Please help!! 610 (Q45, V29)

[anspeed]

Hi All,

My Back ground: Nonnative English speaker(From a remote village in India and studied in Non-English medium till 12th std) , working as a software engineer from last 7 years.

Although I started My GMAT preparation an year back, I am seriously preparing from last 5 months only, My verbal skills were too bad, so I have been concentrated only on verbal section.

Following are my Practice test scores. (I have written essays while attempting each and every practice test)

GMAT PREP1: 49Q V16

MGMAT:

MGMAT2 43Q21V 530 4/3/2010

Due to work and job change, I couldn't prepare for 6 months. Started serious preparation in December 2010.

MGMAT3 46Q33V 650 3/6/2011

Very happy to see the improvement in verbal score. Ron's and others explanations in forums and Thursdays with Ron sessions helped me a lot. I am big fan of Ron's way of approach to attempt the problem. e-gmat sentence correction course boosted my SC skills .

MGMAT4 7Q33V 660 3/19/2011 not even a single point increase in verbal

GMAT PREP2: 49Q V28 04/30/2011

MGMAT5 46Q33V 670 5/17/2011 same again. Very much disappointed


GMAT SCORE: 45Q29V 610 on 05/23/2011.

I know My limitations in verbal, but I was shocked to see the 45Q. I scored 49 in my First Gmat PREP without any preparation. I was not able to manage time in my practice tests but in real test I ended up saving 5 minutes, this may be a red flag. In my practice tests, Managing time for verbal section was a night mare for me but in real test I had finished verbal section 5 minutes before the actual time(was it because of unnecessary concerns about timing .. I don't know ). I have attempted all questions. I understood RC passages and answered well. I felt that I was doing much better than I did in any of my practice test. I felt everything went smooth (till I see the score).

I don't have any idea why my quant score has been decreased, Before attempting the test itself I know that I would get less score in verbal and I would have to re attempt(Since my wife's due date in next month I am not sure how much Time I would get later so attempted GMAT in hurry.)


Resources used:

practice.beatthegmat questions (finished 50% of them, practiced on and off from last one year)
MGMAT sentence correction book.
e-gmat sc
Powerscore CR bible.
OG12, OG verbal review.


I am bit confident about CR. I need to improve my SC and RC Skills(I am very very poor at RC detail questions, although I am good at main point questions). I am thinking of taking a verbal course or personal tutor assistance.

Since I cannot spend too much time due to work and family reasons I am not sure which approach is better . May be this question has been asked multiple times in this forum but still I am repeating, Can you guys please suggest me which approach I should follow to increase my verbal score (and also not to get shock with quant score).


Thanks a lot in advance.

[vineeshp]

For a non-native speaker, I think you speak really well.

For SC and RC, practice is the only way.

For SC, are you sure you have identified all the patterns? I recommend doing grockit.com problems for SC. currently their membership is available at 39 dollars. It usually is 100 dollars.

For RC, Buy RC 99. That will help. RC is tough.

I also request you to keep a realistic target to achieve. You have scored 49 in Quant in the past so that should be a good sign. But Verbal you have come up to 33. If you can hit 33-35 it will be good.

A last note regarding Practice tests. Dont go byu just numbers. If there is no improvement from one test to the other, it does not mean anything. Analyze your tests and see what concepts you are weak in. That will help.

All the best!

[anspeed]

Hi Vineesh,

Thanks a lot for your Reply. I have practiced RC99 for some time and I will continue the same. I will check with Grockit as well. I am sure that I have identified patterns in SC, but when it comes to test I am making some mistakes. You are right about practice exams , when there was no improvement I should have stopped giving tests and analyzed properly.

[lunarpower]

well -- the information here is pretty general (i.e., not a lot of specifics to work with), but:
* your verbal has already gone up 17 points -- this may be the single largest jump i've ever seen in such a short time.
because that's already such a large jump, it's possible that any further limitations are results of your current proficiency at the written english language in general.

you may want to take a break from GMAT-specific questions for a bit, and just improve your reading overall:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/09/ ... ading-comp
in addition to stacey's suggestions, you may also (for SC purposes) want to check out the way in which the sentences are written, seeing whether you can justify meaning, modifiers, parallelism, etc.

--

for quant, you should study "backup methods" -- watch the FEBRUARY 4, 2010 lecture here:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/thursdays-with-ron.cfm

[anspeed]

Hi Ron,
Thanks a lot for your reply. As you said, My Last post was too generic,sorry for that. In this post I will try to specify some specific issues, which I am facing while attempting verbal section.

R.C: As you said I need to improve my current proficiency in written English(This lack of proficiency may be the reason for getting only 4.0 in my awa, one of your Thursday videos helped me to get at least 4.0 in awa). I read the Stacy's post you mentioned in your reply, I will follow that while reading any articles or magazines. Before my GMAT preparation I had not read anything apart from some technical stuff related to my job. My reading speed is to too slow , so while reading the passage itself I am afraid that I am running out of time or wasting more time to read the passage. I would answer more questions correctly If I read entire passage and take notes, but taking notes was consuming more time so stopped taking notes.

S.C: In many of your posts I read that meaning is so important for sentence correction problems, I strictly follow that while solving practice questions, so I answer most of them correctly , but while attempting the test somehow I miss this approach for some problems and automatically try to look for the splits and standard GMAT tips(modifiers and parallelism etc..). My other problem with while solving SC questions is that although I know OPTION A is repeated from the original sentence I tend to read that option again(which may be waste of time). Based on one of your suggestions I tend to use internal clock and check the timer for every 10 questions, This approach works fine for me but for some SC questions I tend to plug in every answer and re read entire sentence, which was causing me to waste lot of time on some sc problems. After analyzing my practice tests I got to know that if I spend more time I would answer that problem wrongly.

One funny issue which is troubling me some times while attempting practice tests is that If I answer couple of sentence correction questions and get a CR question than I would waste at least 10 seconds by trying to find Modifiers, parallelism issues with the CR question instead of finding premises or conclusions. If I answer couple of CR questions and get the SC question than I try to find the gap in the argument instead of finding grammar issues (I mean to say that my mind is taking time to switch from SC mode to CR mode or vice versa, it may seems to be funny but this issue is causing me to waste considerable amount of time)

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[lunarpower]

R.C: As you said I need to improve my current proficiency in written English(This lack of proficiency may be the reason for getting only 4.0 in my awa, one of your Thursday videos helped me to get at least 4.0 in awa). I read the Stacy's post you mentioned in your reply, I will follow that while reading any articles or magazines. Before my GMAT preparation I had not read anything apart from some technical stuff related to my job. My reading speed is to too slow , so while reading the passage itself I am afraid that I am running out of time or wasting more time to read the passage. I would answer more questions correctly If I read entire passage and take notes, but taking notes was consuming more time so stopped taking notes.

if you need to improve your english proficiency, then you should probably step away from the GMAT while you take care of that.
once you've learned to read faster and/or to understand more of what you read on the first pass, then you should return to the GMAT material.

however, because there isn't that much official GMAT material, you don't want to waste more of it before you've improved your english proficiency.

S.C: In many of your posts I read that meaning is so important for sentence correction problems, I strictly follow that while solving practice questions, so I answer most of them correctly , but while attempting the test somehow I miss this approach for some problems and automatically try to look for the splits and standard GMAT tips(modifiers and parallelism etc..).

well -- remember that meaning is not independent of these error types! meaning is an integral part of them!
read this:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/companies-in ... tml#367679

My other problem with while solving SC questions is that although I know OPTION A is repeated from the original sentence I tend to read that option again(which may be waste of time).

... you should stop doing that.
i don't really know what else to say here.

One funny issue which is troubling me some times while attempting practice tests is that If I answer couple of sentence correction questions and get a CR question than I would waste at least 10 seconds by trying to find Modifiers, parallelism issues with the CR question instead of finding premises or conclusions. If I answer couple of CR questions and get the SC question than I try to find the gap in the argument instead of finding grammar issues (I mean to say that my mind is taking time to switch from SC mode to CR mode or vice versa, it may seems to be funny but this issue is causing me to waste considerable amount of time)

hmm -- could you explain to me how that's possible?

i mean ... the different types of verbal questions don't look anything like each other. the SC's have an underline, and their choices are 5 sentence fragments that look a lot like each other. the CR's have a passage, with a question underneath, and 5 choices that are normal (and very different) sentences.

i guess i'm just really curious -- i'm curious about the thought process that could *allow* you to confuse these in the first place, because, in my mind, they're so different that confusion should be impossible.
as an analogy -- if you usually drive a stick shift (manual gear) car and you rent a car with an automatic transmission, then you might start trying to drive it like a manual ... but if you rented a bike, you wouldn't try to drive it like a car for the first 10 seconds.

are the problem types just new to you? i.e., have you not accumulated much experience with them?

[anspeed]

if you need to improve your english proficiency, then you should probably step away from the GMAT while you take care of that.

Ron, does this apply to RC only or to CR and SC as well. Is it ok to practice SC and CR while improving my English proficiency?

I am reading Economist and some other magazines to improve my reading skills and English proficiency, Can you please suggest some other approaches as well.

well -- remember that meaning is not independent of these error types! meaning is an integral part of them!

read this:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/companies-in ... tml#367679

this is great post, it really helped to know problems in my approach while solving sc questions. Thanks a lot for pointing me to this post.

anspeed wrote: One funny issue which is troubling me some times while attempting practice tests is that If I answer couple of sentence correction questions and get a CR question than I would waste at least 10 seconds by trying to find Modifiers, parallelism issues with the CR question instead of finding premises or conclusions. If I answer couple of CR questions and get the SC question than I try to find the gap in the argument instead of finding grammar issues (I mean to say that my mind is taking time to switch from SC mode to CR mode or vice versa, it may seems to be funny but this issue is causing me to waste considerable amount of time)

hmm -- could you explain to me how that's possible?



i mean ... the different types of verbal questions don't look anything like each other. the SC's have an underline, and their choices are 5 sentence fragments that look a lot like each other. the CR's have a passage, with a question underneath, and 5 choices that are normal (and very different) sentences.

I think I have not articulated my issue properly. Its not that my thought process is getting confused, from last 3 months I made my mind in such a way that I should criticize sentences in my work emails and blogs etc.. May be because of this I may be trying to find issues in CR problems as well.

Thanks a lot for your reply.

[lunarpower]

I think I have not articulated my issue properly. Its not that my thought process is getting confused, from last 3 months I made my mind in such a way that I should criticize sentences in my work emails and blogs etc.. May be because of this I may be trying to find issues in CR problems as well.

Thanks a lot for your reply.

i'm not sure how the following 2 statements can coexist -- (1) i'm looking for grammatical issues in CR problems, (2) i'm not confused.
i.e., from where i sit, (1) is pretty good proof of rather severe confusion -- or incredibly severe distraction, which, at the end of the day, is not really all that different from confusion in its effects.

in any case, if you have trouble with the barrier between CR and SC (two problem types that are totally unrelated and don't look like each other at all), then i'm a bit worried about whether you can properly distinguish between CR types, or between RC types. do you find that these sometimes blend into each other, too?
remember that being able to distinguish between the different problem types is *very* important -- the different problem types demand not only different strategies, but actually different modes of thinking.