GMAT is EZ

I just received two more books EZ Solutions Basic Math for GMAT and Advanced one.

I'm hunting down the high scores on exam. Achieving this from the first try saves me $250 (x times :), so an extra book is never too much. Of course, if it's not dumb and stupid and useless. However, I don't have much people around me to advise.

I had a quick sneak preview of them and it looks like the super practical, however, rather thin ones. Like 3 or 4 times thinner then Kaplan's on Cracking the GMAT books. And, as it often happens, I expect them to be at least 3 times more useful then others. :)

But okay, lets go over the Kaplan's book.

I run through the chapter 4 for a verbal quiz. There were 50 questions which I made 41 correct, giving me 82%. While I don't think that I scored well, as the questions were relatively easy, the most of my mistakes were driven my careless and too much distraction from the side of my email, IM and all other things.

As you can see, I still struggle to put myself into noise-free environment, so I should better learn how to deal with distraction. :)

I didn't really like the explanation part, which is a little bit too messy for me, with no clear points and the answer stated right away, missing the logical path of reaching to it. (Do I ask for too much?)

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.)

Essays and warming up math for GMAT

The last theory part of Cracking the GMAT 2009 was about essays writing (AWA). Overall, it was very okay, I liked it, although it looks like to makes some points controversial to official guide.

Why business schools need AWA on GMAT? They want to protect themselves a little bit against those non-native speakers who actually paid to have their essays written. Well, it might be so.

One of the important points — write as much as you can. Length matters. There is a statistical research that says that the length of essay is related to better score. I believe official GMAT guide says a little bit different things.

While the people who scores the AWA are supposed to ignore minor errors in spelling and grammar, you should be ready them not to. Keep in mind that we're all people and having only 2 minutes for an essay your graders might use to nail down the obvious mistakes only and these are your errors in spelling and grammar.

Pages 326-328 give you a nice template to Analysis of an Issue (AI) part. Don't use it as is though. Make sure to develop your own style or you can be easily caught by an "E-rater" — computerized grader of your essay.

There is a good organizational structure for AI on page 331:

1. First paragraph to illustrate your understanding of a topic, chosing a position. Restate, express your feeling, but stay limited to couple of sentences.
2. Second, third and fourth are to develop your examples and ideas to support your thesis.
3. The last paragraph should sum up your position, but make sure to use slightly different words from the first paragraph.

Make sure to demonstrate a good vocabulary as well as don't go too deeply into finding unsual ideas to support your position. There is a possibility to be graded lower because of missing some obvious points, even if you took a deeper and more educated look at the problem.

Make sure to be specific and stay away from over-generalization.

Next thoughts are about Analysis of an Argument part (AA). Page 335 has a good intro and template for it, as well.

The organizational notes are the following:

1. First paragraph should sum up the argument's conclusion.
2. Second, third and fourth are used to attack the argument and supporting evidence.
3. In the last paragraph you should summarize what you've said and show how the argument could be strengthened.

Starting from page 340 I found a very good ideas on preconstructions. VEry easy things that can be easily used.

On more thing is this is good to use some book to reference your ideas to. While this is not a panacea and not always possible, you might have a recent book or favorite one which you could use.

At the end I went through the warm-up math test which consisted of 20 questions. Unfortunetly, I made 4 mistakes (I was aware about 2 of them and other 2 were careless), but still went into the top one third section and supposed to start from math bins 3 and 4.

Technically, it looks like I'm switching to the hands-on practice again and it'll be less to blog about, except the hard questions.

Morning hour for GMAT

I was able to find some time in the morning to move forward with my GMAT preps.

Finishing with the Sentence Correction section of Cracking the GMAT I found minor errors paragraph also interesting (p.251). It also has a comparison quantity matrix, which was pretty much something new to me — I don't remember anything of that.

The next part of the book was devoted to Reading Comprehension. It's a good intro to the exam, but not much new ideas, though.

Few of main points follows:

1. You should always read the first sentence of paragraph, as it's always a key to entire one.
2. A very nice list of trigger words on page 265. And another nice list of ying-yang words on page 266. That's what I can a trick. They structurized the approach of solving a problem and giving you tools for that. I don't know if I can remember this, though. But I'll try to use the book as reference while practice, and hopefully, I will learn them.
3. Process of Elimination (they often call it POE and I always forget about it) — I found it to be the weirdest thing for Reading Comprehension. It doesn't make any sense for me. I mean, you can always eliminate wrong questions, but I was supposed to see some theory behind that. None found.
4. Reading Comprehension section really requires some silence around. I'm not the most noise-sensitive person, but even a working TV in the other room adds a huge pile of distraction.
5. I really got stuck on page 278 in the sample question with answers like scornful and denunciatory, dispirited and morose, critical but respectful, admiring and deferntial and uncertain but interested. While I can logically eliminate some of them (2), I have problems choosing between the rest (3). I need some more practice here.
6. It's recommended to take 3-5 notes while reading the passage. It's something that you need to develop by practicing, from the other side, I'm a little bit concerned about how will it be on the real exam, when you're kinda limited in paper size.

The next part of the book is Critical Reasoning. Actually, as the book authors say, we'll see the most questions on SC, the less or RC and even less on CR. So it looks like the priority of CR is the lowest one.

TEchnically, the whole section on Critical Reasoning was great (pp.283-315). I mean, a lot of interesting and nice tips and tricks. (Fortunetly, as I wasn't very happy about the book at all.) They did a great job on structurizing the problem.

I also liked that they described three main parts to an argument:

1. Conclusion. Something that author wants us to accept. Look for it in the beging and end of the passage. Normally, you'll be able to nail it down very quickly.
2. Premises. Evidence to support conclusion.
3. Assumptions. Unstated ideas or evidence without which the conclusion might be invalid.

On the other note, the real life is different from class room and as you can see on my example (which is not the best one for sure :) it's pretty hard to keep the stable schedule, especially when you cannot invest significant time into it and you're being "attacked" from other sides of your life. However, I am sure that I can make over it. Bear with me. :)

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. :)

Cracking the GMAT

So, the GMAT story continues. I'm constantly failing to keep up with a stable and a fixed schedule for my GMAT. I would say nothing saying that I'm getting mad on myself because of not being able to keep it the way I want.

However, too many things are happening around, a lot of things need to be done at my job, I need to invest a fair amount of time for the Founder Institute program, plus a number of other things that still need my time and input.

Did I say that I'm married and have a handsome son, who also seeks my time? He doesn't get enough as well. (Hopefully, it helps him to respect it.)

Well, one should say that the right time planning would be an answer, however, I always was good enough with scheduling my time, so it's more about something else.

Whatever, down the road with Cracking the GMAT 2009, and I'm still pretty concerned about the value of it. I already saw the number of sample questions in the end of the book, however, I was actually looking for the hardcore cracking tips and tricks, more on the theory side. 50 pages more, and I'm still reading about pretty basic algebra problems with the list of hints that don't really make much sense to me.

I'm especially frustrated with a very often mentioning so called "scratching" and "plugging in" things. As I've been told, the GMAT takers are pretty limited with amount of scratch paper, and even when they're given it, you have to manage the available space on the paper wisely — we won't be given an extra paper, as well as we don't have anything to erase, but our own fingers and shirt-sleeves. So why should we learn to scratch a lot, when we need to train the brain instead?

From the other side, why are the book authors are idolizing "plugging in" so much? Well, this technique can save you if you have problems thinking in x, y and z, but you should better train how to do this. I could hardly find any example which is a proper usage for "plugging in". The most of these cases were fairly easy to solve with making up an equation. (And I am not the brightest guy in math!)

So I'm pretty disappointed and starting to look for other books.

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.)