Stuck in GMAT world!

The devil may be in the details. Can you share your detailed notes if you have a soft copy of them? My emai: CJ@GMATwithCJ.com

- CJ

Hey ScottTargetTestPrep,
Thank you for your reply. According to my experience on the test day, one of the possibilities about nerves, stress, and tiredness did not affect my performance because I was very confident that day and that also led me to complete my test on time with around 5 minutes to spare on each section. I also had a well-rested sleep the night before my exam. The second possibility that you wrote might be the sole reason for my score drop. As per question specific strategy (category by category) that you have written in the post, I actually did not practice each and every question type at a time, but I practiced different types under a section. For example, when I took up CR, I did not practice 100 assumption questions in a go, or 100 weaken question in a go, but I always practiced the questions in a mixed way. Is that what you are implying that I missed?

I see what you mean by practicing a category at a time. Is this similar to what Bruce Lee said? "I am not afraid of a person who knows 1000 kicks, but I am afraid of a person who knows one kick but practices it a 1000 times". Though I might have solved a 100-150 assumption questions overall, I did not do them together and all at once. I just took up CR and practiced whatever came in front of me.

As for verbal, for SC, I understood the meaning of the sentence logically and then tried to pick a correct answer by eliminating 4 incorrect answer choices. For CR, I used to personalise the passage, internalise the situation and I gave the speaker a name or even put myself into that situation and picked what would make more sense. I used this strategy as it was explained by RON in a beautiful way and I even got questions correct this way, but I still wonder what didn't work well for me. For RC, I took time, around 3-3.5 minutes to understand the passage as I am a slow reader and I need to understand the passage or else I miss the information and then I jumped right into the questions taking around 45sec - 1 minute per question to solve them.

I also spoke with Marty regarding this, I may want some guidance on how to approach verbal questions because as discussed with him I may be missing the approach.

Kind Regards,
Aalekh

EMPOWERgmatRichC
Hey Rich,
I hope you are doing well. The two causes that you have mentioned in your posts are both somewhat correct. There might be some unusual way I might be practicing for the test and I did not realise that it was an incorrect one, but the problem is I am not able to understand what was unusual in my approach(maybe what I discussed in my post above regarding practicing question category wise was unusual, but what else can be the case?). Both my scores, Feb 2018 and Nov 2019 are somewhat similar with the quant and verbal distribution, so yes, I might have developed some wrong habit to approach the questions. Just to let you know, I have never been under professional guidance for my GMAT. I prepared for the exam all by myself and I thought that it would be enough as there are not any good GMAT classes in my city. I focused on this forum for the material and relied on experts for the explanations whenever I got my answers incorrect and then made a note of it. I took egmat's verbal online but that seemed to brush up my basics and then I stumbled upon Thursdays with Ron, which seemed to me a really impressive material.

I have taken some time off already from the GMAT and focused on getting other aspects of my application right. Now, as I don't have much time until R2, I need to get done with my GMAT, applications for 7-8 schools and TOEFL. I need to work for all the aspects of my application together now. I'll definitely share my ESR with you for analysis. Thanks for the support.

Kind Regards,
Aalekh

ChiranjeevSingh
Hello CJ,
I don't have the soft copy of the notes. I have my notes on paper and very few of them are under notes on my laptop. I can capture some images and share the same with you. Will that suffice?
I'll also share what I have under notes on my laptop.

In anticipation of your response.
Kind Regards,
Aalekh

Sure Aalekh. You can email the notes at CJ@GMATwithCJ.com

Take the following as positive feedback:

1. If you are really interested in feedback, you should not have restricted yourself to tagging "experts". Excluding people can be very detrimental.

2. There are some/many smart people here who do not walk around with "expert" labels on their backs. Some of us, including yours truly, are even doctoral-trained. As such, you can assume that we too know a thing or two about training, education and other worldy concerns.

Good luck on your GMAT journey.

Posted from my mobile device

Sure ChiranjeevSingh,
I'll do the same very soon.

Hey Hovkial,
Apologies if you felt that way and I consider your points in a positive way. I am just wondering why did you feel that way because I never restricted anyone to provide me with a feedback as I started my post by addressing each and every one. I just tagged some of the experts so that I can bring my concern to their attention and I never meant to exclude anyone.

Let me edit the first post at the end in a way to welcome constructive feedback from each and every individual on the forum. Thanks for bringing that to my attention and if you have any key points that would help me out in any way, I request you to guide me through the same.

Kind Regards,
Aalekh

It's great that you were able to speak with Marty. I’m certain that he provided some great advice. Regarding your plan moving forward, here is some advice you can follow to improve your verbal skills. I’ll start with CR.

when studying Critical Reasoning, you need to ensure that you fully understand the essence of the various question types. Do you know the importance of an assumption within an argument? Can you easily spot a conclusion? Do you know how to resolve a paradox? Do you know how to properly evaluate cause and effect? Do you know how to properly weaken or strengthen an argument? These are just a few examples; you really need to take a deep dive into the individual Critical Reasoning topics to develop the necessary skills to properly attack any Critical Reasoning questions that you encounter.

As you learn each Critical Reasoning problem type, do focused practice so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you incorrectly answered a Weaken the Argument question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice, but keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be stimulating. So, to better prepare yourself to tackle such bland passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the New York Times, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, you likely will have to work on all three of those aspects. Furthermore, the likely reason that your Sentence Correction performance has not improved is that you have not been working on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, to be successful in Sentence Correction, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not just a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.

This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending less than two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.

There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and none of those reasons are that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answers were always the ones that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.

As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey meanings that make sense. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice repeatedly until you start to see the differences between the choices that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to put in the necessary time to see the differences between answers and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.

To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did to arrive at that answer and what you could do differently to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could do differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your skills improve, you’ll then want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple SC topics.

Feel free to reach out with further questions.

Good luck!