GMAT Strategy

Hi,

I finished OG verbal supplement. I am having problem with verbal timing,

CR: I take 3 mins on an avg to solve one question- approach: I write down the premise,conclusion etc and then I attack the question. It takes 3 mins, but I get it correct.Sometimes I have to go back and forth among the answer choices. It takes another 30 secs. Please let me know if there is better approach. If I donot write down but try to solve, then I keep going back and forth between arg, stimulus and ans choices many times, And may get ans wrong.

SC : On tough SC I take around 2.5 mins, when 2 or 3 choices are close. And my hit rate in OG verbal supplement was 70% to start with and slowly came down to 45-50% toward's end. For SC's I try to read the question and without reading answer I try to figure out the prob/sol and later I go look at ans choices, everytime I find atleast there are 2 close ans choices and eats away my time. Is there better approach for this ?

RC : I read first para twice sometimes and then take notes for each and then go for questions. I take 4-5 mins to read passage and avg 1.5-2 mins to solve each questions.

So overall my scenario in exam is by the time I have reached 30 questions on verbal my time is exhausted, I end up marking 11 questions blindly and out of 30 about 17 will be correct, which will land up in low verbal score. My goal is to make atleast 30 correct in verbal out of 41.

I appreciate your help. Please let me know other strategies/practice material to beat the timing issue.

Finally, I would like to know if OG 11 is better than OG supplement ? Do they have repeats ?

Thanks again
Vgmat2.

Hi,

Can anybody respond please....any thoughts.

thanks
V-

Stop reading the passages twice and taking notes. The only advantage to this would be if it saves you time which it obviously dosent. make notes in your head as you read, I highly doubt you go back to your notes to answer questions. The information is right there on the screen it is not going anywhere.

This is a timed test. Stop treating it like you have all the time in the world and then wondering why you run out of time. Try reading a question once and answering it. Then if that does not work use your current strategy. You are treating every question as if it is extremely difficult.

Once again stop taking notes... Just because you have scratch paper does not mean you have to use it.

The fact that you could not figure this out yourself is disturbing.

There is a penalty in the scoring algorithm for blindly guessing the last questions.

WAD

So many don'ts in your message. Can you point out some dos' also pls.

jonscrazy wrote:Stop reading the passages twice and taking notes. The only advantage to this would be if it saves you time which it obviously dosent. make notes in your head as you read, I highly doubt you go back to your notes to answer questions. The information is right there on the screen it is not going anywhere.

This is a timed test. Stop treating it like you have all the time in the world and then wondering why you run out of time. Try reading a question once and answering it. Then if that does not work use your current strategy. You are treating every question as if it is extremely difficult.

Once again stop taking notes... Just because you have scratch paper does not mean you have to use it.

The fact that you could not figure this out yourself is disturbing.

There is a penalty in the scoring algorithm for blindly guessing the last questions.

vgmat2 wrote:Hi,

I finished OG verbal supplement. I am having problem with verbal timing,

CR: I take 3 mins on an avg to solve one question- approach: I write down the premise,conclusion etc and then I attack the question. It takes 3 mins, but I get it correct.Sometimes I have to go back and forth among the answer choices. It takes another 30 secs. Please let me know if there is better approach. If I donot write down but try to solve, then I keep going back and forth between arg, stimulus and ans choices many times, And may get ans wrong.

SC : On tough SC I take around 2.5 mins, when 2 or 3 choices are close. And my hit rate in OG verbal supplement was 70% to start with and slowly came down to 45-50% toward's end. For SC's I try to read the question and without reading answer I try to figure out the prob/sol and later I go look at ans choices, everytime I find atleast there are 2 close ans choices and eats away my time. Is there better approach for this ?

RC : I read first para twice sometimes and then take notes for each and then go for questions. I take 4-5 mins to read passage and avg 1.5-2 mins to solve each questions.

So overall my scenario in exam is by the time I have reached 30 questions on verbal my time is exhausted, I end up marking 11 questions blindly and out of 30 about 17 will be correct, which will land up in low verbal score. My goal is to make atleast 30 correct in verbal out of 41.

I appreciate your help. Please let me know other strategies/practice material to beat the timing issue.

Finally, I would like to know if OG 11 is better than OG supplement ? Do they have repeats ?

Thanks again
Vgmat2.

For CR, the problem, in my opinion, is that you're not absorbing the information well enough. The CR passage is usually just a paragraph long - writing down the premise and conclusion is like paraphrasing what was originally just a 3 or 4 sentence paragraph anyways. You should train yourself to hold the premise and conclusion in your memory. Practice by reading line and by line and mentally categorizing each statement - this is premise, this is premise, oh HERE'S the conclusion, oh and this is the final premise. Before even looking at the answer choices, you should have a summary of the passage in your mind and a mapping of what were the premises and what was the conclusion. The fact that you have to go back and forth between the answer choices and passage repeatedly indicates to me that you do not have a full grasp of the passage before looking at them. You should be able to eliminate 2 or 3 immediately without rereading the passage.

Sorry, but I don't have time to answer your other questions yet - I'll try to get back to you tomorrow for the other topics.

On SC, my approach was simple. I would look for one major problem, whichever one appeared to me first (i.e. the most obvious one) then I would focus on that one problem and go through each answer choice and eliminate the answer choices that replicated that problem - that usually eliminated 2 choices. Then I would go back and look for another problem (i.e. the next most obvious one) and repeat until only 1 was left. The big difficulty with the harder questions is that they usually contain 3 or 4 mistakes usually very close to one another, which blurs the lines between the actual mistakes themselves. Or they are really far from one another so that as you read the sentence, you forget what the first problems were as you get to the end of the sentence. My method allowed me to focus on one problem at a time and break down the complexity of a hard problem into a series of simple ones, each of which must be corrected in order for the sentence to be the correct answer choice. It all boiled down to focus - if you lose your focus while reading the sentence, you'll likely stumble. Look at the questions that you're getting wrong - what makes that question complex? Which of the main SC error types does that question contain? Which of those were the most obvious to you? Which were the least obvious? Which, if you were to choose, is the easiest for you to focus on and hold in your memory for the few seconds you'll be working on the question?

Analyze your patterns. You just need to figure out what works fastest for you and practice it until it becomes second nature.

I borrowed the OG 10th from my friend, it contains more questions than 11th.