Silviax wrote:
Sadly, this is exactly what I am not good at SamirAbrahao.
I was the lousiest note-taker in College. Never took any notes or if I did I just scribbled down some random stuff I never really used.
I didn't have to take notes to be good. I was a big book-person. I liked reading text books and memorized everything I needed for my tests.... dumped my memorized knowledge on the paper exam and walked away with an A. This worked 99% of the time for me and it's obviously not the way to go on the GMAT.
For many quant problems I wouldn't even know how to take notes. Word problems are probably the easiest because they can be classified very easily into distance/rate, work rate, mixing problems etc.
Some of the other stuff.... I don't even know what category they would fall under.... and this is what frustrates me too because I worked through most of the
Manhattan books and I really understand EVERYHING that is written in the strategy guides... but that's not how the GMAT test concepts. Rest assured the GMAT throws some extra curve balls at you that makes you wonder whether you have ever seen anything like this before.
Today there was this problem on the Veritas test:
The function P~ can be expressed as 2P-2 for all values of P. What is the value of (7~)~?
And I remember thinking: what in the world? What is this (7~)~? I mean, I never could have guessed that this simply means go through the function twice. Who in the world thinks about weird stuff like that?
And this happens to me a lot when I just don't understand the way the questions are phrased. No study book or online course phrases questions in a weird way like that.
Silvia,
I wouldnt have solved that problem myself even if you gave me a hundred years, because I have never seen a "tilt" signal being used in that context. If that featured in the veritas question bank, dump it. For me, not a day goes by without learning of a new reason to mistrust these 3rd party question banks.
As to the REAL GMAT questions, I know for a fact that there is a finite number of different questions that can be formulated out of the theoretical knowledge on which the test is based. Sure, it may be a large number of different questions, but eventually you'll have gone through them all several times if you keep practicing, but you have to choose the right resources - which is no small task. I would particularly avoid question banks such as veritas because they are not frequently mentioned on debriefs from what I've seen. When I'm done with Manhattan's I'm gonna be VERY cautious as to what question bank I'm gonna practice with.
Another thing to note is that I'm on the second manhattan book so far (the one about fractions) and, from what I've read,
I wouldn't call them strategy books at all! They are more like "method" books: They'll teach you efficient techniques on how modify and work with information provided by the questions, but you have to do the heavy lifting of correctly identifying all the information, how are they related to each other and how they must be used to get to the answer all by yourself. Developing these skills is not simply a matter of mere practice. I'm no expert on this subject, but I'd say this comes from being used to problem solving in general. In my case, this stems from having worked for almost a decade with troubleshooting IT-related incidents.
From the things you write, and the way you write them, it appears to me that you're a very intelligent and capable person - but the fact that you used to memorize information from books as a means to acquire knowledge may have led you to develop some bad habits with your learning process that you now have to overcome. This does not necessarily mean you should take notes. Avoid any methods you are not confortable with!!