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Sameer
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my experience Updated on: 29 Jun 2004, 22:36
Originally posted by Sameer on 26 Oct 2003, 21:34.
Last edited by Sameer on 29 Jun 2004, 22:36, edited 1 time in total.
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My GMAT was over two weeks back. I waited for the official scores to come along with awa before posting.


I have not had a chance to post on this board for more than a month now. I wish to thank BB, Akamai, Stolyar and all other friends who have supported me and many others through their fight with the GMAT.

Experience:
The quant section starts off very easy, then gradually gets tougher. IMO ETS considers a DS question tougher than a PS :-) since whenever I was sure that I had cracked the PS correctly, the next question was a DS. - Ha ! just joking !
Verbal was tougher than OG. Suggest OG and Kaplan as better bets for preparation.

I would strongly recommend writing awa essays everytime you do a full length test, it helps a lot to get a 6 score since EVERY form asks for this detail.
The full length tests of Princeton are bad. Others tests available on the net are also not upto the mark. 800 score is different, not GMAT style, but good for practice. Kaplan is better but their scoring is not perfect, there is some software bug since even when the answer is correct, (as in their explanation) , the scoring system takes it wrong. Anyway , good practice.
Last month was completely spent with OG.
Take PP's before you plan to assault the OG.

Please feel free to ask for any suggestions and help.

Warm regards
Anupag
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vaka
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my experience 27 Oct 2003, 10:03
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Anupag

Congratulations, man!
I'm sure soon you'll face a problem of making a choice among those top 10 schools that will send you an acceptance letter! If you of course apply to them. I am sure you will given your great score. :cool

Well, I have a rather specific question to you. I have 1 month before the test, but I feel that I am desperately weak in RC. I am looking for solution how to improve my RC skills in a short term perspective. Well, after learning the theory and doing some practicing with OG and Kaplan I understood that it takes me too long to approach with the answer. Ecpecially inference questions. Well, despite the fact that almost all materials teach that one doesn't need to know all the details to answer the question, I feel that it doesn't work with non native speakers - inference questions can not be answered by simply searching for correct answer using anchor phrase. I takes time to comprehend the text and make clear what each paragraph is written for. Are there any special approaches to the problem? I am tired of making 7-8 mistakes in 18 questions each time I practice RC.
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bluefox420
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my experience 27 Oct 2003, 12:56
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Congratulations!

Can you recommend some good resources for AWA preparation?

Thanks.
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Sameer
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my experience 27 Oct 2003, 20:30
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1. Awa preparation is inbuilt in the PP and the Kaplan CD's. Also the toefl CD which comes alongwith the exam toolkit from ETS is a good source. Many previous GMAT takers were of the opinion that you try to prepare all the topics at the end of OG, I tried that and found myself in a bottomless pit and had to abandon it. Net, The basic rules given at the end of OG for awa are the best bet. Sentence structuring, transition phrases, paragraph modeling and making sure that there are no , absolutely no , spelling mistakes while typing are some of the basic rules. One may like to give at least two examples in both the areas of AWA.

2. RC - I had a similar problem to start with. I found the material of Kaplan book a much better preparation ground. The icing on the cake is OG. There is NO other preparation material for RC that comes even close. IMO, it is imperative that one does RC from OG in a systematic way. The RC answers in OG are very well defined and this is where the maximum time and attention goes. Please make sure that you touch OG AFTER you are through with both the powerprep tests. May be one can take one/two passages per day and practice with the answers after having attempted the questions. Do let me know of this exercise.

3. Download the Free GRE Powerprep. This ETS software also has some pretty interesting practice for both AWA and RC - and it is coming from ETS, free !. Don't miss it.

Best of Luck.
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chihao
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my experience 28 Oct 2003, 14:10
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anupag
1. Awa preparation is inbuilt in the PP and the Kaplan CD's. Also the toefl CD which comes alongwith the exam toolkit from ETS is a good source. Many previous GMAT takers were of the opinion that you try to prepare all the topics at the end of OG, I tried that and found myself in a bottomless pit and had to abandon it. Net, The basic rules given at the end of OG for awa are the best bet. Sentence structuring, transition phrases, paragraph modeling and making sure that there are no , absolutely no , spelling mistakes while typing are some of the basic rules. One may like to give at least two examples in both the areas of AWA.

2. RC - I had a similar problem to start with. I found the material of Kaplan book a much better preparation ground. The icing on the cake is OG. There is NO other preparation material for RC that comes even close. IMO, it is imperative that one does RC from OG in a systematic way. The RC answers in OG are very well defined and this is where the maximum time and attention goes. Please make sure that you touch OG AFTER you are through with both the powerprep tests. May be one can take one/two passages per day and practice with the answers after having attempted the questions. Do let me know of this exercise.

3. Download the Free GRE Powerprep. This ETS software also has some pretty interesting practice for both AWA and RC - and it is coming from ETS, free !. Don't miss it.

Best of Luck.
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Hi anupag
I have a similar problem with previous post.............
RC section for non-native takers is very difficiult because we have not enough vocabulary to tackle this articles. Take example, I could crack those question in an essay if I comprehended this whole essay, digesting into summary in own word. In contrast, I can't do well on those question even though I have learned reading skills from books.
Thus, I begin to memorize amount vocabularies to deal with RC section.
In addition,in CR exercise, I have tired of doing questions of OG and kaplan . Could you think whether I re-take those questions in OG and Kaplan or shall I scout for new materials as practice ? In fact, I find CR section is difficult to improve obviously in scores. I tried the way from kaplan to tackle CR, but I find I still don't do well on practice test. Do you have the alternative way ? I think I need your help.............
Thank you!
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Sameer
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my experience 29 Oct 2003, 04:20
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I am also a non-native speaker and I have also struggled with the same problem. I do believe two things
1. Somehow whenever we try to redo a question, we will always end up with the right answer and that too in a very short time. Therefore recycling questions just does not work. That is why we need to do PP before OG. And therefore my advice would be to NEVER take a test again, it would be a waste of time. This also means that one needs to be extremely careful before attempting a test, since quality questions are very very few - PP and Kaplan tests are probably the only good sources.

2. CR took a lot of time for me to get closer to being 80-90% correct responses. I found Kaplan practice exercises and explanations to be the basic. Then we need to assault OG, question by question. There is no point in doing a lot of questions and just see the answers for a right/wrong analysis. The support from OG comes from its depth of responses for the answers - and this is what takes up a lot of time.

For me, since I come back from office only after 9:00 pm, it was a hard struggle. I am sure luck will smile on all of you !
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