Ok folks, so I beat the GMAT
770 50M 46V
My essays not sure yet, but I am pretty sure I did not bust a flat 6 as one of them quite frankly reeked of verbal diarrhea.
First things first, since a lot of you guys are numbers guys, I got the following scores on these various practice tests and in this order
800 Score: 720
Kaplan CD Test 1: 740
Kaplan CD Test 2: 640
GMATPREP 1: 720
Kaplan CD Test 3: 680
Kaplan CD Test 4: 680
GMATPREP 2: 730
Kaplan Online:730
Princeton Review:740
GMATPREP1a: 750
Manhattan Online 1: 690
GMATPREP2a: 720
I was always busting 47-51 on my Math, so I knew I needed to brush up on verbal. SO, I attacked it like I would if I was playing a sport. While I am not a good athlete, I've gotten to be a decent football and basketball player by understanding my strengths, but more importantly ADMITTING my weaknesses and shoring them up.
Before, I took any CAT's I went to Borders and crammed down as many book tests as I could. I realized some sucked and others were solid, but the point was to get an idea of what type of questions I would be facing and assess my weak points. I realized that I would need to focus primarily on all aspects of my verbal performance.
At first, I assumed that I would handle RC and CR with ease and that SC would be my only downfall. So I attacked the SC from many different angles. I first used Kaplan, which gave me a broad sense of what to look for i.e. modifiers, pronoun, idiom etc. Next, I moved to the Big Yellow Book and did all of those questions. When I did this, I did 8 questions at a time or so and checked my answers to really assess at what points my SC was off. Some were definitely careless errors like not seeing a parallelism but I noticed my idioms were kind of off. Thus I took a valuable couple of hours instead of focusing on questions just to memorize a bunch of idioms, by going to platinum GMAT's idiom list taken directly from GMAT maker's books.
After I took a few more practices, I stubbornly insisted my subpar RC and CR were due to careless errors. When I realized these scores weren't changing, I quickly attacked it by answering all of the questions in the Big Book. The key for these questions as stupid as it sounds is to READ THE QUESTION. With SC I could get into a little rhythm and try to find out what type of error existed and pump through em systematically.
If I saw a pronoun I immediately attacked the verb, if I saw multiple commas I would look for parallelism or perhaps a bad modifier. In the same way, you would post up a smaller player or try to dribble past slower ones, you need to find the "weakness" exposed in SC questions.
I took a step back from using this approach in CR and RC. One major disadvantage is the fact that you can't underline on a CAT, but I would suggest a similar approach mentally to attacking RC and CR questions. I think the way the GMAT is structured to go from one question type to another could throw somebody off in this way. But often questions are nuanced and ask stuff like, Scholar A might agree with which of the following. The key is to hone in on everything mentioned by or about Scholar A. The skill I saw most useful was to remember where any point existed about Scholar A, and visually whittle out the rest. Then I would read it at a higher level including some of the surrounding language and the answer to these questions would come much easier.
ONE HUGE THING that helped me was I am tutoring right now a bunch of 6th to 8th graders, on the SSAT reading, Algebra, Geometry etc. I think not only knowing the answer but understanding how to explain it gives you a huge advantage in knowing how to attack problems. I found that because I had students who are just coming to grasp with these basic concepts, I needed to find ways to explain the answers to them from multiple angles. This sort of approach helped me when a weird data sufficiency question came up and I knew I had multiple tools to use.
The difficult questions I was giving a kid like find the area of this hybrid shape, a triangle on a semi-circle, helped me when weird style questions came up. Furthermore, having the basic foundation down pat is a MUST.
Know the what a difference of squares equals like that. Know all geometric properties of triangles, circles etc. Be able to rattle of 3,4,5; 5,12,13 in your sleep. Time can get crunched and you want your mental resources allocated to how can i best find the answer and not what is the formula for an angle inscribed in a circle.
Same with reading comp, if a student got the wrong answer, often he would say, but this one is soooo close! By being able to explain the answer thoroughly I was able to fully grasp the importance of key words (BEST, MUST NO, INFER etc.) and what type of answers are necessary. During the test my students voice would be asking why, why, why. If I couldn't answer it, maybe the question I thought was right was just a red herring.
During the few days before I relaxed, reviewed some key idioms and took only a few questions to practice they way i attacked problems. I told myself I would break 750 and that I would focus more. I knew I could do this not because I thought I was smarter, but because I told myself I would focus more intently, read through everything and not let anything stupid pass by. I knew my foundation was solid and come test time I was able to attack the questions more aggressively than I did on practices. During the test the questions seemed way to easy so I thought I was screwed, but in any case I got my score and was very happy but not at too surprised at my performance considering the test mood I was in.
All in all, don't be lazy with your studies. Its easy to take a bunch of practices and passively study your mistakes. ATTACK your weak areas with attention to detail on why you got certain problems wrong. A question is wrong because not only because you thought one answer was
best but that another one, the right one, was worse. Seeing both sides of the coin might allow you to see where you get trapped and where you need to focus looking at more.
GLUCK all fellow GMATERS
-K
770 50M 46V
My essays not sure yet, but I am pretty sure I did not bust a flat 6 as one of them quite frankly reeked of verbal diarrhea.
First things first, since a lot of you guys are numbers guys, I got the following scores on these various practice tests and in this order
800 Score: 720
Kaplan CD Test 1: 740
Kaplan CD Test 2: 640
GMATPREP 1: 720
Kaplan CD Test 3: 680
Kaplan CD Test 4: 680
GMATPREP 2: 730
Kaplan Online:730
Princeton Review:740
GMATPREP1a: 750
Manhattan Online 1: 690
GMATPREP2a: 720
I was always busting 47-51 on my Math, so I knew I needed to brush up on verbal. SO, I attacked it like I would if I was playing a sport. While I am not a good athlete, I've gotten to be a decent football and basketball player by understanding my strengths, but more importantly ADMITTING my weaknesses and shoring them up.
Before, I took any CAT's I went to Borders and crammed down as many book tests as I could. I realized some sucked and others were solid, but the point was to get an idea of what type of questions I would be facing and assess my weak points. I realized that I would need to focus primarily on all aspects of my verbal performance.
At first, I assumed that I would handle RC and CR with ease and that SC would be my only downfall. So I attacked the SC from many different angles. I first used Kaplan, which gave me a broad sense of what to look for i.e. modifiers, pronoun, idiom etc. Next, I moved to the Big Yellow Book and did all of those questions. When I did this, I did 8 questions at a time or so and checked my answers to really assess at what points my SC was off. Some were definitely careless errors like not seeing a parallelism but I noticed my idioms were kind of off. Thus I took a valuable couple of hours instead of focusing on questions just to memorize a bunch of idioms, by going to platinum GMAT's idiom list taken directly from GMAT maker's books.
After I took a few more practices, I stubbornly insisted my subpar RC and CR were due to careless errors. When I realized these scores weren't changing, I quickly attacked it by answering all of the questions in the Big Book. The key for these questions as stupid as it sounds is to READ THE QUESTION. With SC I could get into a little rhythm and try to find out what type of error existed and pump through em systematically.
If I saw a pronoun I immediately attacked the verb, if I saw multiple commas I would look for parallelism or perhaps a bad modifier. In the same way, you would post up a smaller player or try to dribble past slower ones, you need to find the "weakness" exposed in SC questions.
I took a step back from using this approach in CR and RC. One major disadvantage is the fact that you can't underline on a CAT, but I would suggest a similar approach mentally to attacking RC and CR questions. I think the way the GMAT is structured to go from one question type to another could throw somebody off in this way. But often questions are nuanced and ask stuff like, Scholar A might agree with which of the following. The key is to hone in on everything mentioned by or about Scholar A. The skill I saw most useful was to remember where any point existed about Scholar A, and visually whittle out the rest. Then I would read it at a higher level including some of the surrounding language and the answer to these questions would come much easier.
ONE HUGE THING that helped me was I am tutoring right now a bunch of 6th to 8th graders, on the SSAT reading, Algebra, Geometry etc. I think not only knowing the answer but understanding how to explain it gives you a huge advantage in knowing how to attack problems. I found that because I had students who are just coming to grasp with these basic concepts, I needed to find ways to explain the answers to them from multiple angles. This sort of approach helped me when a weird data sufficiency question came up and I knew I had multiple tools to use.
The difficult questions I was giving a kid like find the area of this hybrid shape, a triangle on a semi-circle, helped me when weird style questions came up. Furthermore, having the basic foundation down pat is a MUST.
Know the what a difference of squares equals like that. Know all geometric properties of triangles, circles etc. Be able to rattle of 3,4,5; 5,12,13 in your sleep. Time can get crunched and you want your mental resources allocated to how can i best find the answer and not what is the formula for an angle inscribed in a circle.
Same with reading comp, if a student got the wrong answer, often he would say, but this one is soooo close! By being able to explain the answer thoroughly I was able to fully grasp the importance of key words (BEST, MUST NO, INFER etc.) and what type of answers are necessary. During the test my students voice would be asking why, why, why. If I couldn't answer it, maybe the question I thought was right was just a red herring.
During the few days before I relaxed, reviewed some key idioms and took only a few questions to practice they way i attacked problems. I told myself I would break 750 and that I would focus more. I knew I could do this not because I thought I was smarter, but because I told myself I would focus more intently, read through everything and not let anything stupid pass by. I knew my foundation was solid and come test time I was able to attack the questions more aggressively than I did on practices. During the test the questions seemed way to easy so I thought I was screwed, but in any case I got my score and was very happy but not at too surprised at my performance considering the test mood I was in.
All in all, don't be lazy with your studies. Its easy to take a bunch of practices and passively study your mistakes. ATTACK your weak areas with attention to detail on why you got certain problems wrong. A question is wrong because not only because you thought one answer was
best but that another one, the right one, was worse. Seeing both sides of the coin might allow you to see where you get trapped and where you need to focus looking at more.
GLUCK all fellow GMATERS
-K
