Stacey, You really rock this forum with so much valuable advice to all fellow test takers.
However, your I tried most of your advices (may be not entirely). It is very tough to honestly follow what you say.
I have honestly tried to analyze my mistakes. I took 9 week online-course. Attempted all 6 MGMATs without much improvements. Every weekday I am giving more than 5-6 hrs honestly for past 2-3 months. But my MGMAT score says a whole lot different story.
Here is my stats:
Q V Total
CAT 6 Completed 11/24/2008 12:17 PM EST 44 30 600
CAT 5 Completed 11/20/2008 10:45 AM EST 45 33 640
CAT 4 Completed 11/13/2008 10:48 AM EST 44 33 640
CAT 3 Completed 11/5/2008 10:43 AM EST 44 30 600
CAT 2 Completed 9/29/2008 10:18 AM EST 42 25 560 (timing issue - last 10 verbal in 3 mins all wrong)
CAT 1 Completed 8/31/2008 2:32 PM EST 39 31 580
I went through the assesement summary report.
Looks like all 5 areas of GMAT is tough for me to crack. I am averaging per assesment report around 52%
with average difficulty right Q - 590 V - (600-630)
Its very frustrating experience so far as I am not seeing improvements. I am looking to hit the 680-700 mark.
Quant details:
Word translations 49%
overlap sets - tough one - If qn is worded I miss the equn & hence chose wrong answer.
ratios - sort of ok.
rates & work - not comfortable till date. - I can do straight fwd problems. if qn is worded I tend to get confused.
exp eqns ; worst. again straight qns I get it right.
VIC's : slowest
circles & cylinders : worst : same as above.. can handle easier qns not complicated ones.
Verbal details:
CR:
Arg & structure: slowest
Mimic the arg: worst
weaken conclusion: (except types) : hit rate 33%
RC:
Inference is worst at 25% hit rate
Tone is worst at 17% and slowest
SC:
Clarity in meaning : worst & slowest
Idioms - worst - anyways I am revising all idioms every other day.
Here's where I guess am facing problems:
I understand the concepts and can apply it appropriately. but so far no improvements.
I am down and low in confidence at moment after seeing/analysing progress so far.
I was hoping to take the main exam if my score touched 680 mark atleast twice. but :((
If you would like me to send you the assessment report I can do so.
I am ready to put in 6-8 hrs for next few weeks to improve, but no idea where to look at. As you suggested at many answers, I went thru most of the questions to understand and learn from mistakes.
Each question has a different dimension, I understand one dimension and feel good that I can handle a type of problem, next test I see a different variation of the same category problem & boom I go.. ((
I guess its not penetrating my thick skull. Is there anyway I can open it & stuff it up with all the knowledge required to improvise ?
Hope you made it thru till here. Now could you please help me out of this ??
Thanks
Awaiting your reply
-Aspirant
GMAT Forum
4 postsPage 1 of 1
- StaceyKoprince
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 9360
- Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
- Location: Montreal
Generally, there isn't much of a score improvement on tests taken within a week of each other, so I'm going to read the last two tests as basically one data point.
You've made some nice improvement in quant (39 to 44/45)and it looks like that score is holding up. Verbal has been more up and down however. You mentioned that you had a major timing problem on CAT 2. Are you having timing problems in general on verbal and it was just the worst on that test? I'll assume, for now, that this is the case, but let me know if that's not accurate.
So, generally, people run out of time at the end because they're spending too much time on other problems earlier in the section. Here are the guidelines you should be following:
SC - about 60-75 sec; max of 90 sec
CR - about 2m; max of 2.5m
RC - about 2.5m (short) to 3.5m (long) to read; about 1 min for general purpose questions; about 2 for everything else
In general, on any problem, don't spend more than 30sec beyond the guidelines. You mention some types above that are the slowest for you, but really measure everything against these guidelines - anything going beyond these is too slow.
I think you would also benefit from a timing exercise: learning about how long one minute is without looking at a watch or stopwatch. If you don't have one already, buy yourself a stopwatch with lap timing capability. When you go to do a set of problems, start the stopwatch but turn it over so you can't see the time. Every time you think one minute has gone by, push the lap button. When you're done, see how good you were - and whether you tend to over or underestimate. Get yourself to the point where you're within 15 seconds either way on a regular basis (that is, you can generally predict between 45 sec and 1min 15 sec).
Now, how do you use that when doing problems? If you're not on track by one minute, make an educated guess and move on. (The general idea is that if you're not on track by the halfway mark, you're unlikely to figure out what's holding you back AND have time to do the whole problem in the 1 min you have left.) For SC, if you're at the one minute mark and you've dealt with everything that you definitely know how to deal with, pick something from among the remaining choices and move on.
Remind yourself that you only need to get about 60% of the questions right. It's okay to get this question wrong - if the question's driving you crazy, forget it!
On CR, analyze the structure, mimic the argument, and EXCEPT type questions are not very common, so don't worry that those are your weaknesses. Just make sure that you don't turn something else into a weakness by default because you spend too much time on one of these more rare ones.
On RC, inference is very common, so you do need to worry about this one. Hold yourself to this standard: the correct answer MUST be 100% true according to some piece of info given in the passage. If the answer you're looking at is only "probably" true or "likely" true, that's not good enough. If anyone could argue with it, then it's not the right answer - it's got to be something that HAS to be true according to the info in the passage.
On SC, clarity in meaning is more common on harder questions than on easier ones, but overall is not as common as grammar errors in general. Idioms are annoying, of course, and the only thing to do there is keep a list and try to memorize - but hold yourself to the idioms that you see tested on official test questions (OG, GMATPrep). There are thousands of idioms in the language, so you might as well spend your time only on the ones that you know they've tested before.
On quant, it looks like you struggle with math that's presented in word form, yes? So you're struggling to translate from words into math. Try to break those questions down sentence by sentence (or comma by comma, when necessary). For each piece of information, ask yourself: how am I going to write that on my scrap paper? I can't move on to the next piece of info until I figure out how to get this one down. And I don't want to re-write the words they gave me, so how am I going to write just this one piece in math? Then move on to the next piece and so on until you're done with that question.
When you do miss something, go back into the problem and try to figure out why. How did they get you to miss an important piece of info, such as an equation? I just did an OG problem within the last week in which they gave me enough info to write an equation, but that info was spread out over two separate sentences! The reason I caught it was because I was taking each individual piece and writing it down, so when I got to the second piece, I went to write it near the first one and realized - hey, I can make an equation out of that. So look for HOW they get you to overlook something and then think about how you're going to do things in the future to minimize the chances that you'd overlook something like that again.
Overlapping sets are not that common. Neither are cylinders. Ratios are sort of common. Rates and work are common, as are circles and exponential equations. The VIC technique can often be used on something like 3-6 questions on the test, so it's worth learning. BUT - the VIC technique takes just as much time as algebra, so you have to decide at the beginning which way you're going to do it. You typically don't have time to try both methods for one problem. Anyway - factor the relative frequencies into how much time you plan to spend on your various weaknesses.
It sounds like you can get yourself to the point where you feel good about the problem sitting in front of you but you struggle to make connections with future problems so that you can recognize what to do rather than have to start from scratch each time. I typically don't like to suggest tutoring simply because I have an obvious conflict of interest here, but you may benefit from some one-on-one help to identify why you're struggling and what to do about it. You're doing a lot of work but you're not seeing a lot of results, which suggests that you need help to adjust the way in which you are actually studying and analyzing the problems and your work - that's hard to do via the forums (especially if you've tried the suggestions that I've given to others).
You've made some nice improvement in quant (39 to 44/45)and it looks like that score is holding up. Verbal has been more up and down however. You mentioned that you had a major timing problem on CAT 2. Are you having timing problems in general on verbal and it was just the worst on that test? I'll assume, for now, that this is the case, but let me know if that's not accurate.
So, generally, people run out of time at the end because they're spending too much time on other problems earlier in the section. Here are the guidelines you should be following:
SC - about 60-75 sec; max of 90 sec
CR - about 2m; max of 2.5m
RC - about 2.5m (short) to 3.5m (long) to read; about 1 min for general purpose questions; about 2 for everything else
In general, on any problem, don't spend more than 30sec beyond the guidelines. You mention some types above that are the slowest for you, but really measure everything against these guidelines - anything going beyond these is too slow.
I think you would also benefit from a timing exercise: learning about how long one minute is without looking at a watch or stopwatch. If you don't have one already, buy yourself a stopwatch with lap timing capability. When you go to do a set of problems, start the stopwatch but turn it over so you can't see the time. Every time you think one minute has gone by, push the lap button. When you're done, see how good you were - and whether you tend to over or underestimate. Get yourself to the point where you're within 15 seconds either way on a regular basis (that is, you can generally predict between 45 sec and 1min 15 sec).
Now, how do you use that when doing problems? If you're not on track by one minute, make an educated guess and move on. (The general idea is that if you're not on track by the halfway mark, you're unlikely to figure out what's holding you back AND have time to do the whole problem in the 1 min you have left.) For SC, if you're at the one minute mark and you've dealt with everything that you definitely know how to deal with, pick something from among the remaining choices and move on.
Remind yourself that you only need to get about 60% of the questions right. It's okay to get this question wrong - if the question's driving you crazy, forget it!
On CR, analyze the structure, mimic the argument, and EXCEPT type questions are not very common, so don't worry that those are your weaknesses. Just make sure that you don't turn something else into a weakness by default because you spend too much time on one of these more rare ones.
On RC, inference is very common, so you do need to worry about this one. Hold yourself to this standard: the correct answer MUST be 100% true according to some piece of info given in the passage. If the answer you're looking at is only "probably" true or "likely" true, that's not good enough. If anyone could argue with it, then it's not the right answer - it's got to be something that HAS to be true according to the info in the passage.
On SC, clarity in meaning is more common on harder questions than on easier ones, but overall is not as common as grammar errors in general. Idioms are annoying, of course, and the only thing to do there is keep a list and try to memorize - but hold yourself to the idioms that you see tested on official test questions (OG, GMATPrep). There are thousands of idioms in the language, so you might as well spend your time only on the ones that you know they've tested before.
On quant, it looks like you struggle with math that's presented in word form, yes? So you're struggling to translate from words into math. Try to break those questions down sentence by sentence (or comma by comma, when necessary). For each piece of information, ask yourself: how am I going to write that on my scrap paper? I can't move on to the next piece of info until I figure out how to get this one down. And I don't want to re-write the words they gave me, so how am I going to write just this one piece in math? Then move on to the next piece and so on until you're done with that question.
When you do miss something, go back into the problem and try to figure out why. How did they get you to miss an important piece of info, such as an equation? I just did an OG problem within the last week in which they gave me enough info to write an equation, but that info was spread out over two separate sentences! The reason I caught it was because I was taking each individual piece and writing it down, so when I got to the second piece, I went to write it near the first one and realized - hey, I can make an equation out of that. So look for HOW they get you to overlook something and then think about how you're going to do things in the future to minimize the chances that you'd overlook something like that again.
Overlapping sets are not that common. Neither are cylinders. Ratios are sort of common. Rates and work are common, as are circles and exponential equations. The VIC technique can often be used on something like 3-6 questions on the test, so it's worth learning. BUT - the VIC technique takes just as much time as algebra, so you have to decide at the beginning which way you're going to do it. You typically don't have time to try both methods for one problem. Anyway - factor the relative frequencies into how much time you plan to spend on your various weaknesses.
It sounds like you can get yourself to the point where you feel good about the problem sitting in front of you but you struggle to make connections with future problems so that you can recognize what to do rather than have to start from scratch each time. I typically don't like to suggest tutoring simply because I have an obvious conflict of interest here, but you may benefit from some one-on-one help to identify why you're struggling and what to do about it. You're doing a lot of work but you're not seeing a lot of results, which suggests that you need help to adjust the way in which you are actually studying and analyzing the problems and your work - that's hard to do via the forums (especially if you've tried the suggestions that I've given to others).
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
- Aspirant
Thanks Stacey
Thank You stacey,
Yes you nailed my issues to the point precisely. I have started working with one of my colleague to help me improve in weak areas.
Hope to get better in next few weeks and ready to beat the beast.
-Aspirant
Yes you nailed my issues to the point precisely. I have started working with one of my colleague to help me improve in weak areas.
Hope to get better in next few weeks and ready to beat the beast.
-Aspirant
- StaceyKoprince
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 9360
- Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
- Location: Montreal
4 posts Page 1 of 1