geewiz

sorry I took so long to reply. Here's my prep: Starting off Having decided to go for the GMAT, starting off the preparations presents the greatest difficulty. Procrastination became my middle name as i kept postponing my preparations. I seriously believe that on such occassions, when your inner urge is not sufficient to wake you from the bliss of complacence, you need someone who can needle you, provoke you and incite you to make that start. In my case one of my college buddies, who has been my mentor through the whole process, was the person who kept pushing me to get over my starting trouble. What also worked for me was that I also had a room-mate who was also serious about the exams and we kept pushing each other through the course of our preps. Once you decide to start off, you start accumulating all the information you can find before you plunge headlong into study. Luckly for me I found TestMagic; the best gmat prep site out there. I soon found out that there is deluge of information and material on GMAT on the net, there is so much material that if one planned to complete all good ones, it would take years to go through all of them. But the whole idea is to sift through the information and make the most effective use of these resources to achieve the score that you have in mind.I was spared this because the first thing i did was to contact max Underground for his "comprehensive" materials. He was recommended by a famous testmagic member. Prep Material After having read the debriefs a number of times, I had devised a plan to nail the GMAT in 3 months. There is certainly no limit on the amount of excellent resources available but at one point one has to take a call and decide that one has to stop collecting more and make the best use of what one has.I was afflicted by the same tendency and decided to buy all the materials Max had to offer. I can't say what they are here, but they were worth the $40 I paid for them. I knew i was not going to take any chances and let a little cash stand in my way of a great score. 1) OG 11 2) Manhattan Math Workbooks 3) Princeton GMAT guide 4) Manhattan Sentence Correction 5.)Max's stuff Huys, if you are really serious about scoring high and getting a great scor well please make sure you study all the books and materials I mentioned above. You must find the cash to buy them all they are critical. One word of advise, You might want to check with Max first to see what he has before purchsing the other documents:) OG 11 is an absolute necessity; this should be your starting point into the world of GMAT. It should be also used for constant reference at every point in one's preparation as the standard to be used. Manhattan Math workbooks are certainly useful for people with non-quant oriented background, but for others I would not recommend it as being too useful. I personally bought it because some stalwarts has spoken highly of the books. The CAT Practise tests of manhattan are guaranteed to give you low scores which certainly provide much needed jolt to one's confidence.Why such a jolt is needed is because I believe that even though GMAT is a game of confidence, it is also necessary not to be over-confident. The other tests like Powerprep and Princeton are not representative of the actual hardness of the questions and this coupled with the fact that you might encounter several known questions in the practice tests, can lull you into a sense of false over-confidence which can prove to be your undoing in the real exam. The key is to be confident but also to identify one's weaknesses and work on those. Manhattan tests seriously damage ones confidence but they also test your time management techniques and provoke you to work to improve on these aspects. Princeton's GMAT guide cannot be taken seriously, except for the verbal portion. Princeton treats the GMAT in an almost casual manner and inculcates a feeling that GMAT is not all that difficult to crack. Providing shortcuts and tricks,this book is certainly one that you could use for introduction to the world of GMAT, but not really something you use at any point once you are completely into serious preps. Manhattan Sentence Correction is perhaps the best material available in the market today for Sentence Correction and I would recommend it highly to any test taker. Other than these the materials most popular in the net are Max's stuff Max's stuff get the point? Get them!!! Headlong Into Preps Once all these material are available its time to stop collecting more and start working on the ones you have.The approach of working one aspect at a time seemed the best suited for myself but each one has to find the method that works best for him/her. Before starting on the preparations in all swing it is necessary to assess one's actual level and one's weaknesses.That is the reason it is advisable to take the first test of Powerprep before you start. I did not do this because I thought I already knew what my weaknesses were. Maths As I started my maths preps I realised that I had grown a bit rusty but soon got into the groove. I attacked maths first because I knew it was my strength and decided that I shold consolidate my strengths before working on my weaker aspects.In order to stir up my dormant brain I used to practise multiplications of two digit and three digit numbers in my mind now and then whenever I got some free time. This helps because it keeps the mind alert and fresh because there is a tendency of the mind to get dull if maths is not practised for some days. I went through entire Maths workbook of manhattan but did not find questions to be challenging enough. But inspite of not being challenged by the questions I was dismayed to see that I was committing mistakes too. Ursula's excel is one of the best tools to be used in practise tests. By classifying your errors as Concept Errors or Careless Errors one can easily identify the areas in quant which are problem areas and also the usual silly mistakes that one makes. As one gives more and more pratice exams one can be proactively alert for the usual suspects ( silly mistakes ) and prevent these from happening. At the same time practise more and more questions from your problem areas so that you are absolutely confident in them. Verbal CR Critical Reasoning is one area where practising hundreds of questions helps a lot to train one's mind.In my case I pratised OG completely to get a feel of what they expected and subsequently I practised a lot of LSAT stuff.I believe that LSAT is way tougher than GMAT and is the best way to train one's mind.There might be times when one might answer less than half of the questions correctly but as one progresses one starts getting better and better at these. In my case even after I got better I could harldly ever get more than 20 out of 25 correct.It used to hover around 18 and occassional dips and elevations. But the important thing was that I was quick to understand why I made the mistakes because I had got used to their style of thinking. After practsing LSAT for around a month, wounded and bruised but nevertheless stronger, one can start off with the GMAT material and it should seem like a cakewalk. As one practises more one realises that the answer starts striking almost immediately as one reads the question.The key to CR is to read the question stem first and then to read the passage and try to predict the answer before looking at the choices. RC There are different techniques in handling RC as suggested by different people, but the important thing is try out different techniques and adopt that works best for you. Some people might prefer to skim through the passage wheras others prefer to read through the whole passage. Reading togh editorials from WSJ, Economist and other sources are the best ways to spruce up one's RC skills. Max's RCs docs are a bigh help for prep. In my case I used to read the passages carefully and write down key points of each paragraph on a sheet of paper and go back to the passages if I could not recall something. Even if I could recall the answer I would go back just to make sure. It is also important not to practise too much because after a point one starts getting bored with these tough passages and concentration factor is exremely important, one should never let one's attention waver. SC SC is perhaps the problem area of a majority of test takers, especially ones who are not much into reading. While it is true that being a reader helps, it also fallacious to construe that a non-reader cannot do well in SC.Reading the editorials of well known newspapers is a necessary part of verbal preparations, but GMAT SC is more about identifying patterns and this is where practise really helps. Manhattan sentence correction is perhaps the best place to start and regular practice in OG, 1000SC and regular perusal of notes made by Spidey, Sahil and Rohith (all available from Max and for free online) should see anyone through. It is also important to make notes on all the mistakes one made because at the end of the day these notes could be a treasure trove for you. Practise makes one so perfect that one can identify the errors almost by instinct and this saves a lot of valuable time in the exam. Good luck on YOUr prep!!

Hey Guys: The comprenhensive includes the 150 document and ton and tons of other stuff which I can't mention here:) Really don't want to loose my score or see my thread taken down. I will post tomorrow on my Prep

You can do better bro. Get your hands on some good verbal materials. Check with gmatunderground@gmail.com

I will start with my test day experience. Here are some of my observations from test day: I'm a morning person, so the 8-12 time slot worked great for me. Unfortunately, I could not sleep the entire night. So I went to the exam with a headache and two tylenols. Food - took two powerbars and water with me. No coffee, I did not want to be jittery, just calm. Ate oatmeal at home for breakfast (something that sticks to you). Started the test with the AWA, I thought the topics were very staright forward compared to the ones given in GPrep or any other testing software. I had reserved essay inputs only for the last 10 days and had a temlplate in mind. I got a little stuck with that during the end of the argument essay, but the form back during the second. I thought the test center was really warm and hence my full sleeve shirt was very uncomfortable. Thankfully, I had a cooler T-shirt in the locker which I switched back after the first hour ! Quant had a good start. I had complete control for he first 7 questions and was very sure my answers were correct. The 7th and 8th were kind of tough, but I invested about 2-3 minutes. One particular question used remainder theorem but in a way I had never seen it before. I had about 2-3 probability questions and 2 on combinations, but they were quite easy. on the whole I found quant easier that Gprep, but a tad bit tougher than PP or PR. I finised quant with about 2 minutes to spare. I usually finish with about 3-4 minutes ahead of time. In verbal,first was a SC, followed by 2 back to back RCs. First one on business, and the second on science (related sth to ocean ecology). I thought this would set my timing off a bit, but it actaully didn't. I had worked through all on OG on RC, also other sources like LSAT (downloaded from another website). RC has always been my strength, with an error rate of less than 10%. Average lenght of each RC was 40-50 lines and 3-4 questions. I had about 4 RCs. One thing very different was that for the first time I had a legal issue related RC. I haven't seen legal based RCs in OG or anywhere. Even in LSAT material I followed for RC, I didn't see many legal based stuff. This one also happened to be longer than usual. But thankfully , this was somewhere after 28 questions and I was feeling confident about my performance so far. I guessed 2 out of 4 on this one. I think that's one of the reasons for my 41 only in verbal. Sorry to hear clintonn's thread got dumped; contact max at gmatunderground@gmail.com for pep documents.

WHOOOOhoooooo!! I nailed the bastard. Thanks to Clintonn (Man you are amazing) and to max underground (recommended by clintonn). I bought the comprenhensive materials and that's all I used for my prep (you get almost every importeant document). I will post a detailed debrief later after i've finished having some drinks at the bar. Lata!!