20 days to go

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20 days to go

by cool_sni » Fri May 22, 2009 11:10 am
I have been preparing for more than a month, but I seem to make same number of mistakes in all the topics.
Quant has improved from 5 mistakes of 20 to 3 of 20 during practice.
I have consistently scored around 47-49 in two GMATPrep tests with 10 to 13 mistakes.

I am having trouble improving verbal.
Here's the breakdown of mistakes on an average.
SC 6 of 15
CR 5 of 13
RC 7 of 13

During practice session I usually do around 41 questions from various sections.
I am spend considerable amount of time reviewing both correct and wrong answers, as most experts suggest.
In case of CR, most of the time I am able to narrow the choice down to 2 but unable to narrow it down further within 2 mins.
During the review I can clearly see what mistake I made, given enough time I would have avoid the mistake.

In case of SC half of the mistakes are in sentences with multiple errors, I am able to spot one error, but I am missing others.

The most trouble I have is in RC, I am trying to do everything that is suggested in this forum. I am reading "The Eco", "Sciam" etc everyday.
I take roughly 3-4 min for reading a average size (45 line) passage (I am taking notes while reading), and try to ans each question in roughly 1 min. Most of the time I feel that I can comprehend the content, general structure etc., but when answering the question I am getting half the questions wrong.
I even tried slowing down while answering but couldn't improve the score.

With 20 more days to go, I would like to get your advice on how can I reduce the number of mistakes.
Source: — GMAT Strategy |

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by 4score20 » Mon May 25, 2009 11:39 am
Attention to detail can help improve the score. Some people focus more on concepts and others on the details. See what types of errors you tend to make and work on a strategy to improve your approach and focus. Good Luck!

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by gmatplayer » Mon May 25, 2009 12:08 pm
Hey cool_sni,
I have had this problem in CR to use POI to 2 ans in about 1.5 min and then confusion. The main mistake I was doing is using only part of one of those answers and applying to statement. Try to ask yourself if everything stated in answer is true. If you find anything seriously wrong then that is mostly not an answer. And if you find both answers with some flaw then probably you are some mistake in other three which you left and then go back to them.

About RC:
My experience is that length of it doesn't affect much on questions. Its the difficulty level of that RC in overall. I remember reading somewhere (OG or Princeton) that RC does not act the way other questions do, it does not change questions with difficulty level as it is very difficult to generate parallel questions with different difficulty levels about same RC. And you already know 3-4 usual question types (Main idea, inference, log. struct, Application etc.) are going to be there. So What I do is read the first or second sentense in detail and then just scan over entire RC with fast reading and finish in 2 min. I have observed in almost every RC that as you answer more questions you take less and less time because you get more and more familier with what is stated. So even if you take more time in answering first question it will be useful later.

All the best!

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by cool_sni » Mon May 25, 2009 11:10 pm
Thank you for your valuable suggestions gmatplayer,4score20.

For CR i have started reading CR bible. One more thing I noticed is that the worng ans almost always had a strong language than the correct one.
My strategy is to look closely to the wording when stuck between to ans choices.

For RC, I will try to implemet your suggestion gmatplayer.