From Padawan to 710 Jedi to IESE MBA

I have a new example of poor MGMAT exercise.

In Book Word Translations, look at page 177 exercise #3:


It took me a hell of a time to understand that 3/4 as much means: Ta = 3/4 * Tb.

This stupid wording seems at first that: Ta = (1 + 3/4) * Tb

The wording in 2) which is perfectly clear got me all confused. I couldn't understand why MGMAT resorted to such poor obfuscation technique for 1) to freak people out

Is it American to say "3/4 as much as" ?

Thanks for correcting my verbal.. I have start working on my verbal.

I am using MGMAT CR guide and It does not seem to work for me. I could get only 2 questions rt out of 10 in the exercise. Please help

I used PowerScore book, and I can now strike 80-90% accuracy. On MGMAT CAT I can only nail 55% though. But! In GMATPrep I score a nice 82% in CR.

Therefore, I think that MGMAT CR wording used is just bad. It doesn't click for me, and I find it's quite different from the typical CR questions we can find in OG12.

Did you score only 2/10 from OG12 problems or from MGMAT problems?

I scored 2 out of 10 in Practise questions of MGMAT CR guide

In my schedule today should have been an MGMAT CAT day. But as I find them unrepresentative of the real problems we'll be exposed to, and as I have had terrible experience with their website, I decided to only train on writing two essays randomly picked from the OG12. The result of both essays was very pleasing. I managed to piss 600 to 700 words and nicely put them together. Learning by heart chineseburned template is an absolute requirement.

By saving this afternoon from performing a test, I am now slightly ahead of my schedule. So I have plenty time to review all material I have absorbed so far.

In exactly ten days from now, I will have my gmat score, and I'm feeling really confident about it matching my goal.

Wishing you all the best

I got 740 (Q50 V40) on GmatPrep on my 1st full practice test. I thought i was doing most quant correct (a couple were doubtful) but mis-calculated some and got 6 wrong!

I couldn't comprehend the sentence of the very 1st Q of Verbal and got it wrong! got a total 8 wrong and managed 40 in verbal! incidentally all 8 wrong were SC, and I got a total of 17 SC Qs! I don't what's the usual no. of SC qs

earlier i got Q49 in 800score (didn't take verbal) and V33 on MGMAT (didn't take quant)

What could be read from these scores? I have the GMAT on Nov 2! I plan to take 3 more practice tests!

I honestly don't like MGMAT CATs (except at the beginning of the training period), and always score "poorly". The repartition of questions in Verbal is roughly 14 ±3. So yeah you can get as much as 17 questions or maybe even one more in SC.

I am starting to get bored in preparing the GMAT. Reviewing my former wrong problems is tedious. I can't wait to challenge the test.

Should I take a day or two off in order to replete energy? I kinda peaked a few days ago when I completed Verbal Review book and feel a bit exhausted now.

Tomorrow I'll take GMATPrep2 so I'll have a good idea of where I am standing.

By the way I clocked about 240 hours worth of gmat work. It's roughly 4 hours per day.

ya, MGMAT scores tend to be lower.

but i think it makes more sense to look back at your previous mistakes and prepare a strategy to tackle those. at this point, i don't think we don't know something (highly unlikely), but its more due to the fact that we fall into certain traps to commit mistakes. I think that can be avoided only if we review our mistakes and make a strategy to avoid them.

taking a break always helps...as long as its not too long

Argh! I just completed GMATPrep2, and only scored 680 Q47 V35!

I'm in deep trouble, my test in on thursday!

What happened? My level decreased since GMATPrep1 and yet I have been very accurate in the Verbal Review Guide. I don't understand!

I thought I would do very well as I saw a few repeats from OG12 and was thinking about a 730.

I'm so disappointed... All these hours of Verbal for scoring a weak 35

Breakdown in Verbal:

SC: 18 problems, and 6 wrong answers -> 67% which is still a fair result. I have to note that most wrong answers were problems already encountered in OG12 and that I had already answered wrong. In reviewing OG12 wrong problems I mostly answered wrong again on these problems, as if my brain were wired to think a given way that forces me to miss the correct answer.

RC: 13 problems and 2 wrong -> 85%. Good

CR: only ten questions and only one wrong -> 90%. Excellent. CR is my strong area, I hope on test day I'll have plenty of them.

The score result doesn't make sense. In GMATPrep1 I made a total of 9 errors: 6 in SC, 2 in CR and 1 in RC and got V40.

This time I made only 9 mistakes 6 in SC, 2 in RC and 1 in CR and only get a V35.

I'll analyze if I made more mistakes in the first ten problems.

By the way, in MGMAT I had V35 for much worse results, namely around only 55% accuracy in Verbal.

Beside that AWA went on very well. I now know by heart chineseburned's template.

Quant was good (Q47), I made a few silly mistakes, and for some questions I didn't have a clue how to solve them under 2 minutes. In Quant I made only 10 mistakes (some get Q50 for that) but failed the last three problems, so maybe the last problems do count as much as the first 10?

Here are my errors:

GMATPrep1: 5, 9, 12, 16, 20, 22, 29, 31, 36
GMATPrep2: 1, 5, 7, 11, 14, 17, 21, 28, 29

My bad I only had 9 mistakes in GMATPrep1.

I think what killed my score in GMATPrep2 is that I failed the first problem, and got two consecutive problems wrong (28 and 29). My perfect from 30 to 41 didn't help an ounce. I guess that the GMAT has some dumb algorithm, and that once it has made its opinion from the early answers, it won't change its mind afterwards.

SC is very (too) sensitive since it is so easy to miss a tiny mistake and hence fail the problem.

I guess I'll have to rely on a bit of luck to have a more balanced set of problems with fewer SC problems and more CR ones.

I just completed GMAT Club test Verbal 6, failed only 5 problems (88% accuracy) and scored an 88% percentile. Is it a good score? Is there somewhere a table that correlates the percentile and the Verbal score? eg: 88% percentile <-> V45?

EDIT: according to this pages: https://www.gmatcat.com/Percentiles.html 88% is V39. Not bad.

The GMAT Club tests are good. Only a few problems will not appear on the real test, but overall I feel it mimics correctly the GMATPrep test which is said to be the closest to the real test.

I'll do the remaining Verbal tests.

Thanks for the feedback. I will consider taking the verbal too. I had planned to do only the quant tests before reading your results.

I just took Gmatclub verbal2 and found that some of its passages in both RC and CR were poorly written.

Anyway I was only interested in SC, and scored 13/15.

I need to come up with with some SC bootcamp!