GMAT Strategy

lunarpower wrote:hi -
here are some responses to these questions.

1)SC: Poor, somehow not able to apply the rules under time pressure and also getting confused with certain constructions. Also sentences that are completely underlined appear very confusing to me.

ironically, the completely underlined sentences should actually be easier, because you won't have to keep looking up ... and down ... and up ... and down, going back and forth between the underlined and non-underlined parts of the sentence. instead, everything you need will be right there in the answer choice, so the only looking up and down you'll have to do will be to look for splits between the choices.

your statements here are completely general, so i'm not sure what sort of response i could give: "certain constructions" could be ... anything.
as for applying the rules under time pressure: the rules really don't take that much time to apply. if you find that time is a problem, it may be that you aren't FINDING the splits fast enough, or it may be that you're DELIBERATING.
* NEVER DELIBERATE.
you should never, ever sit there staring at two equally attractive choices. if you honestly can't decide between two choices in a few seconds, you should just pick one of them and move on. there's no point in second-guessing yourself lots of times; any random guess is as good as any other random guess.
* if you have trouble FINDING the splits, go back to our sentence correction strategy guide, find ALL the o.g. problems associated with certain errors (on the chart in the back of the guide), and look at them ALL consecutively. try to get a feel for what certain errors look like when they appear in sentences, rather than strictly applying rules; learn to recognize the look of sentences with certain errors.
for instance, you should try to develop the skill of immediately recognizing when a sentence features parallelism, or modifiers, or other large-scale errors.

2)CR: Have improved in the past 1 week but still sometimes I pick the wrong one out of the two best choices. I am able to eliminate 3 of the answers but getting stuck between the best two. Also getting 1-2 boldface CR every time and though I know the technique to solve it but get baffled by the terminology ('Generalization', 'Case at issue') used in the answer choices.

well, sure. you will occasionally be down to 2 choices.
i'm sure that you're guessing correctly from 2 choices as often as you're guessing incorrectly from 2 choices. you probably just don't notice the correct guesses as much, because they blend in with the problems that you got right without guessing. in other words, you'll probably be biased toward thinking you guessed incorrectly more often than you actually did, because the wrong guesses stand out while the correct ones blend in.

i don't know of any "translation guides" to the terms used in CR passages, but you ought to try to make a list of the ones that have baffled you over time.

lots of words - such as "assertion", "generalization", and so on - are just ways of saying "statement".
lots of other words - "position", "point being argued", and so on - are just ways of saying "conclusion".
"at issue" means that something is being considered. so "case at issue" would mean whatever specific case is actually addressed in the passage.

3)RC: Is very inconsistent, as it depends on the passage I get. I do well in science/social science passages but not so well in history passages. Also sometimes I get confused with 'main purpose' question as I am thinking whether the author is 'explaining advantages of a theory' or 'explaining relationship between the new theory and old ones'.

ON MAIN IDEA QUESTIONS, ALWAYS COME UP WITH YOUR OWN ANSWER BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE ANSWER CHOICES.
always.

the only way you'll get main idea questions wrong is if they successfully trick you into selecting an answer choice that's completely wrong, but which they trick you into thinking is possibly correct.
if you COME UP WITH YOUR OWN ANSWER CHOICE FIRST, and THEN look at the answer choices, you may find that only one answer choice comes even close to what you came up with by yourself, and that the others are just ridiculously different.
for instance, the two answers you cited above are very different: one of them discusses only ONE theory, while the other one discusses TWO theories. if you came up with what YOU thought was the main idea first, there is absolutely no way it would be similar to more than one of these 2 choices.


4)DS: In quant I do better but timing/pace is an issue. Most of the DS come after 16-17 questions and that is the time I am trying to makeup time from my previous delay. So get a lot of DS questions wrong from 17-22. Could you please email me some of the openers/takeaway for mean, median, range, co-ordinate geometry sort of questions? I have the general takeaways for the above topics but get quite confused with DS questions involving these topics.

first comment: you should NOT have a "previous delay". this should simply not happen.
if you have a "previous delay", then THAT is where you should concentrate; you should not think that's fine and concentrate instead on digging yourself out of a hole afterwards.

if you want specific takeaways about those topics, your best bet would be to search through the forums - both these forums and the manhattangmat forums - using keywords related to these ideas. there are tens, or even hundreds, of problems about those topics, and each of them will have different specific takeaways.
be creative with your keyword searches, by the way; google has a way of not finding lots of things that you'd expect it to find, so you may find that trying very similar search strings yields markedly different results.
happy hunting!

mayonnai5e wrote:With such a limited amount of time, you're focus should be to pick off the low hanging fruits. CR and SC are the easiest portions of the test to make significant gains in due to RC being something that must be practiced over a long period of time. SC in particular requires learning basic grammar rules and idioms so that should be an area to focus on.

Last point, you should be taking CATs with your practice not after. You want to apply the things you've learned to a real test environment because you need to be able to recall those lessons quickly and efficiently. Don't wait until after you finish studying verbal.

logitech wrote:di·min·ish·ing returns (d-mn-shng)
pl.n.
A yield rate that after a certain point fails to increase proportionately to additional outlays of capital or investments of time and labor.


Don't over study. Pick up a date. Make sure you are ready and take the test.

And move on!

logitech wrote:Identify your weak areas and devote more time to them.

If you are already good at math. Do not spend most of your time with quantitative section. We tend to study more the subjects we like but we should face our nemesis!

bsandhyav wrote:

logitech wrote:Identify your weak areas and devote more time to them.

If you are already good at math. Do not spend most of your time with quantitative section. We tend to study more the subjects we like but we should face our nemesis!

Well logitech....i sicerely believed in what u just said....and always followed that....but with GMAT it has not been really positive.....infact it has hurt me really bad!!!

On my TEST ZERO and the subsequent tests for the next 2 weeks(2 GMAT Prep/2 Poweprep) i consistently score Q 48-49 and V28-30.

Realised Verbal was my weakness and dedicated 1 month to verbal SC(my weakness).

Now my scores are Q39-44 and V33-35.(4 MGMAT's and 1 GMAT Prep)