Hi there,
I was more of a passive reader than a contributor in beat the gmat forums. I promise, I will change that habit and will help others as others have helped me. This is my first post and will do a debrief of my gmat experience.
Phew!! lets get started.
I am a non-native English speaker from an engineering background. I love math and problem solving, they are my forte. But, verbal, especially sentence correction was a nightmare for me. As from a rural school, my English grammar was not that great. When I ended up in an engineering college, the curriculum was more oriented towards math, projects etc rather than towards language. Hence I did not find a reason to master the grammar at any point. I had thought I was sufficiently good at it until I gave GMAT prep 1.
I started my gmat preparation 2 months ago. I was good in quant (At least I thought so) and did not worry too much about it. I received 700, wow, at first I thought I have scored really well, but a closer review revealed that I had scored high because of my quant and I had done numerous mistakes in verbal. All in all, I bombed in SC. Later I started looking for a book that will help me in improving my SC knowledge. After going through several forums, I finally zeroed in on MGMAT SC guide. I found a treasure; all the concepts were very well presented. It provided me with a framework to analyze SC problems. Started applying the same and soon I realized that I was believing more in my reasoning than on, ah, it sounds right phenomena.
Coming to other books I referred, for critical reasoning, I went through powerscore gmat cr bible. It helped me both in cr and in rc. Apart from it, I went through verbal section of Kaplan 800. I did find some of the really tough problems, but if you have mastered the above two books then you will not find the problems that difficult. As usual I went through OG 12 and Verbal review.
One major source of help for me were the CATs from MGMAT. As I had purchased the Sentence correction book, I got access to all 6 CATs. I took a test weekly once, and carefully examined the results. Usually for every other test I found that I was doing wrong in some new topic or a new type of the question. I worked on them whole week and gave a test again. My scores started from 680 and reached 760 in the end. As there was a week left for my gmat, I gave gmat prep 2 and scored 760. Sigh of relief!! I was expecting the same score on my test day.
I forgot to mention that a day before the test, I came here to BTG forums and read an article titled 13 sentences to glory for AWA. It gave me an idea of how to go about them.
On the test day, I reached the centre an hour early and started my exam right away. AWA went ok ( I haven't received my scores yet). It was very important for me to utilize every break as prolonged observation of computer triggers migraine in me. A very unfortunate thing that happened was I could not complete my quant section. I started doing problems very fast initially, thinking that this might cause some errors I slowed down. But, when I looked at the timer again, I had 6 questions and 10 min left. I managed to bring it down to 4 min and 2 questions, but I got a difficult DS question. Spent some time on it and was left with only 1 min and 1 question. I completed the problem and marked the answer, by the time I confirmed it, i got a pop-up saying time was over �.
I was left dejected after this, quant was my area. I know how gmat penalizes for not completing a section. For a moment I felt I lost it. I took the break and came out, and it took me a while to settle down. But, I soon gathered myself and prepared mentally to face verbal section. I forgot completely about quant and started attacking verbal questions. Thankfully, I was able to finish the section with 10 min to spare. Later, the much awaited report your score window appeared. I was expecting somewhere between 680 and 710 and clicked "next" closing my eyes, and when I opened it voila! There it was 740.
Although I was aiming at 760, I was satisfied with 740 after all the dramatic incidents. Guys, one thing I want to come out of this debriefing that is never allow spill over effect neither from one section to another nor from one question to another. Hope this helps. Please post your questions, I will be more than happy to answer.
I was more of a passive reader than a contributor in beat the gmat forums. I promise, I will change that habit and will help others as others have helped me. This is my first post and will do a debrief of my gmat experience.
Phew!! lets get started.
I am a non-native English speaker from an engineering background. I love math and problem solving, they are my forte. But, verbal, especially sentence correction was a nightmare for me. As from a rural school, my English grammar was not that great. When I ended up in an engineering college, the curriculum was more oriented towards math, projects etc rather than towards language. Hence I did not find a reason to master the grammar at any point. I had thought I was sufficiently good at it until I gave GMAT prep 1.
I started my gmat preparation 2 months ago. I was good in quant (At least I thought so) and did not worry too much about it. I received 700, wow, at first I thought I have scored really well, but a closer review revealed that I had scored high because of my quant and I had done numerous mistakes in verbal. All in all, I bombed in SC. Later I started looking for a book that will help me in improving my SC knowledge. After going through several forums, I finally zeroed in on MGMAT SC guide. I found a treasure; all the concepts were very well presented. It provided me with a framework to analyze SC problems. Started applying the same and soon I realized that I was believing more in my reasoning than on, ah, it sounds right phenomena.
Coming to other books I referred, for critical reasoning, I went through powerscore gmat cr bible. It helped me both in cr and in rc. Apart from it, I went through verbal section of Kaplan 800. I did find some of the really tough problems, but if you have mastered the above two books then you will not find the problems that difficult. As usual I went through OG 12 and Verbal review.
One major source of help for me were the CATs from MGMAT. As I had purchased the Sentence correction book, I got access to all 6 CATs. I took a test weekly once, and carefully examined the results. Usually for every other test I found that I was doing wrong in some new topic or a new type of the question. I worked on them whole week and gave a test again. My scores started from 680 and reached 760 in the end. As there was a week left for my gmat, I gave gmat prep 2 and scored 760. Sigh of relief!! I was expecting the same score on my test day.
I forgot to mention that a day before the test, I came here to BTG forums and read an article titled 13 sentences to glory for AWA. It gave me an idea of how to go about them.
On the test day, I reached the centre an hour early and started my exam right away. AWA went ok ( I haven't received my scores yet). It was very important for me to utilize every break as prolonged observation of computer triggers migraine in me. A very unfortunate thing that happened was I could not complete my quant section. I started doing problems very fast initially, thinking that this might cause some errors I slowed down. But, when I looked at the timer again, I had 6 questions and 10 min left. I managed to bring it down to 4 min and 2 questions, but I got a difficult DS question. Spent some time on it and was left with only 1 min and 1 question. I completed the problem and marked the answer, by the time I confirmed it, i got a pop-up saying time was over �.
I was left dejected after this, quant was my area. I know how gmat penalizes for not completing a section. For a moment I felt I lost it. I took the break and came out, and it took me a while to settle down. But, I soon gathered myself and prepared mentally to face verbal section. I forgot completely about quant and started attacking verbal questions. Thankfully, I was able to finish the section with 10 min to spare. Later, the much awaited report your score window appeared. I was expecting somewhere between 680 and 710 and clicked "next" closing my eyes, and when I opened it voila! There it was 740.
Although I was aiming at 760, I was satisfied with 740 after all the dramatic incidents. Guys, one thing I want to come out of this debriefing that is never allow spill over effect neither from one section to another nor from one question to another. Hope this helps. Please post your questions, I will be more than happy to answer.
