My stint with Knewton. Will keep updating as my journey...

Hi,

I have given my GMAT on Feb 1st 2010 and scored 680, and you can read my GMAT experience at

my-experience-with-gmat-read-it-over-a-coffee-90518.html

I have enrolled in Knewton online classes and wanted to provide my insight on these classes and take advices from my GMATClubbers on my way to second retake of the GMAT

Will keep posting as I make progress...keep watching this space....

Have taken Knewton Diagnostic test just the day before my actual GMAT day and scored 710 in that.

Have my first class tomorrow.

Guys ,

would appreciate some help here ...This time I want to concentrate on the basics in Verbal so I am planning to pick up

MGMAT CR
MGMAT SC and if Possible PowerScore SC Bible

and would follow Knewton completely.

For Quant where I scored 49 last time would take the GMATClub tests all of them and can you folks suggest any good books in this regard? For practice. I read somewhere about 1012 or some book which sounds like that, can someone throw some light plzz

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Yep ideally yes..they are going to take your best score and gurantee a 50 point on the top of it. Though I havent checked with them which is my baseline score. I will be happy with either of them.

Just took my first class last week. It contained two sections :

Intro to GMAT - which was a normal introduction stressing on :

Make sure to answer all the questions - and not answering the last 5 questions can bring down your score by much as 15 percentile while answering them wrong will not get it down by so much.

Asnwering the first few questions correctly is a MYTH and consistency is the key. Although I thought it does definitely has some effect on your actual score. Can find details in my GMAT experience thread.


Second was a Quant review about fractions, percentages and DS questions on them. I did the exercises at the end of the session. There were a total of approx 50 questions at the end of the session. I thought this was less.

Have my second session this thursday ...

During this time I want to finish the MGMAT CR Book and will actively participate in GMATCLUB.

.

Atleast till now, I havent seen any OG questions directly but there were a few questions in the diagnostics test which were similar to the OG questions. [similar only not the same]

I have my second session tomorrow on Quant and Sentence Correction (toughie in my case). I did their test which was very good and
it was pin pointing my weaknesses correctly like Run On Sentences, Pronoun Antecedent and Idomatic Phrases.

But I feel the number practice questions could have been more.

I am also considering about Knewton. Keep us updated mate

It is a great idea to share your experience!
+1
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Had my second session yesterday.
Sentence Correction - Here they tried to cover all the general errors of GMAT and it was like a FAST Paced Action thriller in which the hero fails finally (pun intended). By the end of the session I did loose my way a bit. But there is an advantage of watching the class N number of times from their archives. So I started my second screening of the SC session now.

Quant - they were trying to teach on, how to plugin numbers etc etc.
Guys, my Quant score on actual GMAT was 49. I want to take this up to 51 for sure. Can some one suggest me some books for getting that extra bit?

Again, there is this concept of Doubts session on some Saturdays. This is called as OFFICE Hours. I attended one today, there was only 1 SC and 3 RC and 2 DS and 1 PS question up for discussion. [I got all the questions right except for SC ] .

Nice idea but if they can this kind of sessions for each of SC, CR and RC seperately and regularly , I think it will help us immense.

i am also taking knewton and would like to share some insights as well (without making another thread). I have about 2 classes left so i am almost done. Basically as
acer2knight said each class is 3 hours long with a quant and a verbal section. For quant they focus a lot more on PS than any other. Geometry is only one class and i believe probability is one class (my next class) as well. The verbal SC is focused the most with CR second.
The structure of the course is like:
day of class:
1 pre- quant problem set
1 pre-verbal problem set
Class
re-take pre quant/verbal problem set (only on topics you got wrong on in the pre sets)
homeworks covering the topics went over in class.

During class the teachers try to go over all the questions students may have through chat and gives almost strictly 2 minutes to answer a problem via a poll. There are on-demand videos for each class - you can view like 2-3 classes from different teachers to get a different perspective - however, the problems are the same (they use same slides).

There is a progress bar that shows a graph that breaks down the percentage of a topic taught and how you are doing for that topic. For example, if they taught all the topics on geometry it will have 100%, if you got 80% of the geometry problems right you are at 80%. They break it down further to specific topics like verbal - idioms, run-on sentences etc. so it shows you what topic you might need to work on. I am not sure how to improve upon a specific topic since they dont categorize problems by topic. I guess one way is to re-take the problem sets you got <100% on and increase your percentage that way.

i got a 640 on my official gmat, got a 620 on my first Knewton CAT and a 650 last week. My math is more or less the same ~48 but my verbal improved from 28 to 32 - i was actually a bit disappointed because i got only 9 wrong on verbal and still got a 32. My next CAT is tonight so i hope at least my verbal can get a bit better.

Sorry for the break guys...had some serious business to do

I finished my 3rd and 4th sessions in this week.

Third Session was of Reading Comprehension and Number Properties. Number Properties was a cake walk, but Reading Comprehension practice questions had some real good questions.

In specific in understanding the tone of the passage and attitude of the author. The choices for these questions were really complex and I couldnt figure out of the meaning . Eg :

authoritative chastisement
dispassionate analysis
unwarranted condescension
incensed trepidation
righteous indignation

I usually do good in RC. This are my scores in this section :

RC Pre Assessment - 89%
RC Post Assessment - 90% (after session)
RC Home work - 70% , boy one passage was like hell and I got 4 wrong out of 6.

4th session was about CR and Systems and Equations

CR classes were something I was looking for.

CR Pre Assessment - 60%
CR Post Assessment - 83%
CR Homework - 75%

I did one office hours session as well. This had 3 sentence correction sentences.

Overall I am getting to learn a few new tips in Sentence Correction and I am looking forward to improve my CR score.

hey acer...

even i have joined knewton and completed a few of their sessions...

But I am still struggling to improve my RC skills.... I score 90+ in CR & SC, but only around 40-50 in RC !! I really need to improve a lotttt in RC...

Can you pls. suggest some tips or methods to crack RC questions!!

Thanks.

What do you think about the difficulty level and conceptual coverage of the questions provided by Knewton?

As everyone advices, I can tell u to push yourself to read as much as possible and keep reading whatever comes your way. But personally I felt inculcating this particular habit of reading a lot is something you cannot to start couple of months before the exam. Instead you can always start reading something you really enjoy reading. I enjoy reading Business Today a lot and sports columns in the daily papers so I make sure I read them everyday at a faster pace.

Coming to the actual RC, this is what I generally do ..for long passage I spend on an averag 3-4 minutes.

While reading the passage :

1) I read the first paragraph couple of times at a fast pace just to make sure that I am undestanding what the author is conveying or going to convey in the next couple of paragraphs. Once you do this, you can atleast guess what is going to come [Though this is not of priority but it is going to boost your confidence]

2) At the back of your mind make sure you are trying to analyse the structure passage
3) You do need to mark all the keywords, just make what is the author tone like is he being on the positive side or being political correct or trying to correct a misunderstanding (slightly critical I would say)
4) Dont worry much about the complicated words or phrases that come in between, you can always refer back if there is a question regarding them.


At the end of your reading you can atleast answer or eliminate a few choices for the answers that talk about

what is the author tone or attitude?
How is the RC structured?
What is the significance of 'x' paragraph in the passage?

These are generally posed questions so you will be able to answer 75% of the questions and for other couple of questions that refer to assumptions or inferring something will need you back to dig into the passage. since you are god at CR , I would say try to put your CR cap on and try to answer these questions.

You will definitely come out with some imporoved performance...afterall GMAT is all about practice and pattern matching

Now that I took time in atleast giving my gyan, I would love to hear your side of the success story about SC and CR, which I am definitely working on to improve.

My area of interest is not into Knewton quant so I cannot really comment here.

In SC , I feel their concepts are good. Atleast they talk about the basic grammar that you will find interesting to learn and apply in the SC questions. I was sure that I was not following any specific methodology in answering the SC and CR questions in my previous GMAT and this time I want to learn the Knewton way of answering questions so I find it pretty useful.

Questions framed in Knewton resemble those of OG and GMATPrep software so you are sure that you are practicing and learning questions patterns which you might encounter in the real exam. No one guarantee this but I believe in learning based on GMAT like questions rather than trying to learn a general way of attacking these questions.

And their support staff is really good. if you pose 10 questions in a day, you will get responses to all of them in 24 hours time which I thought was fair enough.


PM me if you have specific questions or if you are planning to join Knewton


ATB...

I am thinking about enrolling (the 50 point guarantee sounds like a win win to me,) but was wondering if anyone could comment on whether the Knewton instructors or teaching assistants incorporate any official guide material into their lessons or homework assignments?

I started studying for the GMAT 9 months ago, and in that span I have taken it three times, getting a 640, 630, and 650, in that order. I want to give it one last shot, and this is based on the fact that my verbal was in the 92nd percentile the first time around and in the two subsequent exams my verbal has not come close to that original mark. (If I can get the verbal back near that first mark, I should be good since my quant has improved on all three attempts.) Anyway, I attribute this to not really doing much practice with official guide problems leading up to my second and third attempts, so when I took it the second and third time, I simply was not used to the format and language of the GMAT. I took a Manhattan GMAT course prior to my first exam, and while they used a lot of proprietary material, they would tie it into the official guide material as well. For example, for a particular day, they would assign a few chapters from the SC guide, and then at the end of the assigned chapters, you would have a list of official guide problems that pertained to what you just read in those chapters. Basically, I got a lot of practice with official guide problems leading up to my first attempt, and got very little in my second and third attempts, instead relying on Kaplan Quiz Bank problems and running GMATPrep a few times.

I was considering going back and essentially retracing my steps with MGMAT, meaning following the syllabus and study guide, but I am intrigued by what I have heard about Knewton, and I think a fresh approach will really help. I would appreciate anyone's thoughts.