GMAT Strategy

I have seen quite an improvement in my scores. I raised my scores from a 550-650 by going through some serious math training. Also I studied all the wrong possible choices in verbal. THis helped a lot, specifcaly it brought my verbal score up 4 points. Although my quant score is a 38, I have done much analysis and here is a list of what has helped me get much more comfortable in quant.

1. never do math in your head
2. stay extremely suspicous in ds
3. pick numbers the way mayonaisse moderator does.
4. dwell on each mistake that you made
5. take mini math class on each mistake topic
6. understand the questin FULLY
7. MAP OUT AS MUCH OF THE MATH AS POSSIBLE.

I am all ears to all professionals that can chime in on this list!

Awesome post!!

Engin,

It would be great if you could keep adding to your list as you reveal new lessons learned (much like I did in my own post). That way other members can learn from your lessons and it also helps to consolidate the information in one post. Keep trucking along!

I am now switching gears to verbal. My past exams were 650 (38 and verbal 41) and 10 days later 640 (quant 44 and verbal 34)

My scores in quant went up because I had to face the pain. Every day I looked at a puzzling question. This is the only way to move forward. I learned that you cant keep running from your weaknesses hoping that your scores will go up. NO NO NO Specifically, I mastered rate problems and overlapping also. Most of all UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION AT HAND!

As for my verbal, my scores can be much better because of my clear weakness in Sentence COrrection. Furthermore, I am losing points to Critical Reasoning even though its my favorite topic. I am neglecting CR because I am comfortable and must change gears on this. But the real battle in verbal is SC.

My plan:
1.Take notes on Manhattan SC guide (don't skim)
2.do all questions and keep logs of why correct answer and why wrong answer.
3.make mother list of mistakes and fix all mistakes and find underlying moral of each question.
4. Keep previous mistakes in mind and how I can stay away from making same mistakes again!

Succeses:
1. Stop answering because of a hunch, must be able to justify the choice answer because of 1st grammar, 2nd meaning and 3rd style.
(I had similar situation in mastering RC)
2. Eliminate one type of error at a time. (this was huge)


All pros are more than welcome to help fine tune my approach!

As for today I focused on sentence correction and one reading comprehension passage from OG 11. I carefully went over all explanations to make sure I also agreed with the reasoning for the right answers and why I messed up on Inference question. (my nemesis) But Inferencing is getting better. In order to embed this into my brain I even looked up the definition of inference in the dictionary. Hey whatever works!

Sentence Correction breakdown with some quantitative analysis.

pronouns: 19/24
modifiers: 24/35
ver tense and mood: 18/28
subject verb agreement: 10/13 (numbers too small to be representative)
concision and clarity: 19/21

I went through the pronoun and modifier lessons from Manhattan sentence correction and power score SC bible. I did both lessons and then went onto the og questions. I learned a huge lesson! The word THAT and WHICH are like adhesive to the last noun in the phrase right before it. Tis was confusing me earlier but I learned that today and things got much easier. Here is a breakdown of when I saw failure and when I saw success.

Success:
1.eliminate 1 rule or error at a time. (this keeps me from getting jumbled up)
2. understanding WHICH AND THAT with modifiers
3. keep tested concept in mind "what is test writer thinking or hiding"
4.use the differences against each other
5.stay as systematic as possible and never ever answer a question on a hunch.
6. understand that subjunctive mood requires word THAT
7.where can only refer to an actual place like HARVARD OR NYC
8

Weaknesses:
1.must learn signals of types of questions
2.trouble finding the antecedent or efferent of pronoun
3. forgetting to keep idioms in mind (even though I know them all)
4.forgetting to check the meaning of the modifier
5.Forgetting to assign correct referent to correct to deadly four it, its, they and their (need to avoid ambiguity)


SIDENOTE:quantitative weakness to date:
1.comb & perm ( no not in the salon)
2. functions
3.DS keeping information and tested numbers clean
4.divisibility
5.oddball math
6.understanding questions
7. coordinate geometry with algebra

Will go over mistakes tomorrow!

All pro advice is welcome.

I approached a tough og rc passage (og #-111-116) and realized a weakness that needs to be dealt with. First, inferenceing and second of all is my roman numeral questions. I made two mistakes out of 6 and the two wrong answers could have been avoided if approached correctly. First off, I tend to become overwhelmed when I see a roman numeral question. To fix this problem, I am going to employ a common sense strategy, which is to approach each number as a separate question. In essence I am going to treat the question as a 3 SEPERATE parts. This should work. My second wrong answer is beyond me and I am asking for help from the readers. The text was dealing with spiraling galaxies and I got lost. It was dense material and I need to learn how to deal with such detailed information. It was dry topic but I can deal with that, but I got lost. So first off, I will VISUALIZE MORE of the text because whenever I do that, my scores jump higher.

Finished with all OG 11 and og verbal Sentence Corrections questions. Here are the complete numbers:

pronouns: 19/24
modifiers: 24/35
ver tense and mood: 18/28
subject verb agreement: 10/13 (numbers too small to be representative)
concision and clarity: 19/21
Parallelisms: 39/49
Comparison: 32/35
Idioms: 24/25

It is obvious that I will need to work on modifiers, verb tense, and pronouns. The goal is to get to 90% comfortably.

What I learned today: Finally made some flashcards on the rules on SC.
Like can only refer to nouns - this is the golden rule
need to keep keen eye on deadly four - it its they their, keen eye on idioms and meaning.

I am currently waiting for my set appointment with my SC tutor because I have hit a wall with my SC mistakes. I went over my mistakes in modifiers,pronouns and verb tense. I only got a few right. Clearly I am doing something wrong but its temporary.

I was a bit insecure about RC and neglected my studies and focused more on quant. Went through some lessons on CR and tackled the questions.

Here are my numbers!

Find assumption: (og 11 & verbal supplement) 21/28
Draw Conclusion/ Inference: 30/40 -
Strengthen: (OG 11) 20/22
Weaken: (OG 11) 40/47 -

Of all my mistakes, I fixed half right away as a foolish error and was basically just tired!

Still havent fixed my clear weakness on:
1. (COMB AND PERM)
2.Sequence - horribly weak
3.Functions with sequence- embarrasingly weak
4. GOt really good on Rate questions - was my weakness and now my strength.

I need to admit I am scrounging to identify mistakes even though I have many! Please feel free to chime in for direction.

Today I worked with a tutor. We came to the conclusion after him listening to me think out loud that I have a strategy issue. He showed me some ways of approaching and today I scored 24/28 questions from the kaplan practice book. Made a flash card over each mistake.

SC lessons learned:
I learned that I have to identify the differences and weigh them against each other. This was key for me! My motto is :
1. Find the intent of the sentece
2.find the differences
3. weigh the differences against eachother
4. Apply all the learned grammar rules
4.eliminate as needed
5.Play close attention to the meaning

CR Lessons learned:
1.understand the conclusion very well. THe answer hinges on understanding the conclusion.
2.Anticipate where the writer is going? (CR and RC)
3. don't fall for same words in the answer choice and switch of meaning.
4. Take notice of boundary words that because one word can switch the whole meaning and render your great looking answer choice WRONG.


I studied heavily on math also. I focused on kaplan questions and specifically the kaplan lesson course book.

I took a chapter on number properties and geometry. I scored 38/48
but immediately understood what I did wrong. THis brought my hit rate to 45/48.

Still need to work on more weaknesses.

For SC, one of first things I did when reading the sentence was to think about the meaning that the sentence is trying to get across. Don't focus on the specific words, but instead focus on the idea. If you are trying to communicate something to someone you would first think of the idea, formulate what you want to get across, determine how you want to convey that message then find the words and grammatical structure to do so. I found the performing those initial steps before immediately jumping into the "rules" helped me get a clearer understanding of which sentence was the best for clarity and conciseness.

For example, I could say any of the following:

* personally, i'd prefer to go to the movies tonight actually
* actually, i'd prefer to go to the movies
* i'd prefer to go to the movies actually
* i'd personally prefer to go to the movies
* i'd actually prefer to go to the movies

What was the original intent of the sentence and what was the idea being conveyed here? What can you infer from the topic at hand based on word choice (i.e. prefer, actually). You can tell there is a debate going on about what a group of people want to do tonight. You can also tell the individual is providing his preference as to what he/she wants to do.

Now which of these sentences is most clear? Which is the most concise? The difficulty in SC is that the writer adds in intentional errors, but if you can understand the idea and message you are halfway there. In fact, understanding the message helps by making the errors in the sentence all the more glaring.

Ok,

here is the problem with math. Its not that bad actually. I am wondering if I should even spend time trying to master combinations and permutations. I can learn it myself but wonder if it even worth it. Some say they never even see it on the exam. However, my problem is trying to master rate questions when distance is involved. I have a great handle on VIC's (variables in choices) but thought I thought I had the rate topic down until I got confused on 2 advanced questions from kaplan. Functions are a problem also.


I will focus on my last weakness (SC) today also but by applying a huge lesson learned yesterday. The reason why my scores jumped up were that I stayed as systematic as possible. In essence a machine like systematic approach gained me time and accuracy. This also helped me understand what the wrong answers look like.

One more lesson learned: I will no longer be printing out questions that I got wrong because things are getting a bit messy. Instead, I will be making flashcards that deliver the same lesson and stay NEAT!

For what it's worth, I took the GMAT today and had only one permutation/combination question and that was a DS question (didn't even have to try to solve it, thank goodness!). I had mostly number properties questions.

whew, I will focus on the other more heavily tested topics. IE Rates, word problems and number properties!

I have been focusing on SC and overall math. I am trying to focus in on my weaknesses as much as possible. For this, I spent 1 hour with a tutor and learned a sifting process. I already knew it but we found out that I was losing point because I was getting mixed up in all the differenes.

Verbal:
So I focused on the kaplan class book.
On Sentence Correction Bank 1 (37/40)
On Sentence Correction Bank 2 (24/27)

I will now hammer home all my mistakes and go over the questions again but simply skimming what I did right that worked and focus on where I am lacking. Also, I will try to play a game where I try to find the wrong answers and then the right. Its great for verbal and does wonders on CR and RC. (Thanks Stacy Koprince)

Quantitative:
Number Properties and Geometry: 45/48
Algebra and Special Math Topics: 40/49

THe numbers correct out of whole do have mistakes in them also, however I immediatly fixed them because I knew exactly where I went wrong and appropriate flash cards were made!


TOday I need to fully understand my mistakes and make flashcards out of them to fix them. I will no longer keep papers on printed mistakes because things got pretty messy.