Videos on How I got 51 on Verbal: Strategy and Walkthroughs

Hello again. I wanted to wait to respond until I had watched at least one of your videos. To be clear, I would not vilify you or anyone else for drawing attention to any potential business plans you could have. People do it all the time on the forum. (Such is the nature of business.) I appreciate the background information you provided. I imagine Target Test Prep reps would appreciate it as well. I was asking more on behalf of the community, and I am sure members will like seeing that someone who scored so high had used Target Test Prep. What did you use to prepare for Verbal, if you do not mind my asking?

Regarding the videos, the one I watched was the first one, about a Critical Reasoning question. For starters, I think it would be a good idea to credit your source material. (If, on the other hand, you have created original questions, then why not post them on the forum to contribute in that manner?) I could not find fault with your approach, nor would I point out any such flaws publicly if I had. I personally prefer reading through approaches/solutions to watching videos, but perhaps I have a short attention span or wish I could speed up an instructional video to the parts that got at the pith of the matter, that put a finger on my question. I wonder, do you intend to do one analysis or question at a time, or might you expand into a CR topic of the day in the future, perhaps putting together a longer video on boldface or strengthen questions, for instance? I think the lengthier approach would be more helpful, with timestamps for different questions/discussion topics, but I understand that anything you might provide for free is better than keeping all that knowledge to yourself.

I imagine that if you keep posting in the Verbal forums, we will cross paths more frequently. I hope so. A different outlook on questions is always welcome in the interest of assisting the community. Good luck in your endeavors.

- Andrew

P.S. I guessed from the video that you were Canadian, or perhaps from one of the northernmost States (e.g., Minnesota). You do not have to address this, nor will I draw attention to how I had arrived at my guess.

Great ideas about the "topic of the day" - I will definitely try and make some videos in that format as I agree they would be helpful. As for the sources for the questions, I have been putting them in the descriptions of the videos. So far I have only used questions from the official GMAT prep (the free ones, to avoid any copyright issues), but I plan to make my own and post them here as you suggested.

I am Canadian! However, I've never thought of myself as having a distinctive accent -- how did you guess, if you don't mind me asking?

Forgot to answer this--May not be the most helpful response, but to be honest, I didn't really use anything specifically for the GMAT. I found that a lot of the materials available (magoosh, manhattan, etc.) were either too easy or inaccurate to what I was seeing on the actual practice tests. On my diagnostic I got a 47 on verbal and finished the section super quick with a bunch of time left, so my "prep" was just training myself to read the questions more carefully and take advantage of all the time I had. About a year before I wrote the GMAT I did spend some time studying for the LSAT though, using resources like the LSAT Trainer and 7Sage which I think helped me lots. I've been an avid reader and writer for as long as I can remember so I definitely had a head start on verbal. The vast majority of my studying (90%+ of the time I spent) was for Quant.

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Certainly--I think the LSAT CR has a high proportion of hard questions when compared to the GMAT, so it definitely puts you in the mindset to solve tough logical problems.

This is what I was going for with my prodding earlier. For someone posting under the alias fiftyoneverbal, someone who claims a perfect Verbal score, it is natural for a reader to wonder what had led to that type of extraordinary success. I can see that GMAT700Knight has already posted a query along these lines. I appreciate the responses to each of my own questions. Kudos from me.

By the way, everyone has an accent of some type, but the listener has to know how to distinguish different pronunciations/constructs/expressions from others by way of study, experience, or some combination thereof. I studied linguistics for some time in the past, so I suppose I had a bit of an advantage behind my guess. As soon as I heard "about," I thought, Canadian. I watch clips from a birder on YouTube, Lesley the Bird Nerd, who happens to be from Nova Scotia and pronounces the word in a quite similar manner. I have not studied the accents of speakers from the various Canadian provinces in enough detail to distinguish between such accents, but I thought I was in the right ballpark. (My best read to date, the one that got the biggest surprise from the speaker, was when I guessed that a classmate of mine was from Connecticut in particular because of her use of "kitty-corner" to describe an angled piece of furniture in the corner of a room, as opposed to the more broadly used "catty-corner.")

I am interested in seeing where your project leads. I started my tutoring company with a non-profit model in mind after leaving a for-profit tutoring company, and even though I have not realized my goal, my philosophy remains the same, that knowledge is something to be shared (or else it is lost), and I personally do not feel comfortable putting a price on that transfer. I use GMAT Club as a vehicle to type out my thoughts, since I feel they can help others in the community. Maybe making videos will be your strong suit. As I said before, I wish you the best of fortune in such an endeavor.

- Andrew

I just published a new video with a complete lesson outlining Necessary and Sufficient conditions and ways to effectively tackle questions that involve them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXwhwU_yIFE

Let me know what you think, and what you'd like to see next!

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Hello from the GMAT Club VerbalBot!

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