My GMAT Diary - Walletless

All -

I thought I will create a thread discussing my weekly progress on GMAT. I have not decided on the date yet, but I think I am going to give the test around 2nd week of August.

Anyways, I started my GMAT preparation two weeks ago (May-29-2006). I am referring to the following test materials:

Books:
- OG11
- OG10
- Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction
- Kaplan Premiere

Online Materials:
- https://gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=30247 <-- Rhyme gives some excellent advice here on how to crack RC (3rd post from top).
- I posted some good permutation combination stuff in another thread. See https://www.gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=30315 for more details.

Tests:
- GMATPrep
- PowerPrep
- Kaplan test 1 & 2

My biggest problem is that my work requires a lot of travel, and while travelling, I spend about 12 hours every day with the client. This almost makes it impossible for me to study GMAT without buring out completely. So I will have few weeks in between without any progress.


Here is my weekly progress:

Week of May 29:
1) Read strategy from Kaplan 2003 on Critical Reasoning. I think this is my strongest piece from verbal section.
2) Gave all 3 CR tests on Kaplan CD - scored hit ratios of 60%, 75%, 95% respectively.
3) Did first 10 questions from OG11 - hit ratio of 80%. I took 13 minutes to finish 10 questions.
4) After each question set, I look at the official explanation in OG 11 for every question - the ones I got correct as well as incorrect. I maintain a list if questions I got incorrect, and ones that took me too long to solve.

Week of June 5:
- I was travelling all week, so I was not able to study at all

Week of June 12:
1) Solved 10 more CR questions from OG 11. Took 13 minutes, and hit ratio was 90%.
2) Read Ch.1, 2, and 3 from MGMAT SC. I also solved the suggested questions from OG 11 at the end of each of the two chapters.
3) The questions at end of ch. 1 (Basic SC concepts): There were 11 suggested OG11 questions, from which I only got 5 correct (~45% hit ratio). It took me 14 minutes to finish 11 questions. I read the official explanations to all the answers, quickly noted my mistakes, and read Ch.1 again from MGMAT SC.
4) The questions at end of Ch.2 (subject verb agreement): There were 15 questions, but I solved 16 by mistake. I got 12 correct (75% hit ratio) and took me exactly 15 minutes to solve them (<1minute per question).
5) The questions at end of Ch.3 (tenses, mood, voice): There were 17 questions. I got only 10 correct (~59% hit ratio). It took me 19 minutes to finish the questions. The bad news is, that most of my mistakes were on perfect tenses (present perfect and past perfect), and recognizing correct idioms (eg. "as many... as" instead of "so many... as"). The good news however, is that I got all questions on voice and mood correct - I will go over the perfect tense explanations again from MGMAT.
6) The questions at end of Ch.4 (Pronouns): There were 9questions, from which I got 8 correct. It took me 11 minutes.
7) Questions at end of Ch.5 (Modifiers): I got 13 on 22 correct (25 minutes). I think, this is BY far my weakest area in SC.
8) Questions at end of Ch.6 (Parallelisms): I got 25 on 36 questions correct. Most of my mistakes, however, were not related to parallelism, but rather with idioms.
9) Questions at end of Ch.7, 8, 9. I decided to solve these all together. There were exactly 41 questions combines (excluding the questions from diagnostics test, which I did separately). I only got 26 of these correct, and it took me 45 minutes to do them. The most issues I had were in these areas:
a) Dangling pointers
b) Countable vs. Non Countable comparisions (less vs. lower, much vs. many, etc).
c) Like vs. as
d) That vs. which

So far, I am doing average on Sentence correction. But I have identified areas that I need to concentrate most; so I think I should be alright. I am going to revise the concepts that I made mistakes in bullet #9 and 7 from MGMAT SC and Spidey's SC notes.

Next week (week of Jun 19) - I am going to be travelling, but I may do some quantitative stuff.
Week of Jun 26
I am back to GMAT after a long travel stint. Although I was travelling this week as well, and I did not get a lot of time to study, my flight back home was delayed, and so I decided to work on some stuff at the airport while waiting. I glanced through the Permutation/combination stuff, and all the forumlae's from the back of kaplan gmat book. I also worked through a lot of practice questions in the permuntation/combinations links I had posted in another thread (I linked the thread above as well). Then I solved all the practice questions for PS in Kaplan and surprisingly, I got ALL 25 questions correct! great job!
I took the saturday off to rest a little - I was very tired with the travel and all. On Sunday, I gave the first practive test on Kaplan gmat 2004 CD. There were 16 questions and I scored 15 correct (made a VERY silly mistake on the one incorrect question). It took me 20 minutes to finish these. The questions were kinda easy - no questions on permutation/combination/probability. There were a lot of number theory questions though.
I took the 2nd Kaplan PS test from gmat 2004 CD. I ran out of time and I had to guess the last 2 questions. I answered 14 on 16 questions (one of the guessed was correct). Both the guessed answers were calculated risks after eliminating incorrect choices and choosing from the remaining ones. The non-guessed question I got incorrect was an algebra question on number theory - again made a very silly mistake there
I plan to finish 1 more Kaplan PS test by end of today and then jump to solve 10 questions each from CR and SC from OG11 (so I do not forget my concepts). Will post the results soon.

Update: July/15:
I have not updated this for few weeks now; but I have made some good progress. At this point, I have gone through each sections (except AWA), and feel comfortable with most of gmat stuff. Some areas that I need to work on are Geometry (I have forgotten most of geometry basics) and some SC questions (I consistently make errors on countable/non-countable and present participle/past participle questions. I need to go over MGMAT for these 2 categories again).

In order (strongest to weakest) the gmat categories for me are:
Critical Reasoning (strongest)
Problem Solving
Data Sufficiency
Reading Comprehension
Sentence Correction (weakest)
AWA (not started yet)

Starting next weekend, I am going to start solving actual gmat tests (GMATPrep, powerprep, etc). I may not post updates as frequently as I did, mainly due to my travel schedule leaving me very little time for studying; but I am making progress. At this time, Middle-to-end of august seems like a possible g-day.

What's next?
- I have not thought about AWA yet. Most likely I am going to use an existing template from a previous member. I do not think I am going to spend a lot of time on AWA.
- Brish up my weak areas in SC, go over my mistakes again.
- Go over some basic geometry concepts again and solve more problems from OG11
- PowerPrep 1 scheduled for next weekend


Test Results (so far):
CR:
Kaplan 1: 65%
Kaplan 2: 75%
Kaplan 3: 95%

PS:
Kaplan 1: 93.75% (1 incorrect)
Kaplan 2: 87.50% (2 incorrect)

QUESTION 1: (partially answered by Rhyme below)Is there a master list of DS and PS formulas anywhere? Kaplan has a list of 100 formulaes at the end of the book, but I was wondering if a gmatclub member has posted something better. I have read a lot of posts here, but I do not recall seeing one, so if you know about such a document, can you please reply back or PM me?

Question 2: Is there an easy plug-n-play formula for Binomial theorem probability questions?

Question 3: Can someone refer me to good basic gmat geometry concepts? How is mgmat geometry book?


Any comments, suggestions, ideas, criticisms, jokes?