Thanks for the encouragement guys. Good luck to those of you who are taking it in the next month or so. Feel free to start your own thread and we can be online study buddies!
I post every night at around 11pm. Why do I do this? It's because my goal is to take 1 gmatclub every day. I absolutely hate these tests. Sometimes the wording of the question is so bad that I cringe at the thought of answering something written by (possibly) a ten year old. Sometimes I just get really annoyed at my inability to answer the question. Most of all I hate data sufficiency because it tortures my mind and makes me think of the billion possibilities. Or it might be that I forget how to find something that I'll never need to know in real life (e.g. is 43! divisible by 3?).
Sooo... due to my hating math, I always postpone doing the gmatclub test until I'm about to go to bed. I generally procrastinate during the day dreading the awful hour where I'm tortured through the quant section. It's not that I find the section extraordinary challenging or that I can't do the problems, it's just extremely extremely annoying. Enough ranting I guess
Today when I started late at night on the math my brain was so tired and by question 5 I wanted to kill myself. I didn't learn as well as I could have but I did learn two important lessons:
1) Stop taking the test before you sleep and take it in the morning or early afternoon!
2) It was my second consecutive night getting the last two wrong in the quant section with minutes to spare, so I need to take my time to check through the last several questions instead of trying to rush through to finish it.
A bit disappointed at my results, but I know I shouldn't be results oriented. Though, at the end of the test I felt like gmatclub had violated me (like mentally raped... i was bitter
)
Test Correct Total % Correct Mean time Percentile
m03 30 37 81% 111.1665 sec 80%
As to the other goals, I did well on
mgmat word translations question bank and am getting better at combinatorics/probability. I also did 10 passages of OG11 reading comprehension (51 questions) and got 7 wrong. Not as well as I'd hoped and I'm not even sure if I'm improving. One passage I managed -3/7 so I clearly didn't understand what I was reading well enough.
I read through the
MGMAT RC guide two days ago before focusing on RC psets. I really liked the simple strategy of summarizing the passage and creating a headline list. I think their RC guide would benefit everyone, especially if you were like me and were simply passively reading the passage. However, RC is definitely the hardest to improve, and I think their guide falls short when approaching difficult passages or questions. Their strategy is very basic but doesn't go into deeper strategies on how to attack specific questions (e.g. their inference strategy is "Infer as little as possible" ... one line is all they have!).
Generally when I do an RC question the answer either jumps out at me, but in the cases where I'm debating between 2 options it would be nice to have a specific method of attacking the question. I wonder if the Powerscore LSAT RC guide mentions anything on that. Maybe if I have time I'll flip through it.
I think it's getting quite difficult to improve on RC just by doing
OG sets (generally hit or miss). To improve RC I'll just read The Economist more at night and begin to attempt harder RC passages from LSAT. Basically it's like working out. If you're trying to build muscle and you generally lift 20lb dumbbells, you're not going to get bigger just by lifting those. You gotta go for the 30lb dumbbells, get out of your comfort zone, and get used to heavier weights. Then the 20lbers will seem like a breeze.
I'll put RC on the backburner for now; maybe attempt a couple of passages every other day. I should focus on SC next and keep doing some quant work. Furthermore, I'm beginning to feel a bit burnt out. I'm average 4 good hours of studying per day though I probably spend 6 hours trying to study (2 hours of goofing off, reading gmatclub posts, talking on gchat). Though it's only the 4th day or something, I gotta start studying smarter, not harder.
Goals for tomorrow:
gmatclub test m04 (attempt before dinner!)
mgmat number properties test bank (been giving me a bit of trouble)
start
MGMAT SC (get through first five chapters)
long post, but i like typing things and tend to ramble a lot when i'm listening to relaxing music on my headphones.