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Strategy Review

by kolkataknightrider » Thu Mar 12, 2015 2:50 am
Hello everyone!

So I have been hanging around in this forum for a quite a while now.

I need some help with regards to my game-plan for my ( first and hopefully, last ) GMAT ( May 4th 2015 ) for the next 1.5 months.

So here it goes:

1. Finish OG ( Regular, Quant and Verbal)
2. Review errors and do them under timed conditions.
3.Write MGMAT CATs and GMAT prep every week, with 2/week for the last two weeks.
4. Complete Manhattan question banks and review the same.
5. Complete Manhattan SC guide twice.
6. 2 RC passages and 5 sentence corrections EVERYDAY.
7.GMAT Prep Question pack ( the one which is free )
8.Powerscore CR Bible

I will be spending the last 10 days of prep just reviewing my error log and giving the mock tests.

My concern is - is there too much of exposure to just the official material - and secondly, I was thinking allocating a week for the Manhattan Challenge Problem Archive. Is it worth doing so? If not, what what else can I substitute it with?

Thanks in advance!
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by MartyMurray » Thu Mar 12, 2015 6:06 am
That looks pretty good.

One thing I would do differently though is do some focused work on areas of quant in which you are weaker. In other words, you could do an entire question bank and afterward still not be very good at, for instance, handling overlapping sets or working with three dimensional geometric shapes.

With that in mind, the MGMAT Challenge Questions can be a little out of scope. So while doing some to train yourself to find solutions could be useful, doing them for a week may not make sense. So you might be better off doing fewer of those and using the time you free up to hit the quant side of the BellCurves question bank by setting up a practice account. You can break the questions into dozens of quant categories and really work on the areas in which you have room for improvement. Another, more general, source of cool quant questions is the Veritas question bank. Doing a bunch of those could also be more productive than wracking your brain for a week working on MGMAT challenge questions.

You could also use a similar approach for verbal. I mean find weaker areas and really focus on them. For instance, you could be getting tripped up by parallelism. So you would learn all about it, spend a few hours just becoming expert in parallelism so you would get questions of that type right from then on.

Too often people just follow guides and do what a book says to do, and while that can be a good start, to really take your score up you probably should take things to another level by making your own assessment of what you could be better at and doing some focused work in those areas.

As far as using too much Official material goes, with the PowerScore and MGMAT materials you will have balanced out the mix pretty well. Official CATs are the best, meanwhile, providing the most accurate picture of what the test is like and what one needs to work on to rock it.
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by kolkataknightrider » Thu Mar 12, 2015 6:22 am
Thank you Marty.

I wasn't aware of the Veritas question bank. I think I will use that instead of the Challenge Problem Archive.

I was wondering if I should purchase the GMAT Prep Question Pack? Or are the 3 books, the free Question pack and the 4 CATs enough to absorb the official material?

I was also looking at a 750+ score to offset an average GPA.

Is my current strategy driving me towards the 700-750 range or is it good enough to pull off a 750+ ?

Thanks in advance!
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by kolkataknightrider » Thu Mar 12, 2015 6:22 am
Thank you Marty.

I wasn't aware of the Veritas question bank. I think I will use that instead of the Challenge Problem Archive.

I was wondering if I should purchase the GMAT Prep Question Pack? Or are the 3 books, the free Question pack and the 4 CATs enough to absorb the official material?

I was also looking at a 750+ score to offset an average GPA.

Is my current strategy driving me towards the 700-750 range or is it good enough to pull off a 750+ ?

Thanks in advance!
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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Thu Mar 12, 2015 6:45 am
An important variable here is your starting point. If you haven't taken a practice exam yet, I encourage you to do so and let us know what your quant/verbal splits are. The material you plan on using looks very strong, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of quant strategy guides. That isn't necessarily a problem. If you're starting from a quant 45/46, that might be fine - it means you probably already have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. But if it turns out that your raw quant is a bit further away from your goal score, it might make sense to a bit more foundation-building before you hit all that official material.
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by kolkataknightrider » Thu Mar 12, 2015 7:25 am
Thank you David.

My diagnostic results for Quant were:

PS: Above Average
DS: Average

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!
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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Thu Mar 12, 2015 7:34 am
That OG diagnostic has some decent questions, but as a bellwether for where you stand, it's not all that helpful. I'd suggest taking a computer-adaptive test. You can take one of the free ones from mba.com here: https://www.mba.com/us/the-gmat-exam/pre ... tware.aspx

(And every prep company offers a free diagnostic as well.)
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by [email protected] » Thu Mar 12, 2015 9:58 am
Hi kolkataknightrider,

Have you taken any FULL-LENGTH practice CATs yet? If so, then what were your scores (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores). If not, then you should take one soon (perhaps this weekend). Until we have a sense of your current skill levels, it will be difficult to assess your overall plan.

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by MartyMurray » Thu Mar 12, 2015 11:12 am
kolkataknightrider wrote:Thank you Marty.

I wasn't aware of the Veritas question bank. I think I will use that instead of the Challenge Problem Archive.

I was wondering if I should purchase the GMAT Prep Question Pack? Or are the 3 books, the free Question pack and the 4 CATs enough to absorb the official material?

I was also looking at a 750+ score to offset an average GPA.

Is my current strategy driving me towards the 700-750 range or is it good enough to pull off a 750+ ?
I tend to agree with what others are saying here, that to get clearer picture you should take an official practice CAT. Then you and the rest of us will be in a better position to answer some of your questions.

So maybe over the next couple days you could review the math some and go over the verbal question types a little to get more familiar with how they work. Then after that initial preparation, take an official GMAT Prep CAT and see how you do.

I can answer one question at least. If you want to score 750+ probably you are going to have to do something along the lines of what I said before, going beyond just following what any guide says to assessing your skill set and working on specific areas. Right now maybe you don't get this as clearly as you will once you have gotten into preparing. The more familiar you become with the test, the more you will realize the degree to which there are certain concepts, topics and question types that show up regularly and the more you may see that you are more adept at handling some of them than you are others. So in case you do end up working on specific topics, don't be too quick to forget that BellCurves quant question bank.
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by VivianKerr » Thu Mar 12, 2015 2:02 pm
Hey Kolkata,

There's two things I notice about your plan:

1) Prevalence of excellent material (your book choices ROCK, and IMO, there is NO such thing as too much official material!)

2) Emphasis on Quantity over Quality. This is where I think you may need to be careful. There is a HUGE misconception that your GMAT score automatically improves with the AMOUNT of material you cover and the NUMBER of question you answer/practice. This is simply not true. Your score improves to the extent that you (1) UNDERSTAND why you get problems wrong, (2) make ADJUSTMENTS to get those problems right, and (3) make CONNECTIONS between problems, recognizing the underlying similarities between questions.

The GMAT tests a finite number of concepts, and tests them OVER and OVER and OVER again.

"Review" is the most important thing about your Study Plan. HOW will you review? HOW can you maximize the benefits from doing so many problems? HOW can you track the similarities between problems. This is why we GMAT tutors are so gosh darn obsessed with Error Logs. However you log it, you've got to review, review, review. :-)

Always consider an incorrect question from three angles:

1) Content -- did I get this wrong because I did not know a grammar rule, a Quant formula, the flow of a cause/effect argument, etc.?

2) Pacing -- did I have time to fully attempt this problem (could I use a full 2 min)? Did I panic and rush through it in 1 minute? did I simply read the question-stem and then guess? did I not even read the question-stem and guessed so that I could have more time for other questions? If I rushed, WHERE did I start to abandon strategy and cut corners? what question types are quick/accurate, slow/accurate, quick/incorrect, and slow/incorrect for me, personally?

3) Strategy -- if I had unlimited time, would I have gotten this problem correct? did I approach this problem in my pre-determined way? is my current strategy really working for me? what steps did I stick to? what steps did I skip? was there an opportunity here to use an alternate strategy? did I see that or not?

I recommend for every incorrect question you log:

-Question Number
-Question Type (DS, PS, RC, CR, or SC)
-Primary Concept Tested
-Secondary Concept Tested (if any)
-Why Incorrect (content issue, pacing issue, strategy issue)
-Action Steps (what you could do to remedy the issue in future)
-Takeaways (what is the succinct 1-sentence "lesson" for YOU in doing this problem)

You may also want an extra column where you note other problems similar to the individual question you're analyzing.

Hope this gives you some ideas for how to improve quickly and efficiently. Emphasize quality over quantity. Always.

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by kolkataknightrider » Fri Mar 13, 2015 6:36 pm
Thanks Vivan!

Totally agree with your inputs.

I did take a GMATPrep test.

I managed a Q47.

I just randomly checked the answers for the other sections, since I wanted to know where I stand with regards to Quant.

Any inputs post my score? Or my plan is still good enough.

Btw, I screwed up primarily on DS.

Thanks!
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by kolkataknightrider » Fri Mar 13, 2015 7:15 pm
*Vivian
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by VivianKerr » Fri Mar 13, 2015 8:36 pm
Hey there,

As I mentioned you need to dive deep on the review. Q47 is great, but when you say you primarily got DS wrong, that's only the teeny tiny tip of the Review-iceberg. For EACH GMATPrep incorrect Quant log:

-Question Number
-Question Type (DS, PS, RC, CR, or SC)
-Primary Concept Tested
-Secondary Concept Tested (if any)
-Why Incorrect (content issue, pacing issue, strategy issue)
-Action Steps (what you could do to remedy the issue in future)
-Takeaways (what is the succinct 1-sentence "lesson" for YOU in doing this problem)

From there you should know how many of EACH concept you're missing and WHY. By "concept" I mean the ones from this attached document.

I'd be happy to walk you through my Review system and go through your incorrect questions if you need additional help. Feel free to email me at gmatrockstar[at]gmail.com.

Best,
Vivian
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by MartyMurray » Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:46 am
DS is funny and takes specific skills and knowing about tricks they use, such as C traps. So it figures that most of the ones you didn't get right were DS questions.

By the time you go through all the DS questions in the Official Guide you will be much better at DS. Then you could do more DS questions as necessary. From the sound of it, you are not to far from Q51, and maybe once you have gone through the Official Guide math section you will be almost, or completely, there.

As Vivian says, make sure to track what you don't get right so that you can focus on learning about what it takes to get those questions right too. Also, myself, I tend to realize that I am not comfortable when questions of certain types show up. When you know what your are more challenged by, learn all the angles related to each type and do questions until you are comfortable with each type.

Approximately one in thirty-three people scores Q51, by the way. So doing that is not even close to being unachievable.

As far as verbal goes, it's not that difficult. Most of what it takes to get verbal questions right is clear thinking and attention to detail, and without those things you won't get verbal questions right no matter what strategies you use. In other words, don't get so caught up in verbal strategies that you don't see the forest for the trees.

The CR Bible Chapter 2 has in it some key concepts you need for getting CR right. That can be your foundation. Then you could learn some more, but getting CR right is in a way mostly about seeing logic clearly and not getting smoked by trick answers.

RC also takes not getting smoked by trick answers that seem right. The details will get you.

SC might take some learning rules and stuff. At the same time, much of getting SC right is about hacking your way to right answers. I recently took the GMAT again and found the SC questions to be rather hackable, and I think that's how they, GMAC people, like it. That's the point right? Though SC could be tough if you were clueless about grammar and idioms, it's not really about knowing every little rule. SC and communicating effectively are mostly about knowing how to structure language in ways that make sense. So, sure, learn rules and idioms, but also get good at hacking the questions.

So there are some things to consider as you prepare.
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Sat Mar 14, 2015 10:57 am
kolkataknightrider wrote: Btw, I screwed up primarily on DS.
EVERYONE struggles with Data Sufficiency (DS) questions at first. Keep in mind that this question type is unique to the GMAT, so it's totally foreign territory.

It just takes time for the concepts and strategies to become secondary, at which point you may come to find that DS questions are actually easier than Problem Solving questions.

If you're interested, we have a free set of videos that cover everything you need to know to tackle DS questions: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gmat-data-sufficiency

Cheers,
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