Hi All
I scored another mid 6XX score just a couple of hours ago - my head is aching for some reason, although I felt really well through the entire exam apart from the last 10 verbal questions may be when I started losing focus. My gmat Journey started a year ago. I did not know anything about gmat and about gmat club (I encountered this wonderful resource only in august when i failed my 2nd retake). Now I think I am missing the R2 deadlines as well.
Stages of preparationI scored 470 on the first free gmat prep exam, I was skipping many questions. LOL. It was a painful experience but GMAC recommended students take the cat right away. After that I bought only offical gmac pack for $250 which arrived on december 31 last year and went through the breadth of questions and again as suggested by gmac I registered for 18 May. My approach can be briefly characterized as "solve all the questions by the test day". I was not paying much of attention to concepts I did't get and felt well about it.
. Surprisingly the 10 pages dedicated to the math section in the
OG were not enough! And I started to google and look through Khan acad and through my sister's old high school math study guide. I tried to learn by heart the solutions to the probability and combinatorics questions.
So at that stage I only dealt with
OG full package and solutions in the free exams.
1.
100% self study with OG only - December 2014 to May 2015My next attempt earned me already 590 in about 1 month. My scores were hovering since then around 600. The highest scores I got were Veritas 650 in April and GMAT Prep 4 660 2 days before the May exam. I have taken all the available free tests I think (Economist, Kaplan,
MGMAT, GMAT Pill, etc.). When googling for the free tests I figured out that veritas and manhattan probably have the most sophisticated platforms and arguably are the leaders of the gamt market. They were expensive for me anyway - I was never eager to spend that much on prep courses and I strongly adhere to the same opinion even after having studied full 1.7k course with veritas (later on that).
So the May exam
(GMAT 1) passed with IR7, AWA 5, QUANT 40 (PS 40 percent, DS60 percent) and Verbal 37 (CR 53, RC77, SC96) and 640 overall - I ve got the GMAC enhanced report on that (useless mostly). This was a hectic experience. I rushed through the last 5 questions on both sections. Quant seemed sort of weird I struggled to decipher the stem and translate it into algebra.
2.
Veritas prep course - June-August 2015This score was way far below my target score and I went on to see what prep companies offer. I was weighting between Manhattan adn Veritas but chose Veritas mainly because of their CAT which was the closest to my actual exam. So I decided these guys know their stuff well. The Veritas staff was very helpful and responsive even during the weekend when I was deciding which prep company to choose. However after the deal was done the response rate fell dramatically from several hours to 3-4 days when I was trying to clarify the misguiding explanations in the CATs - ultimately they neither accepted the error not blamed themselves. LOL. OK.
So June-July I was taking the live courses with Ravi and diligently completing every homework assignment. Ravi is a great guy in terms of demonstrating how a 99% testtaker cracks the gmat. However I now realise all those prep courses are not a panacea against gmat: they just can lift you to some average degree or provide general understanding of what to expect from gmat whereas the hardest thing you should do on your own. If I knew that I would not have bought the full course but rather take the on-demand (1k) which still is overpriced imho.
i must admit veritas has created the real pearls among the gmat guides: these are the combinatorics and statistics, word problems and DATA SUFFICIENCY. I got from a friend of mine the
mgmat guides in august so I can compare.
UNFORTUNATELY my scores were not improving I was stagnating around 630. Worst of all my verbal slipped. Anyway I decided to take the exam after having reviewed the materials past the course. And on August 3 I failed - immediately cancelled the score - around 550 or so
(GMAT 2). Can`t remember the split. This was a disaster. I was sorry about the money, time and effort.
this was my veritas prep partnership period. costly and discouraging.
3.
GMAT CLUB+Error Log, and feverous November 30 exam - August-November 2015in august i encountered gmat club - i was even more sorry i had not discovered this treasure before! about a week worth time i spent browsing the GC resources. i found out that i should have done the
error log which i started hastily to stuff up by my previous exams. quite quickly i realized i was sucking in number properties and arithmetic. I can upload my
error log which now has about 600 quant questions. i discovered i can reset gmat prep tests and take them again which i did and scored 710 first time with quant 49 (19 mistakes! if you do not beleive go and look my
error log there is a separate sheet created for that cat with the 37 questions split) the rest retakes were around 680-700.
I bought the 6
mgmat cats - the maximum score i gained was 660 (q45,v39). their math is weird as many members tell and i reconfirm. i bought the powerscore cr bible which helped me enormously but well i am still struggling with assumption questions. and veritas devotes only a couple of pages to assumptions in OTK section at the end of CR book. i think the Powerscore book hepled to streamline my approach in CR to some extent - the book is wordy, passages are long. However the several most important things do boil down in your brain: embrace the stimuli, make it your own, dissect the arguement structure and only then go to the answers. The
mgmat CR guides advises to write down the structure in a brief form which I tried to do but then only exercised this for number loaded paras as the approach is way time consuming.
i was retaking the gmat prep test again - these were already 3d and 4th attempts (only quant because I already had learnt the answers in verbal) the scores were 48-49 in quant. so now i am out of cat preps apart from
mgmat which i have not retaken yet and 4 veritas cats not retaken + 9 gmat club quants.
as for gmat club quant i started from q39, was scoring around this for 7-8 tests then later i had several q44-45 and 48 once. as for accuracy i think among the 3d party testmakers veritas are doing the closest thing. later about that below when i will talk about my latest attempt.
so this time i devoted a lot of time to
error log, analyzing where my weaknesses lie. out of the pool of 500-600 questions i revealed that either by the proportion or by the repeated mistake rate or both the most troublesome areas are: inequalities and absolute values, remainders, and questions involving algebra heavy manipulations where I either cannot reintepret correctly the data or make silly mistakes in calculations or manipulate algebraically in a different way. LOL
I made notes of every study guide I had, reviewed the on-demand lessons: veritas,
mgmat (number properties guide just rocks!) and laid out the concepts in a structured way on paper - say combinatorics and stats took me 4 pages, geom 2 pages, etc with formulas, tips that i considered important and nota benes. so by now i can reproduce any formula because i can visualise them in the way i wrote them. LOL i have always been good in memorizing different stuff but math has always been my weak area. though i execeled the class in geom in high school.
So i scheduled my next exam on November 30. BUT the bad thing about this attempt is that i got sick just 1 week before the exam and had to sit it with my temp above 37C. this was a nasty infection which developped out of the last weeks stress and peaked during 2 days before the exam and was fevering me during a week after. i scored 590
(GMAT 3) on that with ir 4 quant 43 and v29 - which i could not conceive already from question 10. besides that the test center failed to do their job properly - i sat before the pc 30 mins past the scheduled 10 am because the admin could not start the machine. LOL. i cancelled the score and went home to take treatment. the infection was still troubling me during last week, with temp rising sporadically during evenings.
e-gmat free webinars: i did not get the pre-thinking method! what i derived from that personally: pre-thinking=personalising=getting engaging with the situation more personaly and closer. assumption questions are still hard for me. quant webinars are good, the wavy method for absol and inequalities was eye openning.
4.
TOEFL and Gmat December 21, error log - December 2015so week 30 to dec 6 i spend taking medical care - on sunday i took the vertias quant retake and scored ironically the same score can you beleive? lol quant 43 and verbal 29. since then is started looking at veritas cats as at a more valuable resource to predict my score. although their verbal is a bit harder than the real thing and scoring is insane in verbal i must admit veritas cats have reconfirmed my desease affected score. what`s more today I again have scored 43 and 4 days ago on another veritac cat quant only i again score 43!!! guys you need to reconsider the prediction power of the veritas cats.
but this is a small digression. from dec 6 to dec 12 i prepared for toefl - still ill - no gmat - took toelf on dec 13, now awaiting results. their online toefl official prep exam gave me 104 with speaking the lowest. imho toefl is peanuts for gmat takers. reading is lenghty but easy to trace the answers back, listening is just about taking every detail, writing is a cakewalk, topics are general and not hard. speaking should be given thourough practice for one to become able to give the answer within 60 secs. i am a bit concerned about my speaking score.
anyway after returning from the toefl test centre i found out that my local gmat test center has one available slot on dec 21 so i booked that to take another chance. during this last week i started feeling much better, the nasty infection retreated - men take care of your health, i literally overstudied during november and it reflected on me. these 2 weeks were also a good opportunity to relax from work and pause on gmat. so during the last week i decided i would just go through the
error log quant which i did. on friday evening i turned off my laptop and read the entire the lord of flies during the weekend, watching some of the barclays PL games and this was the first time my anxiety had passed away. i was so relaxed and calm to the extent of indiffirence about the exam. i was at the test center at 9:15 the same admin guiltily hasted to register me and log me in first. LOL.
GMAT 4. awa run smoothly i was in a good mood, i was done 7 minutes before the timer but decided to add one more para desriving another questionable assumption and it ate my time and left only with 30 sec to spare. ok. IR: my strategy this time was to conserve energy for quant: i was skipping the quant heavy tasks and concentrated on multi source (2) graphs and table. by q 10 i had 5 minutes to spare. energy concerved. multi source reasoning questions have become tougher, they resembled me the
mgmat IR
took the break, red bull quant: i decided to solve correctly the first 10-11 questions whaever it takes me. spent too much on first question - this was algebra manipulation. on question 7 i got a triple overlapping set which i think i got wrong. again i was making the same mistake: stubbornly spent more than 5 mins on hard questions. further on i had 2 probability quesitons including DS, 1 or combinatorics (graph based, was closer to IR actually), 1 absolute value, surprisingly i got the same geom question i got 3 weeks ago lol. i am starting to think gmac does not have that deep question base that is why they are not releasing more gmapt prep cats. on november 30 i also encountered a question which was almost a copy paste from
OG. rushed through the last 5 questions.
verbal: i faced one very familiar bold face CR quesiton: that we want to preserve the environment and that real esatet companies can pay high price for the land and grab it, alternatively farmers would not leave if they can grow good crops on the land but they need financial resources and some other two reasons. there was also another BF in the last 5 questions which I think i dumped because i was rushing and the assumptiion quesitons somewhere in the 38-39. the RC passages were biology and social sciences not that hard but lenghty (4 paras). i struggled with a couple of SC questions. and i got 3 "logically complete" CR questions!
GOING FORWARDdunno. i think i will retake. i am waiting for the gmac decision on my novermber 30 test which i would like either to cancel entirely or get refund at least. i will be focusing on the official materials now - because last time i opened
og was may. and all i saw during the 2 recent exams was a 95% taste of the
og and gmat prep in terms of wording, formulating questions, aha moments. i also have found last week that many
og questions are not actually medium but rather hard level if the gmat club metric is any guide. the samlping is considerbale - about 1000 answers to every
og question so the difficulty level assigned by gmac is not 100% accurate.
UPDATES
1. What I struggled with
QUANT generally: feeling anxious when after 1 min passed i still have not translated the stem into algebra and still. In DS initially I used to rush into statements however thanks to Bunuel's algebra inclinded approach I know spent major time on manipulating the stem - this helped a lot, after manipulation often statements then just jump at you as ready answers. this increased my confidence, overall i do better in DS than in PS.
having one tonns of questions in number properties and arithmetic i have really improved my accuracy. however i still hate number picking when i need to reconfirm statements in DS especially those E DS questions.
in word problems i really struggle with abstract distance problems when variables are involved and sometimes heavy algebra manipulation is required - i try picking smart numbers but feel very anxious about the process.
started loving combinatorics questions although during the first gmat i was just skipping them.
i struggle with timing. i am stubborn. i have set for myself the following timing strategy: 15 questions=45 min left, 25 questions=25 questions left. however i am greedy and cannot adhere to the strategy in the majority of cases.
VERBAL: CR assumption. although CR BIBLE PowerScore helped me I am still struggling. I have bought a couple of LSAT tests and tried 2 sets of LR questions as suggested by Atlantic GMAT here on the forum: he says they are the most closest CR questions to GMAT in terms of quality if your take only relevant questions. Well let us see.
MGMAT CR is strange and simpler than the real thing, veritas is just different. anyway I ve expensed all the resources I have on the CR so LSAT offers thousands of questions, good practice. for some reason i am good at bold face may be because i am good in SC as BF requires only to dissect the structure.
SC: meaning based questions do create head ache, sometimes i forget idioms: whether to use with or in etc. basically i just read the the stem as it is and try to understand what the guy is trying to say then skim down and eliminate choices. on average sc takes me 1.5 min, accuracy above 90%.
RC: after trying the veritas STOP method i returned to my good practice: just read to death the passage - usually first read takes me 1.5-2 min then i read again more thourougly so on average i finish up with reading in 5 mins sometimes more but then i just breeze through the questions spending not more than 30 secs on each. on specific quesitons i have to return sometimes. nevertheless average time spent on 14 rc questions in verbal is 2 mins even with spending 5 or more min on 1st quesstion.
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Updated on: 04 Jan 2016, 01:19
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