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Where do I go from here???

by nislam » Mon Jan 07, 2008 8:59 am
I the GMAT Prep test to see where I stand one month before. I was shocked to see 510 (36 Quant, 25 Verbal). For Quant 19 incorrect and for Verbal 17 incorrect. I screwed up my beginning in Verbal by getting the 5 in a row incorrect in the first 7 questions (6/7 wrong). I know I've read the posts that the first 5 are not weighted anymore than the last 5 but this does make me wonder.

One of things that surprised me was using the scratch paper and black pen. I followed PR's advise in dividing each page in the booklet in 4 with abcde in each square. Although this worked okay in Verbal it hurt me in Quant since I kept running out of space. The other thing I needed to get used to was writing with a marker (I've used mechanical pencils all my life).

My weaknesses are as follows:
RC
SC
CR

I've used the following sources:
-OG 11 (gone through once)
-Manhattan GMAT (gone through all books except RC, CR)
-PR for RC and CR

My target is 650 and I need minimum 600 to be considered. My exam is scheduled for Feb 2? Is this doable?

How do I improve my Quant from 36? I seemed to have hit a block?

I think I can improve verbal with more practice. What should be my strategy?

HELP!
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by heudorferk » Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:25 pm
I think you can definitely get to your goal by 2/2. In order to get a good feel for the question types giving you trouble, you should try to drill down on each. You might want to look at study tools that let you hone in--for example, do 50 Sentence corrections with only verb errors, and you'll start getting a good feel for how verb mistakes crop up on the GMAT. Then do the same thing with modification errors, etc. It sounds tedious, but it's a great way to improve on particular areas in a short period of time. I'd recommend:

https://www.kaptest.com/Business/GMAT/Ka ... qbank.html

Good luck!
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by Stacey Koprince » Tue Jan 08, 2008 11:29 am
Give us some more data on your test results - which specific areas within verbal are giving you the most trouble? (Eg, don't just stop at SC - is it pronouns, verb tenses, parallelism, what? For RC / CR, which specific question types are hurting you the most?)

Also, how is your timing? GMATPrep doesn't report your per-question timing but if you have the 2007 edition of our books then you also have access to our practice tests, which do give you per-question timing.

You are correct that all questions are worth the same amount. The worst thing is to have a lot of questions wrong in a row - so the issue you had is not that you get some early questions wrong but that you had a string of questions wrong in a row. (The worst place for that to happen is actually at the end, by the way, not the beginning - because at the end, there's no opportunity to recover; the test is over. If it happens at the beginning, at least you can try to recover with the remaining questions.)
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by mayonnai5e » Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:37 pm
I agree with what Stacy said about the 5 questions wrong in a row. There has been ample evidence (even confirmation in the OG11 guide) that the beginning questions are not weighted any more than the ending questions so that should not be part of your study strategy. Structuring your study strategy to take advantage of this myth would be a waste of time in my opinion because you want to do well on every problem no matter if it's at the beginning or end. The bigger problem is that you missed 5 in a row - that's a killer at the beginning, middle or end of the test.

As for the pencil/marker issue, you can always practice and study with a pen to get a better feel for it. I'm not sure if you're from the US, but if you are you can easily find marker + dry erase boards at a store like Target/Walmart to really mimic the testing center materials.

We probably need more information to really get a good feel for how your studies have been progressing.

What other practice CATs have you taken and what were your scores?
How comfortable do you feel with the strategies for each problem type? (e.g. weaken questions in CR, pronouns in SC, number properties in DS)
What areas were you weakest in on the quant sections?
How have you been studying for the past few weeks/months?
What is your current study plan?
In the OG book, did you read through and study every single solution including those that you got right?
Are you keeping a log of your lessons learned?
Are you keeping a log of your errors and specific problems that highlight your errors?
What new, unused materials/CATs do you have left to work with?

Answering these questions will give us a better idea of where you're at.
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by nislam » Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:21 pm
Thanks ya'all for the feedback. I plan to give another CAT this weekend (debating between PR or MGMAT). I was originally thinking MGMAT but I'm not at the 600 level yet and secondly I was intimidated when I made my first attempt a couple months ago when I started my preparation.

I have been keeping a log of my strengths and weaknesses for both Quant and SC for OG. I created a spreadsheet for every OG problem attempted and those I did not get correct I made notes (if interested I can send). But the stats are below. The stats below show my hit rate. I've also noted which type of questions I'm getting incorrect (lower number or higher number) since hit rate alone is not an accurate representation.

SC:
Concision & Clarity 64%
Subject Verb Agreement 64%
Verb Tense, Mood Voice 65%
Pronoun 44%
Modifiers 47%
Parallelism 69%
Comparisons 74%
Idioms 85%
Odds and Ends 64%

Quant:
Fractions, Dec, Per cents 84%
Number Properties 70%
Equations, Inequalities & VIC's 63%
Geometry 69%
Word Translations 57%

For SC I've certainly improved i.e. able to narrow down to two choices but still get some questions incorrect. I'm starting to see a pattern where more difficult questions have answer choices are quite different from each other. My strategy as I go forward is improve pronoun, modifiers as well as parallelism and comparisons (tested the most).

For quant my clear weakness is DS. I didn't practice alot and noticed I got many wrong. My strategy forward is practice more DS and improve Equations, Number Props and Word Translations.

For RC I'm still struggling. I've relied on PR techniques but it's not helping. I'm now going through MGMAT for this.

I've got Verbal and Quant left that I can utilize for new questions. For this I will do questions in sequential order (rather than by topic) to get myself used to random questions.

I've kept the best for last i.e. the MGMAT CAT's and practice questions. Reason being I need to be in the 600 neighborhood to get the most out of it. Is my assumption correct here i.e. start doing MGMAT CAT's once I'm in the neighborhood of 600. My target score is in the 640 range to get admission but I want to beat the gmat by eventually scoring 700+.
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by beatthegmat » Tue Jan 08, 2008 9:36 pm
Fantastic post, nislam. I'm really impressed by the way you're approaching your prep, you've clearly done your research. Your study strategy is an excellent example for others to follow!

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by Stacey Koprince » Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:37 am
Two things: you didn't mention timing in your last post. Did you time yourself as you recorded those percentages? If so, how much time did you spend, on average, for all of the different categories? There's a big difference between scoring 60% on some SC category while spending 60 seconds on average vs. 90 seconds vs. 2 minutes (in terms of how I'd tell you to deal with that issue).

Also, I don't necessarily think you need to be scoring 600+ to get the most out of our tests. We've got questions at all levels, and the tests will record data such as time spent per question, which is critical to analyze. You get 6 "clean" tests, so you might want to go ahead and take one to get the data.
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by nislam » Wed Jan 09, 2008 5:05 pm
Stacey,

Thanks. I didn't time myself but i guess it certainly worthwhile to see analyze this. I'll report back after I take the MGMAT CAT.
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by mayonnai5e » Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:37 am
Given that you were getting hit rates as low as 44% without being timed during your practice sets, it seems to me that your fundamentals are not very strong on certain topics. In a test environment with time pressure, your hit rate will almost certainly drop even lower.

You may want to consider going back through some of the initial discussion and examples for those topics and redoing the easy/medium level questions in your books. Also, I would recommend browsing the specific topic forums on this message board and finding more examples for those areas. For example, search the SC forums for pronoun errors questions and the quant forums for word translations. Alternatively, you mentioned that you have the MGMAT books so you can use the cross reference provided at the back of each book to find relevant OG questions. That is three different ways you can strengthen your fundamentals - you can choose which you would like to do given your time constraints, but I recommend doing all three.
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by II » Thu Jan 10, 2008 2:12 am
Hi Nislam ... thanks for sharing your experiences with the rest of us !

"I have been keeping a log of my strengths and weaknesses for both Quant and SC for OG. I created a spreadsheet for every OG problem attempted and those I did not get correct I made notes (if interested I can send). But the stats are below."

I was interested in how you are going about this. Under what conditions are you attempting the OG practice questions.
Are you selecting a range of questions from the OG11 book (say questions 100 to 137), and then just going through them under timed conditions, recording your results in the spreadsheet ?
Or are you just going through the questions at random as part of your normal study routine (not under timed conditions)?

Thanks again.
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by nislam » Thu Jan 10, 2008 7:14 am
Hi II,

My approach was topic by topic as outlined in MGMAT guides. One of things I realized early on that I had been out of school for quite some time and my fundamentals were rusty. For example in the MGMAT SC guide e.g. Pronouns , the end of the chapter lists the questions in OG and Verbal where the topic is tested. So I did all the questions related to this topic and then listed the questions I got correct and crudely calculated my hit rate. I also created a comments column to note if I can easy questions incorrect, medium or difficult. I consciously didn't do the questions in timed mode only because I felt tackling everything at once would be too difficult. However I also made sure I didn't spend more than 3 minutes per question. I did the questions blocks of 10-15 at a time, went back and studied the answers and in my notepad noted if I was able to narrow down to 2-3 choices and if I made careless mistakes. I managed to figure out my careless mistakes were caused by writing too small and skipping steps in between for Quant. I changed my habits and started to see improvements.
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by nislam » Thu Jan 10, 2008 7:16 am
Mayonnai5e,

Thanks for the advice. The lower hit rate rates indicates something wrong with fundamentals in those areas. I also purchased Kaplan q bank so now I can select questions based on topic and difficulty level.
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by Stacey Koprince » Thu Jan 10, 2008 7:50 am
The other thing in general - start doing questions under timed conditions. If you're studying from our books, don't time the in-action practice problems at the end of each chapter. But do time yourself on OG questions - because one of the things you also have to study is "What do I do when I realize I'm not going to get this one in the available time?" That's going to happen a decent amount on the test and, so far, you haven't practiced that at all.

Note that, for SC, your time constraint is about 60 to 90 seconds per question. (You have to save additional time for reading RC passages.)
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by II » Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:16 pm
Thanks Stacey ... always coming up great advice ! :-)
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