Hi Ali,
Please don’t take my improvement too seriously because there were around 6-7 questions repeated in both sections. But still, there are some improvements.
Materials used:
- OG11 and the 2 supplementary books
-
MGMAT SC
- GMAT Club Forums – I used to ask questions for which OE is unavailable
- GMAT Club Challenge (haven’t started yet)
IMO, these 4 are most relevant to the real questions and are essential to score high in the real exam. IMO again, you don’t need anything else otherwise you will lose focus.
Here is my approach to prepare Quan:
(1) Do all question in OG11 and 2 books. Timed yourself.
(2) Do GMATPrep 1.
(3) Research your weak areas (combinations for me). Google the relevant contents and study in GMATClub Quan Forum. If your speed is too slow, you need more practice until you are familiar with the question types. Don’t worry, the day will come soon.
- Take
MGMAT 1-3.
- Redo all questions in OG11, the 2 books and
MGMAT 1-3. And tell yourself how stupid you are when you repeat the mistakes or “invent” new mistakes. So you will remember better.
- Take
MGMAT 3-4
- Retake GMAT Prep 1 (where I am now)
- Redo all wrong in all previous exercises.
- Take GMATPrep 2. (likely be an indicator for your final score).
- Take
MGMAT 5-6, GMATClub Challenge to perfect your skills
- Retake GMATPrep 2
Things that I did routinely/continuously:
- Log errors. Write down the important concepts, rules or shortcuts you discovered when doing exercise.
- Review the concepts and shortcuts every week
For Verb, my strategy is similar. What I think important are:
- Do OG11 and the supplementary questions twice
- For the SC questions, do at least 3 times
- Focusing on the speed when doing SC, aim at finishing within 30 sec (my time is 70 sec after doing all questions once)
- Then, you will have more time on RC and CR. As a non-native speaker, I think these 2 sections have no shortcut, I need sufficient time to understand the passages before visiting the questions.
Last but not least, searched this forum, you will find many successful stories. Read the hints form the 700ers, try to understand why they scored high. I can remember a few which are very important (sorry that I forgot the names of the authors):
- for RC or CR, when you have 2 very close answer left, focus on the meaning of the key words, instead of the overall meaning of the sentences to find out the subtle difference.
- try to finish AWA ASAP to leave more energy for the next 2 sections
- be careful of (C)-trap in DS
- if you are unsure about a SC question which is of 2-3 split, like this one:
(A) ….. derived … as ….unconstitutional… .
(B) ….. derived … as ….. unconstitutional ….
(C) ….. derived … ….. unconstitutional
(D) ….. derived … ….. unconstitutional
(E) ….. derived … ….. unconstitutional
lean to the 3 (i.e. C, D, E)
- In Quan, if you can’t even think of how to approach a question in the first 1.5 minutes, skip it, because it is unlikely for you to answer it correctly within the next 1 minute.
- you should have the determination to skip questions; and you should not give up too easily. Try to strike a balance between them. One solution is to practice more, then you will less likely to see unfamiliar question types. And if you can finish easy questions faster, you have more time for the difficult ones. And when you build up your experience, you will be able to spot the question type you cannot answer within 2 mins, so you know you have to skip. Again don’t abuse the skip.
- I cannot emphasize enough the importance of practicing SC, because it is the only section you can reliably improve the hit rate through practice. And you can improve the speed.
- You should maintain an
error log. Questions you got wrong in the 1st time will likely trap you again. But after they successfully trapped you twice. You will remember them and revenge : )
- During your idle time (e.g. waiting a bus), try to summarize mentally what you learnt last night. E.g. Any new question types? What are the tricky ones? Are they distance-velocity-time type? Ratio/proportion? Word problem? Factor? Inequality? Why they are tricky to you? This is a very useful exercise for me. Now when I see a question, I can immediately open my mental directory, and I will remember the relevant questions I did.
- Try to memorize the rules/concepts/shortcuts. E.g. if you know the ratio of A to B only, you cannot find out the ration of A+3 to B+3 in DS. E.g. for consecutive series, if you know the number of terms, you know the SD, you do not need to know the exact value of any term. These rules are simple, you can prove them by inserting numbers. But if you memorize the rules, you can answer those questions in 5 sec.
- more rules: almost all numbers have even number of positive factors. Even prime number has two factors, (i.e. 1 and the prime number itself). One exception is the number equal to the square of a prime number, e.g. 4, 9, 25, they all have exactly 3 factors, i.e. 1, the prime number and the sq of the prime number
- if x=y if a bisector of line segment AB, if the coordinates of A is (x,y), then B should be (y,x)
close
Updated on: 16 Aug 2008, 00:43
