I just Beat The GMAT!

we can'nt wait to hear from you man .. u are the man of moment

Thank you all!

I have spent quite a long time to get this result and I will be more than happy to share my experience and the challenges I faced during my preparation. I might be done with the GMAT but will continue to be a part of this community and try to contribute to this wonderful forum.

I have used almost the same materials as many of you during my preparation.

I am planning to write a detailed debrief during the course of time and start from the very beginning.

This is my first post on this forum after scoring 620:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/620-6-months ... 21189.html

When I walked outside from the Test Center yesterday, I realized that I scored better this time not because I KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECTS, but because I LEARNED THE GAME OF GMAT.

I will come back to write how I studied before and what I did different this time.

It is Friday afternoon in California and I am signing off.

To be continued....

Commendable !!! Many congratulations .. now get into that dream school of yours and smash away

great job!! congrats!!

Well well well some great news to hear during this gloomy recession period.
Ladies and Gentlemen presenting to you the new King of GMAT---Logitech.

A big big big congratulations to you Logi. You knocked down that GMAT beast really hard, especially the verbal (I mean V38 is simply woaaahhhhh . You’ve just got your self a dream combo with Q51, V38). Dude you truly deserve every single point you scored on that GMAT. Your seriously a huge inspiration for every member on this forum bro. If you can do it, I’m sure we can at least try.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/620-6-months ... 21189.html

When I walked outside from the Test Center yesterday, I realized that I scored better this time not because I KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECTS, but because I LEARNED THE GAME OF GMAT.

Emrah you fought the battle well and what counts is that you fought it on your own terms.
Lesson learnt: Sabır acıdır, ama tatlı meyvesi vardır.

Good luck my friend in everything you do...you truly deserve all the happiness in the world. Looking forward to your detailed debrief.

Congratulations on the achievement. It takes a lot of energy and will to keep going for about a year but the reward is great !

I observed that the major part of your effort was in improving your Verbal score during that period - I had a few questions for you with regards to that improvement :

1) How good was the GMATHACKS Verbal Bible that you said you purchased ? Is it worth investing my time and money.

2) I have heard from a lot of people that even though they were confident in their English skills, they felt like they were guessing most of the time on the actual exam because the last two answers to a question almost always seemed right. Is this really the case ?

3) What else did you do in addition to reading the usual suggested books - did you happen to read any LSAT related books for CR and RC ? If so, could you please share which ones are good.

4) Which tests other than the GMATPrep come close to testing the Verbal section when compared to the actual test ?

Thank you in advance for all your help and wish you good luck with your application process...

Sonu

logitech wrote:Thank you all!

I have spent quite a long time to get this result and I will be more than happy to share my experience and the challenges I faced during my preparation. I might be done with the GMAT but will continue to be a part of this community and try to contribute to this wonderful forum.

I have used almost the same materials as many of you during my preparation.

I am planning to write a detailed debrief during the course of time and start from the very beginning.

This is my first post on this forum after scoring 620:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/620-6-months ... 21189.html

When I walked outside from the Test Center yesterday, I realized that I scored better this time not because I KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECTS, but because I LEARNED THE GAME OF GMAT.

I will come back to write how I studied before and what I did different this time.

It is Friday afternoon in California and I am signing off.

To be continued....

CHAMPION !! Congrats !! You deserve it mate !!

Cheers
Piyush

congrats logitech !!! anxiously waiting to hear how you improved your verbal score

Hello,

I am an engineer and my math skills have always been stronger than my verbal skills and my previous attempts proved that I am one of those engineer guys with weak "GMAT VERBAL" skills.

Even tough I knew that I am better at Quant, and much improvement is needed for the Verbal part...I studied more Quant than Verbal. ( Mistake! ) We feel more comfortable with stuff that we know and we can command and avoid to get into "UNCOMFORTABLE" zone.

Only few of us actually studies more RC than SC or CR. Why ? Because it is boring and the results are very unstable. One day you get all of the RC correct and the other day you miss all of them!

I realized that I need to change my studying habits and paradigms in my last attempt for GMAT. I was always scoring between 48-51 on quant and my verbal score was all over the place 22-45. This is when I realized that I do know the BASIC CONCEPTS for almost any math question on GMAT and I have a strategy for each question types. But for Verbal ? I was like many of us, who knows the MGMAT SC Guide book rules and who had studied the Power Score CR bible and checked couple of books for RC. Oh not to mention that I studied all of the OG questions and timed myself. But something was still missing. And quite honestly every time I read Stacey's or Ron's advice of STUDYING OG TRULY , I was thinking that their advice is very politic and general. BUT YES THEY WERE RIGHT...and most of us, including those who think they do, do not know how to analyze a question! You all know what we should do every time we are we are analyzing the questions and the answers. ( For example: In every question there is only one correct answer 1/5 and there are four wrong choices 4/5; in other words, we can learn 4 times more by studying the wrong answers than a single correct answer - not that is GOLDEN )

So I outlined my plan:

1) I would push my quant as much as I could
2) Work on my BASICs for Verbal and LEARN it.

To be continued...(Please hang in with me guys, I do not want to rush my debrief and I am working on my applications for the brutal Round 3)

QUANT

It is not to hard to push your quant score around 48-49, if you are familiar with Math. But the challenge for me was to push it above 49. I have studied:

1) Manhattan GMAT books
2) GMAT Club Tests ( Like MGMAT, GMAT club also has very challenging questions. )
3) BTG math forum questions. ( There are amazing people in this forum. You might think that you know a subject and the approach to a problem but you will find out many different ways of looking at a question on this forum. When IAN, STUART, STACEY, RON , BRENT or many other amazing people solve a question, it is like a lecture. I followed Cramya's , Mals24, DanaJ, STOP@800's and many other people's posts to learn..Thank you all!)

But maybe the most important thing I learned was:

How to Effectively Pick Your Battles

As Stacey mentioned once, GMAT is like a Tennis game, you will loose some points but you still can win the game. GMAT will throw you curved ball during the test and these curved balls are designed to consume your time and demoralize you. I realized that if I do not figure out how to solve a question in 30 seconds, I am wasting my time trying to solve it and this is the worst thing that can happen you in GMAT.

Wrong questions take longer!! So not only you waste your time, but you also get the question wrong! - NOT GOOD!

And I learned not to get attached to any question. Do not let one single question to ruin the rest of the test for you. Last week, when I started the Quant I had a crazy DS question as 7th question ( my lucky number!) I started to think:

1) It is one of the first 10 questions. Should I try to knock it down ?
2) Should I risk my time ? Because there were 30 more questions waiting for me and the clock was ticking.

Well, I usually do not pick C or E when I get a tough DS. I looked the statements one more time and realized A is looking better than B and chose A and MOVED ON!

Well this is easy to write but freaking hard to execute during the test. But believe me guys, this is what GMAT game is all about. PICK YOUR BATTLES.

I started to get tougher and tougher questions, but I stayed within my time limits:

5,66
10,56
15,46'
etc...

I did not want to stay more than 4 minutes behind my timing plan, because this basically means that you will have to guess at least 2 questions at the end!

I had 2o minutes left when I started the 30th question and I knew that I am doing good with my time management.

34th question was a combination was a DS question, which combined permutation, geometry and mean!

There was no way that I could solve that problem within 2 minutes. I looked the clock again and looked at the question to see whether I can solve it or not. I again chose my battle! I spend almost 8 minutes and 2 pages and I solved it! I would not do this if this question was one of the first 20 questions.

I finished the section on time and I guessed 2 questions in order to stay with my plan.

Please give it a try:

Manage your time and move on when when you see a question that you know it will waste your time. Just stay with the plan! You will be amazed! [/u]

1) How good was the GMATHACKS Verbal Bible that you said you purchased ? Is it worth investing my time and money.

It is a great book but IMO it is still not as good as the Math Bible.

2) I have heard from a lot of people that even though they were confident in their English skills, they felt like they were guessing most of the time on the actual exam because the last two answers to a question almost always seemed right. Is this really the case ?

In Math, 3.4 is different than 8789 so you have a feeling whether you got the question right or wrong, but in Verbal...especially hard questions throw you two close answers. But ONE of them is WRONG! So I do not agree with the guessing part.

3) What else did you do in addition to reading the usual suggested books - did you happen to read any LSAT related books for CR and RC ? If so, could you please share which ones are good.

I could not help it and solved couple of LSAT tests. Honestly, I liked them! I would recommend studying LSAT materials for those who ALREADY studied OG materials and still want to practice MORE! Otherwise you really do not LSAT stuff.

4) Which tests other than the GMATPrep come close to testing the Verbal section when compared to the actual test ?

NOTHING!!

Nice job Logitech, I was waiting for your post here.
Good luck with application now

VERBAL

I realized that I was trying to run before I can walk! I started reading:

1) https://www.nytimes.com/

2) https://www.sciencedaily.com/

Reading will do miracles! First of all, you will get used to read well constructed sentences. This will help you big time on SC. You will increase your vocabularies and also you will get used to read from a PC screen.

I picked up the "DOING GRAMMAR" book. I highly recommend this book not just for your GMAT studies but also to learn how to write efficiently!

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Grammar-Max ... 0195138406

I think if you have time and if you want to build verbal skills, you have to start reading more and learn the grammar!

Once you are done with a grammar book, move to the bible:

https://www.amazon.com/Sentence-Correcti ... 335&sr=1-1

I would recommend completing this book and move to OG questions. Then you will find out your weak points in SC, simply go back to that chapter and read it again and work with the OG questions at the end of each chapter.

BTG forum is an amazing platform to post a question and get tons of replies to your question. ( I gave a battle to IMO people for quite a long time )

Lunarpower, Stacey, Karen, Stuart are amazing people! Find their posts and read them religiously.

Hats off to iamcste! Find this guy on the forum and hit him with your SC questions and he will enlighten you!

Check out the SC notes at:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/resources.html#gmat_verbal

SC questions are important on the test because they can donor time!

There are 12-14 SC questions in GMAT solving them around 1 minute will save you around 10 minutes, which you can spend on CR and RC questions! And as I discussed earlier. You either know or do not know! Do not stare at a question when you face a tough SC question. If you log your time during your studies, you will realize that the SC questions you got right only take 20-60 seconds to solve!

See the attached file and find out how a SC guru approaches the questions:

Hats of to Bangus!

you are awesome logitech. all the best wishes! thanks for the verbal info!

CRITICAL REASONING

I think that people with good analytical skills can do really well in this section. This is no secret anymore: Read the Power Score CR Bible!

LSAT stuff is an additional resource if you exhaust the OG materials. But I believe in QUALITY over QUANTITY. Having said that, you actually need ONLY OG materials. Try to strip down a question. Learn how a wrong answer is designed. Do not time yourself in the beginning of your prep. LEARN to find the answer. This applies to RC as well. Try to find the answer without time pressure. I coach soccer and this reminds me fundamental development. Just as you get comfortable with playing with the ball and learning the skills in soccer, try to learn how to find the answer. Once you master it, play the game. 10 Questions in 20 minutes.

Spend another 60 minutes to analyze all your answer. This might sound crazy for many of you to spend 80 minutes on 10 questions but this is what worked for me. I improved my CR hit rate from low 70's to 95+.

Then push yourself to 10 questions & 15 minutes!

During my prep tests, I realized that I really know the CR topics and skills but when you run out of time, you need to nail CR questions in less than 90 seconds.

How about solving 10 questions in 10 minutes ? This will teach you how to process a CR question in hurry and how to eliminate wrong answers quickly. It will also improve your guessing techniques.

And use a OG tracker and log your answers and time. When you do a review, you will see your weak areas and where you spend most of your time.

Attached is the brief summary of Power Score CR Bible.