imi_gmat

Hi Ryan, These tests are available from the GMAC website : http://www.mba.com. I purchased all the tests as I was keen to stick as closely as possible to the OG format. I can sell them at 50% of what I paid if anyone's interested ;-)

Hi Newbie, I am totally with you on RC being the toughest, but besides the obligatory practice here are a few tips that worked for me : 1. As much as possible try to read the passages as though you are reading on a topic of real interest to you and after a few passages, you just may start finding some of them no longer as dull. That for me was the defining moment when RC slowly started turning into an ally. The passages on marine life and chromosomes sometimes made me blank out, but when I tried to earnestly assess what the passage was trying to convey, I could do them faster and more accurately. 2. A lot of the answer choices given often make unreasonable assumptions, undermine minorities, or women and are sometimes downright incredulous. You can safely rule out such choices even if you have not read or understood the passage. Of course, read twice make sure that what you think is ridiculous is indeed so. 3. In some cases, it is better to assess the central idea of the passage ( take about 30 sec to 1 minute for this), read the questions and then re-read the passage in depth. This works especially well where the questions are straightforward. 4. I mostly studied from OG & OG Verbal together with the GMAC paper tests, which meant that I often got the same passages over and over again & would you believe it, I got the same questions wrong again most of the times. Moral of the story is that i is important to understand exactly why an answer choice is correct. 5. Another thing that helped me was the realization that what I sometimes assumed as the right answer was simply the second best choice, and most of the harder RC questions have a next best answer. Once I understood this, I started looking harder for fine differences as to which choice is the winner and my scores improved. Try to apply some of these tips to your next round of RC passages and let me know how it goes. P.S Sory about the delay. Currently working on my application and the deadline is close. All the best !

As far as debriefs go, this one is very long and detailed covering a few aspects that may not be of interest to everyone. However, even if this helps any one of you, I would consider my sitting and writing this until three am worthwhile. I finally gave the test on 8th Jan this year after wasting precious dollars on a few postponements and cancellations. We moved a year and a half ago to Singapore from India, and trying to juggle GMAT preparation and family life with my pre-schooler has not been easy. I gave myself four months of preparation factoring other obligations. Although, I must add that I studied for around 2 weeks in early 2006 also, which is when I had just started this project. Ok..let me get to the actual debrief In all I studied from the following 9 books mostly in the order given below: The first book I purchased was- Cracking the GMAT by The Princeton Review, quickly followed by The GMAT Advantage with Professor Dave which had received a glowing review at Amazon and I heartily second the recommendation. You can read more about it at Amazon. Halfway through these, I started the dreaded Kaplan, and as expected performed poorly on he diagnostic(I think I got about 50/70% V/Q right).The PR really helped me understand the so called GMAT English and GMAT Advantage had some really challenging quantitative questions, which made my future attempts at Kaplan much easier. Next, I bought the mandatory OG11,which even though at first seems to be a compilation of questions, gives some great techniques in the answer explanations, although the book assume that you are familiar with all the quant fundamentals. I parallely also started Kaplan 800, which oddly enough seemed more straightforward than its predecessor Kaplan Premier program. Math Workout by PR gave me additional practice questions as well as nice techniques which its combined version lacked. Somebody also suggested a guide called ‘Magical Book on Quicker Maths by M.Tyra’ which is a local Indian guide for preparation of Bank Probationary Officer’s exam in India. While this book had some great practice questions on Probability and Permutation & Combination, it has a rattu tota (mugging parrot) style that never works for me, but it may be useful for those with a talent for memorizing things like square of 27 etc. as these techniques can sure save some valuable time. Somewhere in between these books I attempted a few tests rather non seriously and did not track the results. I think they were mostly in the 650 to 720 range, 720 being my score on GMAT Prep. I must also add that I did not complete all the practice questions in all the books but just attempted whichever ones seemed unique or challenging. The scores of the serious tests (all these were GMAC paper tests) that I took are: Q Raw Q scaled V Raw V Scaled Overall Test 1 47 47 48 41 710 Test 2 47 49 38 36 700 Test 3 45 47 41 37 680 Test 4 49 49 49 42 730 Test 5 43 47 42 40 700 Test 6 47 47 45 40 710 Test 7 49 50 47 40 730 Test 8 46 46 46 41 700 Test 9 48 50 46 44 760 Test day I feel that we largely perform within 30 points of our average performance in the prep test. Whether you do better or worse than prep depends on factors unrelated to your academic preparation. In my case, the interrogation of the admin staff at the test centre rattled me. They were curios about my Indian outfit and the need to wear a dupatta and things like that. I think I got a little pissed with them and it affected my essay as I spent the first few minutes focussing on cooling myself down. Big Mistake ! Please do not allow ANYTHING to perturb you on the test day. After all it is only your loss. I realized I barely had time to finish my essay, leave alone to spell check them and I could detect a few errors but ran out of time. If I had to do a self rating, I would not have given myself more than 4.5, so 5.5 on AWA was a pleasant surprise. The Quant section started with some easy peasy questions on averages, percent etc. but very quickly became trickier. Despite my best intentions to not spend too much time on any one question I ended up wasting nearly 10 minutes on some of the very challenging ones ! I think I got into an ego battle with the testmakers in trying to solve the questions as I considered myself a Maths pro. This foolishness led me to realize that by question number 22 I has barely 10 minutes remaining. Then began a frantic attempt to guess even some of the easier ones of the remaining 15 odd questions. By the 30th question I had some 3 minutes to go I was simply picking answers randomly. Oh, how I cursed myself for throwing away precious time. I ran out of time around 33rd question and I almost wept. My break was spent contemplating whether to continue or quit. If I had performed so poorly in the quant section which I was so good at, what hope did I have in the verbal section which invariably was my downfall. The prospect of going through the whole rigmarole again made me finally decide to continue and try to give verbal section my best shot despite my mental state. I spent two minutes relaxing and then started the next part. Luckily, the verbal section seemed considerably easier than some of the confusing Kaplan stuff and I managed to finish with a few minutes remaining. Still I contemplated cancelling my score, and only decided at the last minute to view the score. I must say I was surprised. Though my score was somewhat lower than what I had previously hoped, it was nowhere as bad as I had been imagining throughout the test. I thanked God and rushed out of the test centre and bought myself a celebratory smoothie as I was suddenly famished. I seriously hope this will be of value to some of you and you will be able to glean some important tips and lessons from my unbrief debrief.

Thank you so much for your feedback. My test is tomorrow and the essay bit is making me nervous. Your point about morality and ethics is a good one. Thanks again.

I had written a detailed critique but the system rebooted and I lost my post !! This is a somewhat shorter version. Hi Praveen, Even though I have only recently begun working on AWA, i will try my best to meaningfully critique your essay. Overall it is a fair attempt but I will focus more on areas of improvement as I personally find them slightly more helpful. Finally, please remember I am also a beginner like you, and so my critique may be as flawed as my own essays are ! You emphatically agree with the author’s stance, which comes across clearly in your first few sentences. It is a good opening paragraph. The first example also connects. However, I am not clear on how the second and third examples are relevant. There are also some grammatical errors and repetitive phrases, such as So if everybody in the society takes responsibility to obey the laws then everybody in this society will be safe and secured and lead their lives peacefully . Hope this is of some help. All the very best for GMAT !

Hi all ! Please spare some time to critique one of my first few attempts at an analysis of an issue essay written under timed conditions. This one took me approxiamately 33 minutes:(, mainly because of my not so fast typing and the time it takes for me to translate my thoughts from hindi to english.:blush: Thank you for your time. "The best strategy for managing a business, or any enterprise, is to find the most capable people and give them as much authority as possible." The author of the given essay suggests the best strategy for running any business or enterprise is to find the most capable people and grant them complete autonomy. While this recommendation in theory may sound deceptively simple and common sense, in practice it is a lot more complex than it appears at first. Admittedly , most businesses would stand to benefit from recruiting the best, but like any other resource acquisition, this too requires a careful cost benefit analysis before making the investment. To begin with, it is not the easiest of tasks to identify and attract the most capable people in any industry. Even if it were to happen easily enough, such folks come with a heavy cost, which may not be justifiable for all kinds of enterprises, depending on the size and the degree of expertise required. In addition, the higher salary and perks usually expected by such professionals can lead to resentment among other employees which can seriously hamper employee morale and teamwork leading to overall lower productivity than can be achieved otherwise. Secondly, giving them as much authority as possible seems a bit extreme. Sure, all employees need a certain degree of autonomy, but one has to ensure that they are guided on the overall organizational missions and that all their activities contribute to the organizational goals. Giving up complete control to the employees can not only lead to chaos but also to abuse of authority in some cases. Thus a fine balance between autonomy and control has to be maintained with all employees to ensure that none of them stray out of the desired organizational framework. Finally, we must also remember that having the best in the business also means correspondingly greater effort at employee retention as such employees are constantly inundated with great offers from rival firms. This extra time and financial investment also needs to be factored in when weighing the virtues of getting the best. To sum up, while the advantages of having the most qualified and talented employees on your payroll are undeniable, there are a host of other issues that require careful consideration before arriving at the decision to recruit the best and the brightest.

Hi Erin, This is such a wonderful place, i wish i had learnt of it sooner.I truly respect your set of rules which seem to be pretty fair and mostly easy to follow.Your point about this forum being a platform for two way information exchange rather than an information dump is also well taken. However, it would be a great help to those like me who have joined only a couple of weeks before the test to know precisely what are the priveleges and duties we can expect. Thanks for all that you are doing.

Hi Shona, I'm jotting down a few tips that I feel have helped me to improve my GMAT practice test scores : 1. If you are giving the GMAT within the next two months and don't time have the time to go through too many books, the ones that I would recommend are : a. Princeton Review Use Princeton Review to start your preparation with as it has some excellent techniques and helpful tips for both Quantitative and Verbal sections. Data Sufficiency is one area which used to completely baffle me initially but using PR's strategies really helped me get a grip on DS.It also explains the different errors in Sentence Correction in great detail. b. Official Guide This is a must have because it is closest to the actual test questions, and gauge your fundamental understanding of the topic. Also, it has tons of practice questions given in increasing order of difficulty and their answer explanations are brief but easy to understand. c. GMAT Advantage by Professor Dave I found a lot of the quantitative material in GMAT Advantage closer to some of the tougher OG questions. The explanations are well written and each question has been graded as easy, medium or difficult. The friendly tone makes the book seem an easy read but it has some really challenging material lurking underneath. In fact, that's another reason why I would suggest starting with PR and then graduating to GMAT Advantage. After a few days of untimed practice on each section, start pacing yourself to improve timing. Another important aspect is to be able to withstand fatigue caused by applying yourself to solving problems at the required pace continously for three and half hours. To achieve this, once you are reasonably comfortable with all the sections,try to give as many full fledged practice tests as possible.

A very warm Hello to everyone :-> I'm in Singapore, and have my GMAT scheduled for the 8th of January, after cancelling twice earlier,as both times I miracolously fell ill just three days before the test. I am keeping my fingers tightly crossed this once.:hmm: All the threads I have seen so far on this forum seem to be really helpful. I too hope to get some encouragement and advice from all of you and perhaps share what I have learnt in three months of preparation spread over 2 yrs ( during relocation from India to Singapore and trying to manage studies around my three yr old son). All the best everybody:tup:.