Done with verbal!

I'm just done with the last verbal bin from Cracking GMAT. Actually, with two last ones,#2 Medium and #3 Hard.

Well, frankly speaking, I'm still struggling in fixing my verbal part. I was able to score about 65% on the hardest part while scoring about 61% on the medium one. While I feel myself a little bit more confident on the type of the questions, I know the good approaches to solve some of the problems, I still much more intuitive on them, rather then knowledgeable.

I don't really have a theoretical points to support my answer. Well, sometimes I do, about half of the times. In all other cases, it's more like what feels good.

Also, I don't know if it's me or the book (Cracking the GMAT), but hardest ones were rather easy. Easy, I mean, I've got wrong 2 or 3 in total 16 or 17.

And a few final words: I'm pretty unsatisfied with the book. I believe it's pretty worthless. They've got a pretty solid part on permutations and combination theory, but, dude, it's only ten pages or so. Yes, they provided readers with some good use cases, but that's it. Everything else is like the image on the right -- too much about nothing (or the same).

My next one is Kaplan's Comprehensive Guide to GMAT 2009. My best hopes that it'd be a better book.

Other than that, I'm going full throttle into practice questions.

Almost done with math...

I'm completing the 4th math bin of Cracking the GMAT book. (Yes, I had a pretty big gap in my preparations. Don't ask why. :)

While the book advised me to work on 3rd and 4th bins (according to my warm up test), I decided to go over all of them. The 1st and 2nd ones took me a little of time and I scored a little bit more then 90% on the 1st one (very easy, only careless errors, I need to force myself to read question but not run over it), and about 80% on the 2nd one. I don't think I really got too much of it, more like a practice side. (Didn't took much time, so it's okay.)

The 3rd bin was a little bit harder and took me a little bit more time. I had a lot of distraction while doing it, had a lunch, took about three phone calls, so, it was kind of less well done, but I still scored about 70% on it. Not that much of careless errors now, though.

The 4th bin felt really hardcore for me. It's more like something you need to go over each question and learn the way how to solve it. I didn't complete it yet but I am scoring about 50% so far (pretty bad). If I can get my scores up 20% for this bin, I should say that would be good enough. The bad thing is that explanations didn't seem good enough for me. Some of them are too brief or like "this is a good example how to apply blah-blah-blah technique and with it you get blah-blah-blah". Well, you better show me how.

I still have to complete 3 verbal bins, hopefully, I'll have it done over this weekend or early next week. I'm not satisfied with the book, and while it costs $25+ I feel like I'm getting value only for a few bucks of it.

I have my official guides verbal and quantitative waiting for me, they're cheap and seems to be more useful. (Actually, I have even more books and practice tests to go through. However, I need to do this as quickly as possible, as I'm starting to put myself into much more strict time frame now.)

Sentence Correction

Finally, thanks God, I can face some interesting topics in Cracking GMAT. The Sentence Correct section it is.

While I had no chance to invest a fair amount of time into it, yet, I've already noted some interesting moments.

1. They do not say that you can't use your ear. Just don't do this first. The first step is visual spotting for errors.
   
2. They structurized errors spotting a lot. There is nice list of major errors featured on GMAT exam on pp.233-250. Very well organized.

For non-native speakers (as I am) I found a pretty nice pronouns matrix on p.234. Native speakers might find it too basic though.

Also, I found the most of sample questions described so far to be fairly easy. Of course, they give you an idea what type of error is there, but once you know that, I found it very easy to find the right answer. I did very well on this.

More to go, stay online. Hopefully I'll find an extra hour or two tonight to work some more on this.

Keeping cracking the GMAT

Well, so far so good. I've just finished with almost half of the book (Cracking the GMAT 2009), completed the quantitative part of it and still pretty intrigued about when will we start to crack.

No, don't get me wrong. The book is really nice and good for people who was very bad with math. (I can judge the verbal section, yet.) I wasn't the most brilliant math guy, and I have more then 12 years past my school days so far (I graduated when I was 17, I now I'm almost 29). However, the book is very, very basic. 225 pages out of total 347 (not including practice questions, answers, drills and blah-blah-blah) and almost nothing new for me. No tricks, no hints, no secret combos that I'd be able to apply on my own on the real test. (Well, sorry, The Princeton Review, I might be dumb to get yours, too.)

Anyway, I still want to mention pages 147 to 158. These ones have a pretty nice intro with practice questions on probability, permutations and combinations. I marked it down and going to use it as a table reference. Very clear and nice.

There are also few nice intros on pages 183-184. This is something I normally don't use in my daily life and tend to forget. The books has all these formulas for me there. Thank you.

So, lessons learned.

1. There are a lot of books on GMAT and there is no the best one. I might need to purchase some more to cover those parts which are needed to get me to 700+ score. However, I still believe I should better practice more. It looks like those hints and tricks aren't for my type.
2. Flexible hours of studying time just don't work. You need to be have a specific timing every single day (well, you can give yourself a break 2-3 days in a week). But you should have specific hours within specific time frame. If you break it — you should know that you fucked up. I tried many different ways of managing my study time, and everything sucks but specific and set hours. You can feel some pressure because of that, but it's good for you, trust me on this.
3. GMAT questions are tough. At least, they should be. If you feel that they're piece of cake for you — you either extremely brilliant and well prepared or you're doing them wrong. I try myself not to turn the page and breath with a relief because of seeing an easier question. This won't happen on a real exam, if I'm doing well. Better manage to enjoy tough ones.
4. Make sure you can get some peace when you're studying. Every single minute you're being disturbed requires up to 5 minutes extra to get back on track.
   

Bear with me, I'm moving forward. :)

Going forward with GMAT

Well, I'm going through the Cracking the GMAT 2009 Edition right now. I'm a little bit confused. I've passed through the hundred pages of the book, which is literally 20% of it and made some marks barely twice. I can't say this is good or bad, but definitely it'd be better to get the book with 20% discount then. :)

Right, some people may find it useful though. I can't estimate the level of all people who're approaching GMAT — so spending 20% of the book (so far) with very-very basic material could make some sense. However, I think my initial level is pretty low (for the range of scores that I'm aiming at), so such a cracking book only "cracks" my time, but not skills.

I had no chance to determine the level of questions that this book has (as they say, more then 250 practice questions are included). However, I hope they are good enough, otherwise, I'll be more sorry about waste money in addition to my time.

So far, I feel that it's more important to do more tests then read more theory. (Read: buy books with practice tests, prefer more advanced ones!) Many rules (tricks, hints, whatever you call them) that I see are repeating each other, so you basically learning nothing new.

Stay with me, it looks like I'm going to be back to GMAT review books very soon. :)

On the other note, today is a pretty hot day here in San Francisco Bay area. While nothing extraordinary comparing to what I used to experience in Southern California (Pasadena), it's still a little bit too much. Tomorrow is promised to be hotter. I feel like I'm ready to vote for the artificially regulated micro climates, where you can get sun bathes and swim on the sea side, but rest in cool area while at home. (This may sound like a signal to attack for obsessive environmentalists, but I don't care, really. I'd prefer not to destroy things around me, but my life and comfort takes the higher priority anyway.)