Petr

Vijay, thank you, wish you good luck! Actually I will enter school only in 2007-2008, cause need to finish a big project. I am thinking about INSEAD, LBS, IMD and second tier schools in US. However I still do not clearly understand what field to choose after MBA - industry, finance, consulting. I have work experience in all of them and there are too many opportunities in Russia to choose from.

vijay_muddapu, initially, when I decided to get to MBA I started with TOEFL and passed it with 260. It was in April'05. However, when I started to prepare for GMAT my English level was still poor (and I think it's not good until now :D ), so I concentrated on verbal part. At that moment I thought smthing like this: "Ok, when I will see stong improvements in the verbal part I will switch to the math, because math in GMAT is easier for me than verbal". Unfortunatelly I was wrong, because I estimated math difficulty level completely on GMAT+ where it is actually not complicated. How did I approach verbal? First of all I started to write essays. Three times a week I wrote one issue or one argument essay. I did it for three months and totally I wrote around 60 essays. When I understood that it's enough I began to spend more time on other parts of GMAT, still writing about 2-3 essays per month. I prefered to study in the morning at my office because I think that at this time you have a fresh brain and nobody disturbs you until official working hours. I managed to study 2-3 hours in workdays every three days out of seven. Thus, starting from October, when I returned from vacation, I began with RC, CR and SC. Thinking that simulating real exam's conditions would help me to improve my stamina, I arranged a sets of 41 verbal questions and tried to finish them within 75 minutes. Certainly I monitored not only the time I spent but also a failure rate. Each set consisted of 20-25 RC, 8-10 CR and 6-10 SC. I imputed all statistics in Excel (sorry I can't upload the file as my i-net provider restricted this service, if you want I can e-mail it), so I could see where I were at each moment. The hardest and the most time consuming section was Reading Comprehension, and actually I read all texts from OG10 (these are easy) and all GMAT texts from GMAT_GRE_LSAT_READING (when I tried LSATs' texts my failure rate was about 50%). Only after that I felt that I managed to improve situation in RC; failure rate decreased from 30% to 13-17%. However, about a month before exam several times I got around 25-30% mistakes, and this fact disappointed me stongly. The SC was easier. At the beginning I had up to 60% wrong answers! I tried to carefully read all the explanation from OG, but it did not positively affect my scores. The main problem lied in that I did not understand the basics of English grammar, I knew nothing about independent and dependent clauses, what is the difference between compound and complex sentences, how modifiers work and so on. After searching a good grammar book I found what I needed - a textbook written in mid 80 for ESL students. It gave me basics and explained more complicated questions. After I read it for several times I began to understand what was discussed in SC part of Testmagic forum. So, my hit rate also improved up to 10-15% wrongs and I began to feel more comfortable with it. Math part took me around last two months before exam. Actually I significantly reduced preparation pace then. Virtually at that time I solved a complete set of verbal questions only once a week, instead of 3-4 times before. To get ready for math I searched all Testmagic's math section, looking for questions which I didn't understand, and solved them one by one, reading explanations from the forum. Also I solved HardMath (Princeton) and several JJ from Scoretop. And once I clearly get known that I am not really good in math. Some obvious questions took me around 4-5 minutes to be solved, I did many mistakes in DS and I also made many stupid err. in calculations. If I needed to prepare for math one more time I would better to hire a tutor who would give me a sets of questions on one topic, for example absolute values, with increasing difficulty. Thus, right before exam I knew that math is not my strong point. The last weekend before exam I passed GMATPrep with following scores 670 (Q45, V37), 660 (Q45, V36), and 710 (Q44, V41). I think the 710 score is explained only by fact that I got many RC and SC question that I have alreade seen. So, that is all details about how I get prepared.

Sidmin, in AWA I got quite straight forward topics. Argument has two critical assumption which I beat into the ground, and issue was more complicated for me as I'm quite poor of examples and other support to the logic. in math part I expected to see many probility and combination questions, however I got only two or three and they were quite simple. Also there were no question about standart deviations and simple statistics. I understand that I failed on 10th or 12th Q when I'v got ratios DS and that is why the consequent questions were simple. I think that GMATPrep does not have the same algorithm as the examination software. I monitored my studing process (in verbal, as I beleived its most hard area) by Practice Grid where I imputed all my scores until 10 March 2006. After that date I switch to use GMATTER and became pay less attention on results in verbal. The end of March I dedicated completely to math section and complicated CR. I used to open TestMagic and chose all posts made by 800bob, gschmilinsky and others, as I beleive that these boys comment only hard problems. Also for math I solved HardMath (by Princenton) and some JJs from Scoretop. gschmilinsky - thank you for congratulations.

Hello, friends, I did it!! Certainly for someone it is not a great result, but for me it's a real achievement. I 've expected to get around 650 and it was a great surprise for me to see the final score 680. I'm not a native speaker, thus I beleived that my math score would improve the final one. However I got the opposite - by nice verbal I changed the whole weak picture. I would like to thank 800bob, bungholio, gschmilinsky, ramyagupta, CTG1983, karmaholic, arjmen and many many others whose posts helped me in the preporation process. Naturally, great-great regards to Erin who develop and maintain this place. Besides the Testmagic I also practiced on GMATPrep (unfortunately, I understand too late that this prog. changes the content of each practice exam every time you restart it), OG10 and GMAT+. Also, at the early stage I visited Pericles courses in Moscow, great thanks to people from that company, they calmed me down before exam and I felt very confident in myself. The whole preparation process took around 6 months, but two last months I was very busy in work. I think that the exam was very easy and I beleive that I could do better had I practiced more in math. Thank you all!

For Q2, pls correct me if I wrong, n=n(1)*10 + n(2), i.e. n(1) is a tens digit and n(2) is a unit digit. Statement 1 says n(2)=k*n(1), and k=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Am I right to say that n(1)=3, n(2)=1, k=1 and 13 comply to the Statement 1?

I also choose E, as there is a comma after "bad weather" -> thus, we could not choose "...and the chilling effect.." because it would be beginning of the new clause (compound sentence structure with two INDEPENDENT clauses) Therefore we need to take "as well as..."

C A D C

Hi, Friends, My preparation strategy is to practice in such conditions, that are similar to those that I have on the exam. To do it I combine a GMAT-like sets of questions from 1000+ source for verbal and quantitive sections. However, I found out that my results on "paper" tests are much more better then on the computer-based tests, like 800.com. I think this was explained by inconvenient interface of GMAT software, especially for RC, which prevents you to easily navigate through text and make notes on it. So the question is the following. Do anybody knows the exam-looking software which allows to download questions from external sources? Thank you

What is the OA?

DMM I don't clearly understand why "a coolness of judgment and mutability" is considered as plural. We are talking here about coolness, not about judgment and mutability. So, I think there is a singular subject, thus A is correct.

I think E is correct

C "can" is better than "are able to" "would have" is better than "would"

looks like C

I think LSAT much more harder, questions are ambiguous and unclear. But the most surprising fact that LSAT RC section need to be finished within 35 minutes or 1 min 20 sec per question.

Hi jeremey I have the same trouble with LSAT from "GMAT_GRE_LSAT_READING.DOC". My average hit rate on GMAT RC is from 70% to 90% (very volatile). Usually I take GMAT of GRE RC sets from this file and take precisely 22 questions. I have already finished all GMAT and GRE tests up to GRE 9-6 (page 486). Two days ago I decided to to try LSAT01 instead of GMAT/GRE and got only 65% right!!! Today I took LSAT02 and got only 71% with 1 hour 20 min. for 28 questions.