750 Gmat (99%), Q-50(95%), V-41(93%)

[tictaktoe]

brilliant score.all the best. hey can you help me out.i am also from mumbai can you plz tell me where can i get a manhattan sc book?did you have one for ur self?what about o.g 11th ed did you have a look at it before ur test?cud you share some vital information on ur prep ?

thanks buddy.

Nopes. No Manhatttan SC guide, No OG 11th edition. Bought just two books OG 10th edition and Princeston review, which aint that good for maths but provides a nice platform for verbal. ( i know this wont fit in GMAT SC format , but what the heck !!, though The last clause "modifies" PR )

[CTG1983]

Hey tictaktoe,
Do u think actual quants was much more difficult than the OG?
What do suggest for quant improvement?
I want to make sure that I get 50 at least.
Thanks

[dreamz]

Acknolwdgement: Each and every member of this forum, esp dreamz, goel_ar, Arjmen, twinsplitter, abhishek, he_hels, icecold, 800Bob, gmat168, alex_cute, greycellz, and many more who participated in the discussions. Testmagic was the foundation of my GMAt preparation. Thanks Erin. I would surely luv to put special thank to mah sweets for standing by me and encouraging me throughout these days,esp after it got spoiled the first time. Luv ya baby.

I’ll be putting the post abt my preparation in few days.

Thanks for those nice words, 'tictaktoe'. And thanks to Erin too for providing such an active forum where one not only prepares for GMAT, but also makes wonderful friends.

I guess I have reasons to be grateful to GMAT. Never knew any test preparation could interesting or addictive before I gave this one I just got lucky!

[jsr_idhar]

Congrats!! Quite an adventure with the first test.

[azrizvi]

Awesome Score!!

Best of luck in future!!

[heike2504]

hey tictactoe, congrats!!! I knew you would do brilliant!!! Wish you all the best!

[tictaktoe]

I am attaching three documents at the end of this post, one each for the last day revision of verbal and quant and third one is having my own template for AWA, which is without doubt, a modified version of what I found somewhere on TM. These can come handy for the last minute revision.

Ok .. so how did i prepare for my test?

Well in my opinion, starting the preparation was the trickiest part with so many books available in the market OG , Kaplan , PR, Manhattan, Barron, 800, etc etc. To start with, I did some research on net about the GMAT and came to know about testmagic and I can surely say that the foundation of all my studyis this forum. I'll come to it after sometime.


Through TM, i went and browsed throught different books available in the market for GMAT preparation . As all of us might have noticed OG comes at the top. So I went around the markets of mumbai, delhi and banglore to get a copy of OG 10th edition ( till that time there was no 11th one). Finally managed to get a copy of OG during the month of April. Before that I decided to buy another book just for the sake of starting the prep for GMAT and bought Princeston Review. According to me, we can skip PR for maths section but it makes the basic of verbal section very easy to understand while teaching what are main type of errors in SC, how to approach them , how to write AWA, what to expect in verbal section, where to put more attention etc.

Though I had these materials, I seriously started studying only 2 months before the testdate and in my case that is 27th of July, which was washed off. since I have an engineering background, I realized that Quant should be my strength and recognized that verbal is the weakness, mainly SC. So I decided to work on the weak part first. Gave myself one full month to work on SC. Followed by CR and RC , another 1 week in total, 1 week for quant after that followed by tests.

Sentence Correction:

My major weakness in verbal. Since I am a non native speaker, it wasnt something which was natural to me. When i started SC, i dint even knw what exactly are gerunds, pst participles, usage of different tenses , subordinate clause, modifier probs, restrictive nature of sentence , etc and I usually go the way a sentence used to "sound" to me. Anyways, I started with PR. Familiarized myself with typical problems. Then came on TM, the Sc section of it. started attempting the question from it and initially made a big fool of me when most of them used to go wrong. But slowly and steadily , my hit rate increased. Along with the TM , i did 1000SC around 50 per day min. Colored those which went wrong and finally made another document of those wrong ones. Posted them on TM , and always found a good analysis of the questions, though sometime repeated. During that time my hit rate went frm say 75 to arnd 85-90. Thn I came on OG and did all the SCs. Hit rate was arnd 90 %. Since I managed to find the softcopy of OG verbal section , I didnt touch the OG BOOK for SC. Did it on computer to get used to stare the screen for long hours. Then before starting the test, I again went back to the document where I saved my previously messed up 1000SC and yeah, there was definitely an improvement.

Critical Reasoning:

This post of gmat168 says it all:

If you’re not getting the questions, I think with practice, one should be able to perform fairly well on these. The biggest stumbling block I see with a lot of people who get these wrong is one of bias/pre-conceived notions. They make judgements and try to answer more on what they FEEL is right without much concern to what is explicitly stated in the passage, which is ALL you should rely on, nothing more! If the passage says that oranges are purple as a fact, then oranges are purple.

(Strategy for solving CR)http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22424 è A presentation on how to attack CR questions.

Followed this approach initially and then personalized to suit my way of doing things. Started straight with the OG CR initially and was pretty pleased getting a hit rate of more than 95% in them from the beginning. Again I did all of them on computer form the pdf file of CR rather than moving on to OG book. After finishing up with OG, I started with LSAT CRs. These are a bit more difficult than the GMAT level but whn you get used to them and start solving GMAT CRs again, you will find them too easy. In verbal , CR was my strength and I am sure I dint mess up even a single CR in exam too. Though i find this fear of Boldface in many people, actually speaking they arent really tough. You can always narrow it down to two using just 1st part of options and second part combined will give u the most obvious answer. I found these posts on BF and its related question of tremendous help.

(Boldface : some definitions)http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25935 - Definitions of all weird & whacky words used in Boldface such as premise, background, assumption, etc

(Boldface Cr!)http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14239 - A set of really good BF questions for practice. If you can ace them, you need not worry.


Reading Comprehension:
Okie whether you follow it in any other section or no , do it here. Make sure you do all your OG RC on computer rather than from the book. Theres a pdf copy of all RC of OG available here on testmagic. Download it and do your RC from there because I read it somewhere and found it really true that the speed with which we read on paper is several times better than on computer and this can mess up your time management if you arent used to it. Another thing I noticed is that during the initial phase my RC was much much better than during the phase when I was near the test date. I think with all the tests, Crs , ect we tend to overanalyse the question in RC. So i decided to stop practising RC and did only those which appeared on the practise tests and nothing more. It really improved though I wouldnt advise people to follow me for obvious reasons. You can read more on RC in the file attached below.

QUANT:
Always my strong area and I was xpecting a 51 in this, so disappointed by a 50. People are generally scared of Probabilty / Combinations / Permutation kinda problems in maths but believe me, you wont find the questions of those difficulty level in real exam as posted on forums.

Here is a compiled list of around 50 problems in P&C which are a level beyond GMAT, so if you can get through it , you can tame any problem in P&C.

(Compilation of Probability Problems)http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25411

Another thing is that GMAT ppl DO NOT EXPECT us to know P&C formula so theres almost always another way to solve the problem other than using those formulas, though it applies to the questions that come in real test and not for those which are posted on this forum.

I found absolute(modulus) kinds of questions a bit tricky but the links arjmen mentioned in his post are really worth going through:

Various ways to solve absolute value inequations were discussed here:

http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31139 (3 Inequations)
Some other questions on absolute value inequalities:
http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31056 (absolute value)
http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18693 (Ds)
http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20715 (absolute value inequality)
http://www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26507 (Dsvalu19m)
A few external links (fairly elementary):
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/...abs_value.html ----> Quite good
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/absineq.htm
http://regentsprep.org/Regents/mathb/7D8/absinequal.htm
http://www.themathpage.com/alg/absolute-value.htm
http://www.analyzemath.com/AbsEqIneq/AbsEqIneq.html ---> Problems to solve

Though with GMAT prep things just might look a bit different as its a step more difficult than present GMAT but gives u a chance to hit back again. With 3 questions down in total, including 2 in top 10 can also give u a 51 in GMAT prep , something unimaginable in PP!

Another important topic is number theory. Make sure you know basics tricks like dividing big numbers into prime factors and then working on it, Even*even = even , Odd+Odd = even and all its combinations, LCM, GCM, Remainder theory, number line, etc. In standard deviation , GMAT DOESNOT expect you to know the formula and apply it . It just test your understanding of std dev and its significance. If you know these basic concepts well, quant is not that difficult to nail.

TicTakToe

Could you mail us some of the questions you got in GMAT in Quant/Verbal that you remember. Would really help us.

Thanks a bunch.

this would mean going against the confidentiality statement i signed , though i can give u an idea.

Probability - chances of failure of series of bulb , formation of team questions, easy absolute question but yeah bit tricky number theory ones like on a number line they dint show any 0 , just 3^11 and 3^12 equally spaced.. and five equi distant points before tht .. asked me which point is -3^11..

AWA:
Nothing much here but dont underestimate its importance. You need following things to ace it up:

1. Good typing speed. Write as much as you can.

2. A template each for issue n argument that will give you a nice start and good euff concluding para.

3. Avoid slangs.

4. Logical thinking.

5. Last but not the least, spare last five minutes for editing each.


Practice Test Scores

Test Code 52: 740
Test code 14: 800
Test code 31: 790
Test code 37: 740
Test code 42: 800
Test code 48: 780
Cambridge - 690-710(range)
Crack gmat – 690
PR1 – 740
PR2 – 710
PR3 - dint attempt
PR4 - dint attempt
Kaplan Diag – 690
Kaplan1 – 660 : 50, 38
Kaplan2 – 640 : 50, 33
Kaplan3 – 670 : 50, 37
Kaplan 4 – 650: 41,33
PP1 - 750
PP2 - 730
GMAT Prep- 760
GMAT Prep- 710
Real GMAT: 750; 50Q, 41V

Books/Softwares I used:
OG: Absolutely necessary. I used only 10th edition though OG 11th edition has come up. Decide for yourself. I didn’t find any COMPELLING need for 11th edition. Gives you the way ETS expect you to solve the problems.

Hi, Ur post says that u used only OG and princeton. Im pretty much on the same lines xcept that i'm using OG and KAPLAN only

.

Is it advisable to use OG ALONE for verbal? Pls suggest. Im relying solely on OG for verbal. using kaplan and this forums and few other sundry q's for quans.

Let me know if it is ok to bank on OG ALONE for verbal (10th edition)

Yes you can. Follow it religiously. Rather than number of correct/wrong, work on concepts. Regarding Kaplan, you can see my views few lines down(abt the CD), but then , they are My views, you might find it different.

PR: Good for starting you with verbal stuff. Quant is not so great and that info along with AWA info can be found in any GMAT book.

Kaplan Workshop(Software): Good one. Tricky questions at the end part. I did only quant from here.

KAPLAN CD:Verbal is trash. Dont need to even look at it. Though pattern is same as GMAT , verbal RCs CRs and Scs are totally out of world questions that will confuse your understanding. So better avoid it for verbal. Quant is managable. Definitely more difficult that PP but for practise , it can be tried and it will push you to the wall in time mgmt of quant section. But test result analysis is GEM considering it tells you whether you should guess on intuition or no?

Real GMAT Paper tests: Too easy. They do not hold any significance at these times.

Princeston Test CD:Dint like the format. Also theres some aoftware bug. If you dnt immediately follow your verbal section after the quant section, you lose that test. Dint like it so skipped 2 out of 4 tests.

CrackGmat tests: They are seperate verbal and quant test. Can be tried. Maths is challenging though not as challenging as KAPLAN. Verbal follows GMAT pattern.

Cambridge: It always gave me range as a score. Good enuff reason not to like it though it has some really good test result analysis.

PowerPrep: Quant is relatively easy in PP than in real test so IMO it gives the upper range of the real score. Verbal is same as in GMAT.

GMATPrep: My favourite! Loved the quant section. A bit difficult than PP but manageable. Verbal is same as OG/PP level. In my opinion, it is good indicator of the lower limit of your real GMAT score.

That is what all I can think of right now. Excuse me for the long post and any non confirmation to GMAT SC structure but then, lol, its history for me now. Feel free to ask questions, if any.

PS: By the way, this is my new id on TM after I lost the details of my previous one. I was formerly known as “Piyusht”. So I aint really a new member of this forum. Combining both ids, I crossed 1k figure

[kindergartenkid]

Oh so ur piyusht...now i understand why the hell u got 750...u were always there..

[bragss2]

Heartiest congratulations Piyusht/tictactoe. An excellent debriefing. thanks. all the best for your admission procedure

[sraj]

Congratulations. Thanks for the review materials.