Thanks for the tips. I have the
OG 12 and both Quant and Verbal smaller supplemental additions w/ additional practice sets. I was able to review my test in depth last night. Below is an in depth debrief. Please please provide advice on the verbal portion below as I found some additional insights. Thanks for all of your help!
Quant:
I am pretty good with quickly identifying questions that I don't know and need to guess on and move on. I finished the exam with 16 minutes left and scored a 42. This is pretty good news because after reviewing the exam in depth I found that I was making two types of mistakes- about 7 were simple mistakes that can be corrected I think by better allocating my time to quickly recheck. The other 8 were on 600-700/700-800 level questions and were a lack of missing the final computation step to get to the right answer.
Please let me know if you have a better suggestion on how not to make stupid mistakes or how to better allocate my time. Regarding the second type of mistakes I was making, I think this can be corrected by continuing to work difficult problem sets.
Verbal:
Timing is still an issue and I think I identified a root cause but still need advice. In reviewing my test in depth, it is clear that unlike Quant where I am able to quickly identify the problems that I should just guess to save time, I am not able to do this quickly with Verbal. For instance, my accuracy for CR 500-600 level questions is 1:45 and 75% correct, but when it comes to the 600-700/700-800 level questions, I am spending sometimes around 2:00-3.00 minutes on them and am only getting 50% correct.
The average time spending on wrong questions in this quesetion range is1:50-2:00! If I can quickly identify when to just guess and move on, I can save significant time on these harder questions. My accuracy is also less mainly for the minor question types- Is this something worth focusing on?Regarding the SC questions, I think I need to revisit verbs/parallelism/comparisons. I also found that I am narrowing the answer choices down to two and picking the wrong one and usually the correct answer at the higher levels depends on minor things like idioms/comparisons etc.
I am not that great with idioms but feel like spending time on trying to memorize them is not an effective use of my time. Do you have any suggestions? Regarding RC, I think I can still improve my speed. Overall, performace for this area is not that bad,
but I am terrible with specific detail question types. I think I need to not focus on the actual details but why that detail was placed in the passage to get these right. Is that correct? For these last two weeks, I wanted to take at least 2-3 more full lenght practice exams, structure my sessions similar to the test doing sets of 37 and 41, and memorize any quant key concepts/formulas & SC rules.
Is it time now to cut my losses and practice on questions where my strength lie? Please advise. Thanks again!!
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Updated on: 17 Apr 2012, 07:20
