My journey from 580 to 710 â€“ long post

Question

Without GMATCLUB, the useful resources and all the support I wonâ€™t be able to get here. My sincere THANKS to ALL POSTERS in this site, especially those who walked a smiliar path before me. I found my experience very similar to that of gmacvik (even our exam dates and scores are very close). His success story posted several days before my exam helped A LOT. I am also applying EMBA and may be we can become classmates in the future.

Now comes the story: About myself: 10+ work experience, high-tech background, non-native English speaker. Exam 1 â€“ Feb 2006: Days of preparation: 26 Study time: 3 hours every weekday, 8-12 hours everyday for weekends. Materials used: - OG10 - Kaplan GMAT CD-ROM 2006 Preparations/Strategies: I only have about 1 month to prepare for my first GMAT. Given I have no prior experience on this exam. I need to get familiar with the test and every question type within this short time period. Since my strength is better on the quantative side, the strategy was to get as high as possible on the Q-side, and get â€œjust enoughâ€

trivikram · Answer

Congratulations on a job well done!!

Fig · Answer

Congratulations, nbooky

Such a great achievement in an hard journey that demands devotion and perseverance

.... Good Luck for the next steps ! :D

gablaze23 · Answer

thanks man
i learned a lot from you

joy110211 · Answer

i took my first GmatPrep this afternoon and was so frustrated at the score. I guess I was too spoiled by my Kaplan CAT scores. Thanks for sharing your story with us, it really motivates me by a whole lot :-D

bmwhype2 · Answer

"I found a good document from the internet that talks about AWA structures and timing, and comes with the standard templates. "

can you elaborate on this?

nbooky · Answer

Here is what I used:
www. 800 score.com/awac.html

I just checked the above link and they have trimmed down most of the online materials (wanted people to use their service). Fortunately I have cut-and-pasted and saved their materials. If you are interested feel free to PM me so I can send those to you.

I also have a document to discuss logical fallacies (which I found useful in AWA, CR and real life), just google "logical fallacies".

bmwhype2 · Answer

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ashishsharma04 · Answer

Hey thanks for this encouraging story..can u please mail me (ashishsharma04@yahoo.co.in) the AWA doc that u used for your preparations..it would be of great help...thanks....ashish

baer · Answer

Since I am running out of practice test questions, I downloaded SC1000 and CR1000 and used them as my primary exercises. I tracked the hit rate (as I always did in the past) and read explanations from this site to understand why I did not eliminate the wrong choice (note that I am not saying â€œwhy I did not picked the right choiceâ€

nbooky · Answer

Just checked my spreadsheet...

I compute two metrics for hit-percentage:
1. Compute hit-percentage for every "test", each test has 20 questions - let's call this  20HIT 
2. Compute hit-percentage for every 100 questions (or every 5 tests) - let's call this  100HIT 

I only completed 480 questions from SC1000.

1st 100 questions:
20HIT range from 50% to 65%
100HIT is 61%

2nd 100 questions:
20HIT range from 55% to 65%
100HIT is 60%

3rd 100 questions:
20HIT range from 55% to 75%
100HIT is 64%

4th 100 questions:
20HIT range from 65% to 85%
100HIT is 71%

Last 80 questions:
20HIT range from 65% to 90%
100HIT is 59%

In general the variation is still high between test sets. However, you can see both the low- and high- end ranges are both improving.

Note that I cut-and-paste all my wrong questions to a separate Word file and re-do those questions. My hit rate is approximately 50% for re-do questions (I make sure I don't remember the answers).

baer · Answer

Interesting... thank you for sharing. It seems like you had an outstanding verbal day on your test. Your practice scores and hit rate on the 1000 SC do not indicate that you would have reached a 40 on the actual exam. Congrats on such an improvement!

nbooky · Answer

Note that in the actual test a candidate should have  consistently-good  hit rate  across all question types  (CR, SC and RC). This is because the questions will come in mixed order. My CR and RC hit rate are usually high (in 90% range).

Looking back, the reason of low verbal score in my initial attempts was primarily due to SC (hit rate was below 50%). I did not really focus on SC until the last attempt. The improved hit rate in SC is possibly the biggest factor to pull a higher score in the verbal section. From my observation, the first couple questions in verbal section are usually SC and CR, so possibly I got a lot of initial SC questions wrong in the first attempts.

Looks like you are all good to go! Good luck on the exam!!

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