Hi Adrian:Hey Eric,
I have read your blog a million times (obvious exaggeration), but your points are very informative. Also, I find your humor to be very entertaining....it's obvious that you could have worked for a mag. Anyhow, I have already mapped out my strategy in order to get into a good grad school. However, just like a stack of dominoes, I need to ace the gmat in order for the rest to even have a chance of falling into place. I have done the Kaplan GRE/GMAT refresher book and must say that it really helped me a lot especially on Aritmetic, Word Problems and Geometry....I think for the average studier, you're underestimating how good it is. I have done the first 7 chapters in the Kaplan book, which leads me to the DS stuff (which I haven't even begun tackling yet). I like your study plan a lot and have borrowed from it quite a bit. However, I am no where near where you were at that point, I try to tell myself that maybe it's because I didn't read the Princeton book (because it's highly recommended that it's a waste of time -- and after reading 5 chapters myself at the local bookstore, I thought the same thing of it). I got more than my share of CR, SC and RC questions wrong -- I'd say I got about 65-70% right which is completely ridiculous. The Word problems, I faired a little better with about a 44/50 due to the refresher book. I'm making flash cards for math, but haven't yet started for verbal. I'm skipping the Delta course, and haven't even taken a Kaplan CAT yet...hopefully by next weekend. What and where do you think are my next steps?
Thanks so much,
Adrian
First of all, thanks very much for reading my blog! I'm glad you found my posts useful for your studies.
If I understand your e-mail correctly, it sounds like you have only done the Kaplan book so far. My advice to you is to not take your Kaplan performance too seriously. In my experience, I've found Kaplan books to be more difficult than actual GMAT problems as well as poorly written. It's still worth going through this text because the problems are challenging--but you shouldn't take your results too seriously. Try instead to focus on figuring out concepts and question patterns that you consistently get correct and consistently get wrong. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses is crucial--the earlier you can do this in your test prep, the better you can strategize your time.
Really try to get specific about your weaknesses. For example, you might note that you consistently get Idiom questions wrong on SC. Continually work those problems over and over and make sure you understand the concepts/question patterns thoroughly. Also, since in this example SC would be a weakness, plan to devote more time tackling this subject.
When you get to the OG book, start paying more attention to your hit rate. Since OG draws all of its questions from retired GMAT questions, this book is a better indicator of what your actual GMAT performance will be.
But with regards to Kaplan especially, don't fret too much about your hite rate. Just focus on what you can learn about the test and yourself.
All the best, homie.
