well, sam, there is at least one piece of good news here, and that's this: you've basically answered most of your own questions. in other words, you've already identified basically all the major problems in your approach. now you have to fix them, at least as far as possible at this point.
sam2012 wrote:i solved close to 3000 problems in quant alone till Jan (but randomly reviewed as i was running short of time), and later on i picked up SC did MGMAT SC, OG, VR, moved to CR, Did MGMAT CR book, CR bible and OG, VR, and during the last week i solved few RC passages and worked on AWA.
i'm genuinely interested in what your thought process was here. specifically, if you were literally solving
thousands of problems, weren't you at some point motivated to take a practice test/assessment of some sort, in order to determine whether those practice problems were
doing anything for you?
it's really an issue of balance. you don't want to go bonkers in the other direction, either -- in other words, you don't want to be one of those guys who takes twenty practice tests in a month -- but it's interesting that you didn't take even a single practice test to evaluate the effectiveness of all that practice.
All the above exercise were never under timed situation, i used to take my own time (this is one more flaw as i never trained my brain to solve them under time pressure)
well ... now you've got yourself in a fine situation here: you've basically trained yourself -- quite thoroughly, most likely, given the quantity of problems you described -- to work under the assumption of unlimited time.
i think this is perfectly clear already, but just in case it isn't: your first challenge is to
un-train the "unlimited time" instinct ... which means that absolutely everything you do from this point onward must involve strict time limitations. at this point, you will probably have to overcompensate a little bit to restore the balance.
also, why didn't you take any practice tests?
I was under an impression that the score algorithm wont be as good as the gmat prep, and i was scared that this score will demotivate my learning, i did not try gmat prep software as most of the question collections i had were all from that software so did not do it either.
well, at least we know what the problem is now.
... and now it's time for the bad news: from what you've written here, it's going to take nothing short of a complete personality transplant for you to succeed at this test.
right now you've got this problem with perfectionism -- that's "problem", as in
crippling problem. unless something is absolutely perfect, wonderful, hearts and flowers all day, you've basically decided that you aren't going to do it.
the problem is that this test, the gmat, is specifically designed to kill test takers with perfectionistic attitudes. there is intense time pressure; you can get lots and lots of problems wrong and still end up in the highest percentiles; etc. the only thing you really
can't do is hesitate, stare at problems that you don't know how to solve, or generally have an attitude of "i have to get everything right".
in order to succeed at this test, you will have to destroy every last ounce of perfectionism that remains in your mind, and replace it with a sense of trade-offs and priority setting.
that's not necessarily going to be easy, but, now, the good news: that's exactly the same kind of thinking you're going to need if you expect to be a business leader someday.
if you read just about any autobiography of a successful businessperson, one theme is pretty much constant: fail! fail! fail! ... and then maybe succeed after a bunch
more failures.
if your attitude is "i'm not going to try anything that isn't perfect, in case it might demotivate me" -- well, guess what: if you have that attitude, then you're
already demotivated!
you have to allow things to go wrong -- you have to allow lots and lots and
lots of things to go wrong. that's the only place from which any genuine success ever comes: the sum total of lessons from an innumerable number of errors, mistakes, and failures.
Different way! I used to solve each problem the way i learnt in the first place most methoods are from fourm experts.
i don't really understand what this sentence means. however, if it means "i've dedicated a significant part of my study to finding
as many ways as possible to solve the problems", then good. if it doesn't mean that, then bad.
for instance, consider problem #227 in the problem solving section of the official guide 12th ed. (i'm not allowed to reproduce official guide problems here.)
until you have worked out ALL of the following methods for this problem --
* traditional algebra solution, solving for x and y in terms of a and b and substituting into the target expression
* plugging in your own specific numbers for a, b, x, y and working out the problem in terms of those specific values, rather than with variables
* taking the given expressions for a and b and substituting them directly into the answer choices, seeing which answer choice reduces to the target expression
-- you can't really say that you are truly "done" with REVIEWING the problem. if you just solve the problem in one way and then declare yourself done with it, that's not a very useful review.
good luck.
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