RESETDay 1: May 19, 2013. Verbal is killing me at the moment. All this while my prep has been too quant-focused and I've probably spent about less than 1/5th of my study time on verbal. Needless to say, the lack of verbal prep is now coming back to haunt me. The funny thing is I was great in CR! In the beginning, I was hitting an accuracy rate of 87% but then hubris set in and I let my CR prep slide. Most of the verbal questions I answered incorrectly at yesterday's Prep Test were CR. Motherf%#^&@.
Lesson learnt:Don't go on too long without practicing a particular set of questions, no matter how good you think you already are in that area.
What I did today1. Quant - Because quant is still something I need to pick up speed on, I attempted the first 30 PS questions and the first 20 DS from OG13. I've already solved all the quant problems from OG12 and while OG13 is mostly repetition, doing the sums all over again has helped seer some of the basic math principles into my head. One thing I did differently this time, I made sure I went through all the 50 questions I just worked on on the GMAT club forum. Irrespective of whether I got them right or not (happy to report I got only a total of 5 wrong; yeah I know they're the 'easy' ones but at this point I'm going to savour every little progress!). I've downloaded the GMAT Toolkit App on my ipad (a
fantastic app btw!) and one of the great things about it is that the '
OG Tracker' contains forum links to each of the
OG quant questions (all added by bunuel). So it was easy for me to navigate directly to the forum discussion for each
OG question. If you don't have the app, just Google the question up and the first links are usually the Gmatclub's links. Anyway this time consuming exercise has already opened my eyes to a few new ways of solving specific problems. Even if I answered a question correctly and it was probably one of the easiest questions in the book, I made it a point to read up on the solutions listed on the forum. I had set aside a time of 2 hours to solve all 50 questions and review the answers, but I ended up spending 3.5 hours instead. Well spent.
Another site which I refer to for
OG problems is GMAT quantum. I don't think I've ever heard anyone mention this site before. While some of the videos may seem lengthy, Mahendra Dabral does more than an excellent job of explaining
OG problems.
2. CR - I've been using the
MGMAT books for prep and I love them. Their quant books are excellent for math novices like me. I think their CR book is fine too but I have decided to give Power Score CR a try. I know it's not advisable to keep switching between books and methods, but I've just heard so many good things about this book that I have to at least glance at it. I've only finished reading till the 2nd chapter and I can already see that this book does appear to be slightly better than
MGMAT's. I wish I had picked this up in the beginning but I was put off by how thick the book was
. That being said, because I've been practicing the
MGMAT technique, I'm going to try and stick to it, while maybe interspersing it with any Power Score tips that might compliment it. After completing chapter 2 and the practice questions after it, I attempted 10 questions from
OG (medium level). 3 out of 10 wrong
But to be fair, I worked on the 10 questions after coming back from a heavy buffet dinner with my sister where I did drink a couple of glasses of wine
That's another thing I've learnt - not to put my life on hold because of this. All this while, I haven't been hanging out with my friends, going out, or even allowing myself to read my plethora of books because I've been trying so hard to not let anything make me lose my focus. But I think depriving myself all this while only made it worse because I kept spending half my study time thinking about how nice the weather was outside and how I'd much rather be doing a, b, c, or d instead of this!So if you want to do a, b, c, or d, go and do it. Just as long as you have the discipline to come back and continue where you left off. It's only been a day for me, but living this new 'philosophy' has already made me a less snappy person and it has helped me plan my time more.