GMAT Strategy

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:I just took a weekend Veritas verbal class. Their reading comp strategy is the best in the business. I would suggest trying to find their Reading Comp guide if you can. I will post a summary of what I learned later on in the week though, if you want to look out for that.

I can't seem to find any of their guides as a breakout. They sell the set for like 450 on their site. Any ideas?

I will post a summary. It is literally the best reading comp strategy I have ever encountered. I will post a summary later in the week. I will post copy and paste it in this thread for you after I post it in my blog thread.

Another Diagnostic test down and another improvement....

Quant: 35
Verbal: 34
Overall: 580

I'm actually surprised that she did so much better on the verbal. And a bit surprised that she stayed the same on math. I had her cover the word translations book this past week but I haven't had the chance to review her misses on the test yet.

So this week we're focusing on reading comprehension and whatever section of the math she is not doing well on. Here average misses for both reading comprehension and sentence correction were over 700 so I'm not super worried about that holding her score down. Obviously she'll continue to do problems and review but there are other areas that could give her better score improvements.

Still going strong. Shes doing well and continues to improve. My guess is that she will hit right about 600 on test day.

She is struggling with one strategy: the "pick your number" strat.

Obviously in VIC problems its evident you can pick numbers for the variable in the answer choice. But in lots of problems, particularly ratio/percent problems you can select a value that makes the computation easy. I haven't been able to formulate a hard and fast rule for this.

Something like: you can pick a number for the "total" if it doesn't explicitly state the total in the problem.

Any suggestions?

ldoolitt wrote:Still going strong. Shes doing well and continues to improve. My guess is that she will hit right about 600 on test day.

She is struggling with one strategy: the "pick your number" strat.

Obviously in VIC problems its evident you can pick numbers for the variable in the answer choice. But in lots of problems, particularly ratio/percent problems you can select a value that makes the computation easy. I haven't been able to formulate a hard and fast rule for this.

Something like: you can pick a number for the "total" if it doesn't explicitly state the total in the problem.

Any suggestions?

I think it may be important to teach the algebra. If she doesn't understand the fundamental math, picking numbers won't help her that much.

osirus0830 wrote:
I think it may be important to teach the algebra. If she doesn't understand the fundamental math, picking numbers won't help her that much.

Well its not that she doesn't get the algebra. She does. It just takes her an EXCEEDINGLY long amount of time to solve a problem with variables in it for some reason.

An example, she had a problem and it took her 3:50 to get the incorrect answer. I then added to the problem the statement that "Paul started with 100 dollars" and it took her :45 to get it correct. So theres an imbalance there.

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:
I think it may be important to teach the algebra. If she doesn't understand the fundamental math, picking numbers won't help her that much.

Well its not that she doesn't get the algebra. She does. It just takes her an EXCEEDINGLY long amount of time to solve a problem with variables in it for some reason.

An example, she had a problem and it took her 3:50 to get the incorrect answer. I then added to the problem the statement that "Paul started with 100 dollars" and it took her :45 to get it correct. So theres an imbalance there.

Hmmm...the only solution I would have is to just have her do 20 of those in a row in one sitting. Repetation is the only solution.

osirus0830 wrote:
Hmmm...the only solution I would have is to just have her do 20 of those in a row in one sitting. Repetation is the only solution.

Probably what I will have to do. At the same time I don't want to accidentally make her think that you can always plug in numbers for certain variables...

Hey did you ever get a chance to post that reading comprehension strategy from Veritas?

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:
Hmmm...the only solution I would have is to just have her do 20 of those in a row in one sitting. Repetation is the only solution.

Probably what I will have to do. At the same time I don't want to accidentally make her think that you can always plug in numbers for certain variables...

Hey did you ever get a chance to post that reading comprehension strategy from Veritas?

yeah, its the last post in my blog. Click the link in my sig and go to the last page.

osirus0830 wrote:

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:
Hmmm...the only solution I would have is to just have her do 20 of those in a row in one sitting. Repetation is the only solution.

Probably what I will have to do. At the same time I don't want to accidentally make her think that you can always plug in numbers for certain variables...

Hey did you ever get a chance to post that reading comprehension strategy from Veritas?

yeah, its the last post in my blog. Click the link in my sig and go to the last page.

You know, that is funny...

So I didnt have a strategy for this section and I'm not particularly good at it, nor do I have a set routine. So Kim does a bunch of practice questions and I ask her how she does them and basically says "I read until I can understand the primary focus and the authors tone and then I stop and go onto the questions. If I get a specific data question I'm going to have to go back and read anyway." Which is basically what that strategy is. And shes doing really well. On her last test she was 100% below 600 and 93% on above 600. So I can validate that it works.

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:

ldoolitt wrote:

osirus0830 wrote:
Hmmm...the only solution I would have is to just have her do 20 of those in a row in one sitting. Repetation is the only solution.

Probably what I will have to do. At the same time I don't want to accidentally make her think that you can always plug in numbers for certain variables...

Hey did you ever get a chance to post that reading comprehension strategy from Veritas?

yeah, its the last post in my blog. Click the link in my sig and go to the last page.

You know, that is funny...

So I didnt have a strategy for this section and I'm not particularly good at it, nor do I have a set routine. So Kim does a bunch of practice questions and I ask her how she does them and basically says "I read until I can understand the primary focus and the authors tone and then I stop and go onto the questions. If I get a specific data question I'm going to have to go back and read anyway." Which is basically what that strategy is. And shes doing really well. On her last test she was 100% below 600 and 93% on above 600. So I can validate that it works.

Yeah, I just figured that out...lol. Its good she's doing well with those. I think the other two verbal areas are more tangible and people can work at to see improvement.

I'm curious to see how she'll do.. I'm in her same shoes.....