Veritas Prep On Demand Course Debrief 3 – Praveen

by , Jan 3, 2011

The following is a guest post by Praveen, better known as kvcpk on our forums. This is the final debrief of the 3 debriefs that Praveen will write for the Beat The GMAT community about his experiences with Veritas Preps On Demand GMAT Course. Without further ado, heres Praveen.

This is final part of debriefs relating to my experience with Veritas Prep on Demand course and Private Tutoring. Excited to write this one as the experience in itself was quite wonderful. I noticed a phenomenal improvement in my scores after this session. Let me kick-off without much delay.

Mentor Guidance

After noticing a distinct improvement in my verbal score, I wanted to reach that 50-51 mark in quant so that I could look at a big score. I requested Jeff (my Veritas Prep tutor) for a session to analyse my weaknesses in Quant. After about an hour discussion with him, I could clearly understand what my strengths and weaknesses were in Quant. He took the results of my previous mock test performances and analysed them thoroughly. I am from a Math background, so I hesitated to leave alone any problem on the test. After this session I understood that there will be certain problems on the GMAT which I should guess on in order to gain control over others. Also, he advised me to go through the Advanced word problems material of Veritas Prep. I went through the Advanced word Problems & Quant review, Geometry and Sentence Correction books before giving my next tests.

Geometry

This is the best practice book for geometry problems I have seen so far. Couple of reasons behind this: i) There are only a limited number of topics tested on the GMAT. This book limits its scope to exactly those concepts that are tested. ii) It gives out ways to breakdown even the most lengthy & complex geometry problem into a series of small, straight forward tasks.

This book addresses only the relevant topics under each sub category. For example, in quadrilaterals it details about the types, perimeters, areas and the diagonal properties of quadrilaterals. That makes it all in all a well composed unit. The book has a total of 79 geometry problems with detailed solutions. This includes about 19 Challenge problems. One thing I could ask for is some more practice problems on circle-angle properties.

Advanced Word Problems & Quant Review

This book is merely a tool for practicing all the quantitative concepts along with some challenging word problems. It details out the way to break down tricky problems into their underlying concepts. The add-on advantage in this book is that it has the best, tried and true last minute tips for doing well on test day. The book is a mix of both DS and PS problems. This book has a set of 134 problems for practice with detailed solutions. The problems are spread over all relevant quantitative concepts. Someone looking for a quality practice with detailed solutions should definitely approach this book. One thing I should mention is that the problems are GMAT-like. I think this is very important because there is no point spending time on problems that are not GMAT-like. Couldnt find any cons with this book.

After going through these books, I wanted to test my approach on some of the old paper based GMAT tests. I did a couple of them. To my surprise, I got only 3 problems wrong both the times in the quant section. It varied between 5-10 in my previous test performances. Certainly the level of practice done has eased my approach towards the problems. Quant section looked bright all of a sudden and it was time to jump back into Verbal. I had heard about and looked at a lot of material for sentence correction before going through the Veritas prep books. I cant take credit out of the other resources I went through, but I should also admit that the Veritas Prep books present an equally good resource for sentence correction.

Sentence Correction 1

This book introduces us to a list of common types of errors encountered in Sentence Correction problems. This book akes sentence correction easy to crack with the help of the VAMPIRES technique. There are ample examples provided under each sub category of errors. Separate sections are maintained for assorted and categorized problems. The key advantage is the detailed solutions they provide at the end. This book doesnt go much deeper into the technicalities of language, but gives enough edge to crack the SC section. 93 practice problems under various categories add a huge amount to the GMAT-like Practice problems.

Sentence Correction 2

This is an extension to the SC-1 book, both in terms of content and brilliance. The theme of the book is quite simple. More and more practice using VAMPIRES. It discusses some of the finer points of the error categories. Common idiomatic errors are addressed with more precision. On the whole, the book touches the advanced concepts tested on the GMAT. The detailed solutions provided for the 65 practice problems will keep us on track to fight the toughest of the tough SC problems.

In short, Veritas Prep SC-1 and SC-2 books are good resources for practice. They present crisp information well directed towards the GMAT needs.

My SC errors have reduced considerably after going through the detailed explanations in both these books. I took a mock test and this time I was able to put my errors below 8 in Verbal. Thats a dream come true for me! I thank the Veritas Prep team and BTG for their support all through this process. The journey with Veritas Prep has been fruitful and quite exciting. My sincere thanks to Jeff for his guidance & support.

I wish fellow BTG members all the best.

Cheers,

Praveen

Read Praveen's other Debriefs here:

• Debrief 1
• Debrief 2
• Debrief 3