or
2) 60% correct with an average difficulty of 650

Which is better? Typically, the one with the higher average difficulty level - NOT the one with the higher percentage correct.

So keep this in mind as you compare your performance on different tests - having more or fewer questions wrong of a certain type does not automatically mean "strength" or "weakness" because the difficulty level data has to be factored in as well.

For SC, it sounds like you've been making good progress since getting the SC guide. As Dana said, it's important to really study this stuff in depth, take notes, come up with your own way of remembering, devise your own examples, etc.

You may also want to make what I call an SC "cheat sheet clues" list. Make two columns. In one column, write the name of a particular grammar rule (eg, not just a chapter title, but a particular rule from that chapter). In the other column, write down what differences ("splits") in answer choices would indicate that that rule is being tested. (For example, the split "has/have" would indicate that subj-verb agreement is being tested. A ", which" vs "that" split would indicate an non-essential noun modifier vs. an essential noun modifier. And so on.

What you're doing here is actually learning SC clues as you would math symbols. If you see a multiplication sign, you know what to do, right? So now, if you see a certain split in the answers, you'll immediately know what rule to test.

Idioms are kind of a nightmare, I agree. Only learn the ones that have been tested by official problems (there are literally thousands of them in the language - you can't learn them all). The ones listed in our SC guide have all been used on official problems. As you continue to study in newer materials (GMATPrep, OG12), make your own flashcards for any new idioms that you don't know. DO NOT BOTHER with idioms that show up on non-official questions (or in our SC guide) - and, yes, I mean that even for questions from our own CATs.

For CR, you ask whether it is imperative to make notes. I have a question for you: are you trying to improve your CR performance? If so, then yes.

However: you need to make sure you understand WHY you are making notes. You are NOT taking notes the way you would for school - you are not going to need to use these notes to study for a test 3 weeks from now. You only need the notes for the next 2 minutes while you do the problem.

The point of taking the notes, then, is not the typical reason; instead, the point of taking (VERY short) notes is to organize your thinking and analyze the argument while you're reading it for the first time - because you only want to have to read it through once. The notes are basically just helping you understand: what's going on here? what's the main point / conclusion? what are the flaws?

In fact, if you've taken really good notes - you typically don't have to use them much to answer the question! Again, that wasn't the point of the notes in the first place. The point was to organize your thinking and analysis. (This is true on CR. On RC, you will have to use your notes.)

The better you get at this, the shorter / faster your notes will be (and some people get to the point where they don't have to write anything at all on some of the shorter or more straightforward arguments). But it does take time and practice to get this good - to train yourself how to analyze CR arguments thoroughly during your first read-through.

I used to avoid reading the question stem before reading the argument itself, but I am now a convert to the idea that it's better to read the question first. There are two big advantages to reading the question first:

1) categorize the question type: because I'm supposed to do different kinds of analysis depending on the type of question, it's useful to know right from the start what that question type is.

2) find the conclusion: more then half the time, the question stem contains either the conclusion itself or some words that hint at the conclusion (which makes it easier to find the conclusion in the argument above). If I know that info before I start, it makes it a lot easier to comprehend and analyze the argument the first time through.

For RC, try this exercise.Â Go back to problems / passages you've already done from OG and go over them again with your notes from when you first did these.Â Now that you've done the problems, checked your answers, and generally know how things were supposed to work, go back and look at (a) what you initially wrote down on your first read-through and (b) what your understanding of the passage was before you started answering questions.Â

How well do (a) and (b) match what you knew of the passage and questions after you'd done the questions and gone back to correct your answers and analyze everything?Â Probably not very well.Â Where are the disconnects?Â Did you misunderstand the main point of the passage?Â Or did you understand the main point but fall into a trap when reading the answers to the question?Â Did you misunderstand the detail for a specific question?Â Or did you concentrate on the wrong detail?Â Or did you examine and understand the right detail but fall into a trap when reading the answers?Â Etc.Â

Then, re-write your notes in the "ideal" way and study how that is different from the first way that you did it, and how you should know next time what to write down and what not to write down.

(And, yes, completely agree with Dana that notes should be short and sweet - as noted for CR above. Main idea of each paragraph, in a few words, that's it. You want the overall picture or outline, NOT the detail.)

You asked me in your PM whether I thought your goal was reasonable (710+, representing a 70+ point improvement, in 6-8 weeks). Did you take your practice tests under full official conditions? (both essays, two 8-minute breaks, etc) If not, then your true scoring level may be a bit lower than your practice tests, in which case you're talking about an even great improvement. I'd say a 640 to 710 jump in 6-8 weeks is possible but will be challenging; a larger jump would be even more challenging.

I'd also like to caution you re: emphasizing quantity over quality. You mentioned at the top that you'd rather do 1 thing 10 times than do 10 different things, but you have an awfully long list of things at the bottom. Just think about how you're going to balance that - the quality of your study is a LOT more important than the quantity of practice questions or practice tests.

In fact, I don't recommend taking a CAT more frequently than once a week in the last stages of prep (the last few weeks before the real exam). Before that timeframe, I recommend taking CATs only once every 2-3 weeks. CAT exams are really good for (a) figuring out where you're scoring right now, (b) practicing stamina, and (c) analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. The actual act of just taking the exam is NOT so useful for improving. It's what you do with the test results / between tests that helps you to improve.