Dear targetgmat87,
Welcome to the GMAT Club community. You are at the right place to prepare for GMAT. The community support and resources that you get here are exemplary.
First of all I commend you for approaching your preparation in a step by step manner. You are doing the right thing by first planning your preparation and then executing the same. I see that with suggestions from other community members and with your understanding of your own skills, you have devised a plan of action for achieving 710+ score in your test.
In my response below, I will highlight the aspects of your plan that work and the aspects that do not work. For the aspects that do not work, I will provide you sufficient guidance so that you can change your plan accordingly.
What works in your plan?
1. You have decided to prepare for SC first and then CR. This is the optimum order. SC gives you the confidence of reading and understanding on a single sentence level. And to do well in CR, comprehension of sentences is one of the core skills because in CR you have to understand a group of sentences that make up the passage.
2. You have accounted for time for preparing for Quant. Many students make this mistake of not preparing for Quant since they feel very confident in the subject, but this over-confidence severely impacts their quant score.
What does not work in your plan?
1. You are preparing for SC using 3 different books.All the three books that you have mentioned in your plan teach the concepts that are tested in Sentence Correction. Now the concepts for SC remain the same. After all they are solid accepted grammar rules of English language. Yes each book may have a slightly different approach in teaching the concepts, but the concepts that you learn from each book are the same. So there is no benefit of you learning the concepts from 3 different books. Frankly this aspect of your plan relies on the assumption that the more books your read, the better prepared you will be. In reality, this assumption is absolutely invalid since reading the two books after reading the first one is simply donkey’s work.
Secondly, one key ingredient that you are missing in your preparation is “Application” and books because of their very format (static and linear) don’t do as great a job teaching application as Online self-paced courses or classroom courses do. Now are the ingredients any good if the recipe does not exist. Likewise, just learning the concepts without knowing how to apply those concepts to solve GMAT questions is not enough.
Here is how I suggest you begin your SC preparation. The materials for initial steps are available to your free of charge.
1. View the recording of live session
“How to Prepare for Sentence Correction” a. This session will set the tone for what you need to focus on to ace SC. It will tell you how to use
e-GMAT resources to prepare for SC.
2. Register on
e-GMAT account for a free account.
3. In the free trial, access the following concepts of SC. The intent of attempting these concepts is for you to experience how concepts and application are tied together in the SC course.
a. Comparisons – Usage of Like
b. Comparisons – Usage of As
c. Comparisons – As vs. Like
d. As vs. Like Application File
After doing these files you will see how you would be able to solve questions pertaining to these concepts so very effectively.
e. Modifiers – Verb-ing and Verb-ed
Go through this file and see for yourself how well you can retain the concepts.
Essentially, you do not need to prepare SC by using the books. The course above will teach you everything from foundation concepts to basic concepts to their application to advanced concepts and their application. See how
Rishi improved in SC after using
e-GMAT SC course.
2. You are preparing for CR using 2 different books.
Whatever I said for SC also applies here. In fact for CR it may be even more detrimental to prepare using two books. Why? Since CR is a test of reasoning. Now the concepts covered in CR may differ from one book to another since the concepts really lead you to how to approach CR questions. So if you do read CR from two different books, you are bound to get confused since now you will get two sets of approaches for different question types without any unifying theme.
I would also recommend that you take a look at the
e-GMAT CR course. The audio-visual course of CR covers all the concepts that you need to ace CR. It teaches you the proven “pre-thinking” method for CR.
3. Your preparation strategy for RC includes reading as much as possible.In this discussion, you have indicated that you read 1 novel per week. You also read newspaper every day. Great!! You certainly are an avid reader. So now tell me, if this extent of reading has not helped you do well in RC, then how by doing the same thing, i.e. reading, you expect to do better in RC.
Believe me you are not alone in making “reading more” your way of preparing for RC. Many aspirants have this notion that if they read more they will be able to do well in RC. Here is why this notion is flawed: When you read for pleasure such as reading a novel,
• You do not draw inferences while reading.
• You do not wonder about the intent of a certain paragraph.
• You do not think why the author used a certain phrase or expression.
• You do not ponder about the main point of the passage.
• You do not try to infer the meaning of a certain unknown word. You skip that word and continue reading since in most cases not knowing that word does not impact your understanding of the novel.
All the things above that you DO NOT DO, you need to do to ace Reading Comprehension section. And this is why “reading as much as you can” DOES NOT give the desired results when it comes to acing RC section.
So here is what I recommend you do for RC:
1. View the recording of live session
How to Prepare for Reading Comprehension a. This session will introduce you to the key reading strategies that you need to master in order to ace RC.
2. In the free trial, access the following concepts of RC. The intent of attempting these concepts is for you to experience how concepts and application are tied together in the RC course.
a. Main Point Concept 1
b. Main Point Concept 2
c. Main Point Practice Quiz 1
After doing these files you will see how you are able to approach RC main point questions so easily. You will learn what you need to do to ace the RC course.
4. You plan to appear for mocks every week
You are correct that you want to track your progress as you are preparing. However using mock tests for this purpose is not optimum. To understand why, you need to focus on the KEY feature of GMAT – Adaptive.
Remember verbal section includes all three sub sections – SC, CR, and RC. And the test is adaptive, implying that you will get progressively more difficult questions if you answer correctly and you will get progressively easier questions if you answer incorrectly.
With this understanding, let’s consider the weekend after week 1. You have prepared for SC. You have improved well in SC. You take the mock. You are able to answer SC questions correctly but as you get to CR and RC, you are not able to do well so the algorithm considers your overall level as low, which includes SC as well. So now even for SC you get easier questions. So in essence even though you prepared well for SC, you will see that your overall verbal score will not improve much. There are other things that may happen and throw you off but that is for the discussion on why
accuracy is not the correct measure to gage progress.
So we have concluded that mocks are not the right tool to use to track one’s progress during the preparation stage. You may have two questions:
1. How should I track my performance then?
2. What is the purpose of mocks?
Let’s take up each question one by one.
How to Track Performance while preparing for GMAT?
In
e-GMAT course, there are practice quizzes throughout the course. So as you go learn the concepts and learn how to apply those concepts through the application files, you also take these practice quizzes to see how well you are doing.
Furthermore, all
e-GMAT students who purchase any of our verbal or GMAT bundled courses, get access to Scholaranium. Scholaranium is an Exam Prep tool that will help estimate your ability. Click
here to see how to estimate your progress.
So essentially to track progress you do the following:
1. While attempting the course, track your progress using the practice quizzes in the course itself.
2. After completing the course, track your progress using Scholaranium.
What is the purpose of mocks?
Mocks are tools that help with test-readiness once you know the concepts and the approach to the questions. They help to simulate the test like environment and give you a platform to practice your timing strategies. So you should take mocks once you reach a certain ability level, i.e. once you have completed all your course work and have mastered the process to a certain degree. If you take the mocks during your preparation, then you will end up wasting them as explained above.
Hence, to conclude – prepare for various sections of verbal first, estimate your ability using Scholaranium, and take mocks when you are done preparing for the three sessions.
With appropriate planning and the right resources, you can reach your target GMAT score, the way
Suren did.
Pooja with immaculate planning got 740. And likewise see how
cchu92got his 760.
I hope this helps you plan your preparation better. Do let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Payal
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27 Jan 2015, 07:30
