I just Beat The GMAT!

Is it advisable to take first CAT without IR & AWA?

I feel I have stamina issue. So,I couldn't finish the verbal section in first mock.

What would be your advice to pace oneself in a month? I also take more time for CR qns & Inference qns in Rcs.

What was ur strategy for RC & Cr sections?

Hi Piyush, Congratulations!! Hard work pays!
I scored 550 on mock too! I have been preparing for GMAT 4 months now and still not feeling confident mainly in verbal and I keep forgetting the Quant concepts and requires thorough revision bfr every test.
First mock Q30/V21
platinum mock test : Q41/V30

Materials studied so far:
Manhattan set of 8 strategy guides - 4th edition
OG13 practice questions
Beat the gmat and GMAT club forums qns

Please suggest me should I go through the 5th edition of MGMAT? Are they different?

Advice me..

Thanks in Advance..

Congratulations for such a good score and debrief! Your blog too is really good!

Congrats !! for the good score..can you please share your strategy for CR Assumption Questions and Evaluate the argument questions. Most of the time I get these two questions wrong.

regds
sachin

buoyant wrote:Is it advisable to take first CAT without IR & AWA? I feel I have stamina issue. So,I couldn't finish the verbal section in first mock. What would be your advice to pace oneself in a month? I also take more time for CR qns & Inference qns in Rcs. What was ur strategy for RC & Cr sections?

Dear Buoyant, good questions. I advice you to give all your CATs with AWA and IR. There are two advantages to this approach; firstly you dont need to allocate dedicated time to AWA and IR. IR can be daunting in the beginning but it is essential to score a respectable score, which comes with practice.

First and for-most, you should be aware about your average time to solve each verbal question time. As you may be aware that you need to solve 41 verbal questions in 75 minutes, approx. 1 min 45 sec for each question. In my case, I knew that I needed 2 minutes to solve CR questions and hence made up the lost time in SC section. SC section can be mechanical and with good practice, you can even master the best practices. Also I was not afraid to guess a question to make up for the lost time. I generally guessed 2 CR or RC inference questions per verbal section. This allowed me to stay calm during the verbal section and completely focus on the remaining questions. You don't need to solve each question correct in order to score 40 in verbal.

I developed a one minute strategy coutesy Manhattan. Do read this excellent post by Manhattan. If I was not able to solve RC inference question within 1 min 20 sec, I forced myself to move on. No point reading the entire passage again.

In summary, know your strengthens and weakness with regards to each specific question type in the verbal section and device strategy for each when faced in real exam.

abhinayar wrote:Hi Piyush, Congratulations!! Hard work pays!
I scored 550 on mock too! I have been preparing for GMAT 4 months now and still not feeling confident mainly in verbal and I keep forgetting the Quant concepts and requires thorough revision bfr every test.
First mock Q30/V21
platinum mock test : Q41/V30

Materials studied so far:
Manhattan set of 8 strategy guides - 4th edition
OG13 practice questions
Beat the gmat and GMAT club forums qns

Please suggest me should I go through the 5th edition of MGMAT? Are they different?

Dear Abhinayar, I have not gone through the 4 edition so I really cant comment about the differences between the two editions. Looking at your mocks score, I believe you should really work on your basics and find out weakness in your concepts. With regards to maths concepts, they really come with practice. I would advice, if appropriate, follow a structured program with regards to your prep. Good luck

sachinsonu wrote:Congrats !! for the good score..can you please share your strategy for CR Assumption Questions and Evaluate the argument questions. Most of the time I get these two questions wrong.

Dear Sachin, I was bombarded with these question on my actual GMAT, they were just not stopping. Both these questions demand a strong hold of the argument and limited imagination. They require you to be disciplined in your approach to read answer choices, and an advance test taker will be able to spot pitfalls.

I learnt to tackle both these questions through the Powerscore CR bible, which categorized both these questions in the same category of Must be true questions. In order words, the book demanded us to apply the following
1. Fact test: The correct answer must be absolutely and absolutely be true in all conditions
2. These answers must must be true. Can or maybe is true is not sufficient
3. Use denial test for difficult inference questions.

I also saw inference questions as strengthening question but with no extra assumptions. If we flip the preceding statement, when applying the denial test, the correct answer when negated should necessary weaken the argument. Also I solved LSAT CR questions which had a number of challenging CR inference and evaluate questions.

I was prepared to take a just a little more than 2 minutes to each of such question if required as I made up in SC or guessed a couple of questions in the middle of my verbal section. Good luck for your prep.

Thank You very much Piyush!

Good luck to you too!

Small Review of a product I used during my Prep.

Magoosh Premium $100 : More than 700 questions

Great set of video explanations and lessons for each topic both in verbal and quant. The explanations are clear and to the point. I was able to do timed sets with adaptive difficulty similar to the real GMAT. For advance test takers, they have a number of high level questions, which will challenge your understanding. Each question is complemented with its explanations and related subject video to bridge the gap in the knowledge. Total they have over 600 questions of varying difficulty complemented with video and written explanations. Their support team is very helpful and the instructors reply to your query within 24 hours only.

Highly recommend it

jainpiyushjain wrote:
Firstly, I took the first month off from GMAT and carried on with my general work. This period allowed me to chill and erase the official answers from my memory specially incase of Verbal.

During the second month, I appeared for a number of CATS, which allowed me to build stamina and to stay completely focussed even till the last question of the verbal section. I practiced Verbal only from official questions and reviewed my mistakes on every weekend. During this time, I purchased GMATprep question set 1, which was a great source to do timed set and has a good bunch of verbal questions with explanations. Both the prep and calmness, did the trick for me.
Cheers and good luck

Thanks for the amazing explanation - very helpful. I do have a few questions:

I've taken 3 cats - 500, 600 and 580 - my goal is to break the 700 mark! I seem to have a lot of trouble with timing - what do you suggest to fix that issue? I've read the infamous "My timing is killing me" article and I also keep a tab on the top right, but come practice CAT time, it doesn't seem to help much.

Also, I notice that while doing practice OG problems, I get a good percentage correct and some of higher 700+ ones correct as well(even though they take upwards of 2-3 minutes!), but during the CAT, I can't make the similar connections. I guess what i'm struggling with is - should I try to understand the CONTENT better(read strategy guides etc) or should I start doing random timed sets, which from my understanding is just doing 10-20 random problems from the OG - is that correct?

Thanks in advance!

Hello,
Congratulations for the score.. and must say you did a lot of hardwork.. well the post is really helpful.. with all the necessary an sufficient details..
All the best.
Thanks.

Hi Piyush,

Please let me know where can I get 10 LSAT papers for CR.

Great work ...piyush..

i am giving my gmat this sep19th

shinigami wrote:Great work ...piyush..

i am giving my gmat this sep19th

Good Luck

First of all Congrats on your score.Simply brilliant!!!Im having a problem with Probability and Combinatorics questions.Since you're a 700+ scorer,can you please tell me the number of probability and combinatorics questions you encountered on the test day.Also,how did you master those concept?,and advice or tips are really appreciated at this stage.Also,are Manhattans set 0f 10 books sufficient in terms of problem variety?

Thanks

Dan

jainpiyushjain wrote:

lunarpower wrote:

jainpiyushjain wrote:may I know what do you mean by RON's explanation of GMATPrep questions ..

so, i've been wondering this for a while, but never asked until now... why does everyone here always write my name in all capital letters?
just curious.

Good question. I used the capital letters for your name to demand the extra attention and weightage. There are number of instructors out there, but your work is really outstanding and hence the extra importance to the name.

dddanny2006 wrote:First of all Congrats on your score.Simply brilliant!!!Im having a problem with Probability and Combinatorics questions.Since you're a 700+ scorer,can you please tell me the number of probability and combinatorics questions you encountered on the test day.Also,how did you master those concept?,and advice or tips are really appreciated at this stage.Also,are Manhattans set 0f 10 books sufficient in terms of problem variety?

Thanks

Dan

Hello Dan, thanks for reaching out. I encountered about 3 questions on this topic, however I was able to solve two (medium type) and had to guess on one, to avoid falling back on time. Probability and Combinatorics is a very vast topics, and it can take lot of time to master each type of questions. The best way to go about his, recognize your strengths and weakness, and play along those.

For example, I only solved the Probability and Combinatorics in the official guide and gmat prep (viewing solutions on forums rather than official answers). and was prepared to take a calculative guess, if required. I spend most of my study period on popular quant subjects such as Number properties.

I was able to understand Probability and Combinatorics concepts through the forum only, because I believe Manhattan quant books are not sufficient to score high in quant. However there is no harm going through Manhattan, before approaching such questions.

My biggest takeaway for such questions -

Practice common and official type questions with answers from forums
Learn how to make calculative guess (Manhattan advance quant book has some handly techniques such as cut off, approximation, etc.)
Very important - If by the end of 1 minute, you have no clue about the question - Guess and move on.

Cheers
Piyush Jain

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