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18 days remaining - Can you advice some strategy?

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18 days remaining - Can you advice some strategy?

by sampolo » Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:06 pm
HI Eric, Stacy and everyone else,

Thanks a lot for maintaining such a wonderful website neat and full of useful information. I have been reading the posts silently so far, but as my exam date is approaching, I decided to ask for some customized help.

Background:

Have been studying for GMAT for roughly 2 months. I have too much of breaks between by studies because of extreme work pressure and also social commitments. Here are the materials I have been/am using

1. GMAT OG11
2. PR verbal workout
3. Arco GMAT 2005
4. Baron's GMAT
5. Just ordered Manhattan GMAT SC today
6. Kaplan tests

Statistically, I have been scoring satisfactory in Quants, scores ranging from 40 - 48. Have some trouble with probability, but hopefully will manage. DS has been a problem always, but working on it.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to score above 640 because my verbal scores. I am very disappointed to see my score in Verbal around 30 almost always. RC has been a panic, and so is CR. When I practice un-timed, I do fairly well in these. Probably loosing my nerve and focus when attacked with too many questions.

Now that I have less than 3 weeks left, I need to know what is the most common and effective strategy for verbal? I would like to reach 680-700 in the actual GMAT.

Any suggestion would be highly appreciated and helpful.

Thanks guys!

Sam
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by beatthegmat » Fri Mar 02, 2007 10:06 am
Hi sampolo:

It sounds like the best thing you can do to improve your verbal score is work on your pacing. You mentioned that when you go through various verbal questions in an untimed environment, you perform fairly well. This isn't necessarily the case when you're timed. This almost sounds like a psychological block rather than a lack of skill/knowledge.

If I were you, I would emphasize going through lots of verbal question sets and using a stop watch to make sure you are keeping pace. Time management is a real issue when taking the GMAT, and the only way I know of being effective at time management is doing a lot of timed practice.

Also--do you find yourself re-reading passages and CR prompts? This is a very common way to lose time on verbal. Try to force yourself to read text JUST ONCE, and see what happens to your performance. This is actually very difficult to do, but manageable with sufficient practice.

Best of luck!
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by sampolo » Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:53 pm
Thanks Eric for your feedback.

I have been using a stopwatch for the tests. It gets most difficult because of the unpredictable nature of my performance. Sometime I do very well in SC, and not so well in others, and sometime the opposite. I have not been able to make the best performance in all of them in one test yet.

And you are right about the RC. I do tend to lose focus if the passage is some social science or political science type or history. I tend to re-read the passage and probably at the end of the passage, can not make the complete sense of it.

But being so unpredictable in the RC, SC and CR, it is difficult for me to decide which one I should focus more and how. I read very good comments about the SC of Manhattan GMAT, so ordered it yesterday.

What do you guys think about the typical time one should spend in RC of 30-35 lines? I tend to take roughly ~10 minutes. I think I am taking too long for them.

Thanks for your advice.
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by beatthegmat » Fri Mar 02, 2007 1:12 pm
Is it taking you 10 minutes to read a passage of this length? Or 10 min to read the passage and answer the associated questions? I'm not really clear on that...

Unfortunately, I can't really suggest an ideal pacing for RC because it dramatically varies from person to person.

Check out the RC resources available on the GMAT Resource Wiki: https://www.beatthegmat.com/wiki/

Best of luck!
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by Stacey Koprince » Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:15 pm
Re: timing

Each range listed below depends upon the length and complexity of that particular problem / passage.

For SC, you generally want to spend about 1 to 1.5 minutes.

For CR, right around 2 minutes.

For RC, you should spend about 2-3 minutes upfront reading the passage and roughly 1.5 to 2 min for each question.

DO jot down some notes on RC - it will help keep you focused on your first read-through and you'll make sure that you get the most important points. Concentrate on high-level stuff (what's the overall point? what's the structure of the passage?) rather than nit-picky detail. You won't remember all the detail anyway - you can come back to it if you get a question on it.

Also, jot down some notes for CR. Depending on how good your short-term memory is, you may be able to do this only for the hardest ones, or you may want to do it for all of them. But, again, the note-taking is to help you focus and think critically about the argument on your first read-through. What's so important that it's worth writing down? Then it must be important to notice in general.

Also, do go back and examine questions after you finish them. Figure out not just why the right answer is right but why the four wrong answers are wrong. On verbal, it's often the case that you find the right answer only by eliminating the four wrong answers. The better you get at spotting wrong answers, the better you'll be at finding the right answers.

Oh - and when you get that SC book - memorize it. :)
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