A challenge. Edit. : Completed. Debrief 760 (Q50 V 44)

14

Okay, I finalised a date.

Also took GmatPrep Test 1. The results were slightly surprising.

690 (Q50 V 34)

Quant , I was slightly apprehensive about a 47+ .
While 50 is okay,I had to rush on the last few.
Need to solve 'em faster.

Verbal - now that's a shocker. Haven't started my verbal prep , just randomly solved a few questions here and there.
Think I took it for granted, good wake up call.
Need to tackle verbal systematically, else its gonna take me to the cleaners.

The overall score is a bit of a bummer.
Could've done better, but I gave the full test including AWA and IR as well... and this was the first.
While an 80 point improvement in two weeks is stiff, I still think it is doable, given that I will improve my Verbal score largely over the week and test taking should get better with more tests.

IR - 8.0
Dunno if thats good or bad or ugly, and at this point I dont really care.
Will look at that next weekend.
Seems alright though.


A couple of things have happened over the weekend that have really reinforced the direction I plan to take in the next few months.

Uninstalled https://gmatclub.com/chat.
Spoke to the girl, convinced her not meeting for 2 weeks was a good thing.
Started working out again.
My WTP is back, stronger then ever.

Sand Tiger is back.

keep it up...
u r goin good

Archit

Thanks Archit

CR it is today.

Crazy workload in office, so hmm.

best of luck mate
keep going

Thanks Warrior.

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of **** every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

13

One point would like to mention: We have a certain limit of willpower which can be increased over long term but not in a matter of days or a few weeks. The willpower is highest in the morning and decreases as the day progress and we do things that tax our willpower.
The point is you have set 3 goals: losing wt, not smoking and GMAT. All these tax will power from one source. If you focus on one goal at a time chance of sustaining your goals is higher.

There are actually two different schools of thought on this Abhi.

One school of thought talks about a limited amount of willpower which can be increased with practice over a period of time -- a sort of parallel to stamina or muscle building.
The reason most people fail challenges which take on changing multiple aspects of behaviour is attributed to the fact that we are limited on will power and can only do so much.
There's also some corresponding biological research that suggests that our willpower also decreases with the decrease in glucose in the body -- that needs to be maintained at a certain optimum level. Makes good, logical, verifiable sense.


There is another school of thought, which essentially says that the amount of willpower we have is the amount of willpower we believe to have. Have you ever seen someone turn around their lives at a moment after the death of a loved one, or reading something that touched them? The amount of will power that you have is practically limitless if you keep feeding it with fear,or fire, or anger, whichever works. This is what separates the obsessed from the motivated, the elite from the great, the Michael Jordans and the Will Smiths and the Napolean Bonapartes and the Godfathers from the rest of the world. It is not a passive belief either (as has been verified in controlled experiments that people who believe in the latter exhibit much more will power doing the same tasks than people who believe their will power is finite... the research paper is out there on the internet somewhere). See also --> Cognitive Dissonance, and Method Acting. I assure you they are related.

Of course, neither school is completely right, neither is completely wrong. Will power is an abstract quality, easiest to have, toughest to keep.

Sorry for the rant.

Thank you for the motivation.

12

Great Results..Keep it up Sandtiger, less than 2 weeks left:)

Don't forget to give regular full length tests(with breaks)...sitting 4 hours handling the pressure is the all that going to mark the difference...in between check your error log what went wrong in the test and in practice...

Thanks guys, very good advice.


Heavy workload in office for the past two days - i think we've managed to complete the whole week's scheduled activities in these two days.

Was hoping to complete SC by eod today, I've barely started

Gonna be a long night tonight.


I wish I had more time to prepare for the exam. I wish I could take holidays, and take breaks, and not sit through the night every night. I wish I got a scholarship, and a nice house by the sea. I'm sooooo tired. My head hurts. I'm afraid my eyes will pop out. I wish life wasn't so hard.
Or maybe, I'm just a lazy bum.

11

Sentence correction - MGMAT
plus 28 Qs from that set
plus 700+ Qs from the other set --> around 165?

so that's 3/4th of the book and 190 odd Qs after that.
Very doable.


***************************

Finished the book, the earlier set and 25 of the latter.

My accuracy is still around the 80 % mark, but I'm solving 'em much better and faster than Sunday's gmatprep.

Should have this in reasonably well rounded by EOD, so that I can start with CR tomorrow

********************************

SC overload for today.
Getting sick of SC... a quick review on Saturday perhaps, and a preparatory CR introduction tonight so that there are no starting troubles with CR tomorrow.

No more posts.
Gn folks.

10

CR has been cool.. up until now.
Note taking is considerably slower than usual, but im going to persist with it, for all of today atleast.

MGMAT plus the SC problems. Try to get in a 100 - 150 problems in by EOD

Cheers.

*******************

Holy mother of god only nine days remaining and so much to do.



How much can a human brain sustain?
Guess its time to find out.

Mustn't lose the faith.

Okay so the main purpose of this thread was to chronicle my journey from the start of the prep to the exam -- to gain insight into myself as well as bring better clarity to the whole effort (of prepping for the gmat).

While it has succeeded somewhat in both those purposes, I find myself spending an inordinately large amount of time on the forum, lurking about, reading other people's posts, and experiences, and tips and suggestions.

I find myself thinking about what to achieve in a day, so as to put it in the post -- the entire effort has reduced to a series of minor ( and highly uncalibrated ) challenges -- ticking boxes, I suppose, so that I can put that up here.

My GMAT is in ten days and its gonna come whether I am ready or not.
And ultimately, what matters is that I show up.

To those of you who have their exams scheduled before(Samvit?)mine, good luck.
I'm no longer posting here until after the exam.

See you on the other side.

Thanks,
M.

Hey Sandtiger,

All the best, see on the other side for sure.
Hope we Both cross our expected results.

Regards
Samvit

Okay wasnt going to post until the exam was done but there's a question I'm hoping someone can answer --

Gave the second gmat test prep today and there was a marked improvement in verbal -- or so i thought until the final score popped up.

Turns out that I'd got 8 questions incorrect, as opposed to 16 last time round.... but 4 of them were consecutive ones in the last five - A horrible RC.

Would that account for a lower than expected score in verbal??

At V35 it would not at higher levels it would.

Done and dusted.



Wont be sober for a while.