I definitely need to learn English

Well, I am keeping pretty stable position on the quantitative side, scoring 47-48Q on the most of practice tests.  However, my verbal drives me mad.  I didn't realize it's going to be that big issue as it's now.  

Okay, after running a few practice tests, I found out that my verbal sucks (in general), but gradually looks like the following:

1. The best thing I'm scoring is Critical Reasoning.  I don't know why, maybe because it is what it is. :)
2. Sentence Correction is something in the middle.  I'd say, it's closer to CR, than to RC.  It's still bad.  Even while I'm starting to think I'm catching up, I'm still failing.
3. The worst thing is my Reading Comprehension.  It is like 20% away from the SC, which is already bad enough.

So I'm pretty much gearing towards verbal now.

1. I grabbed PowerScore Critical Reasoning Bible for CR.  It's one of the most recommended book for it, although I've heard complaints of it being boring.
2. Manhattan's Sentence Correction is also a sure leader for SC.  A lot of memorization though, as it seemed to me from the first sight.
3. And none for RC.  Harvard Business Review was recommended many times, as well as many other books and magazines.  However, they don't seem to me helping.  I need to come up with a better strategy here.

We'll see how it works out for me.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Reading for GMAT

I definitely acknowledge that I need to read more to improve my verbal GMAT, in particular, the Reading Comprehension section.

I do have a long list of books to read. Typically, they are non-fiction books, business related or bios. My current one is Stealing MySpace. It's pretty entertaining I should say.

However, I normally cannot read more then 40-50 pages without being interrupted. With ~350 pages total, it will take me a week to get the book done and this is pretty poor progress. While such amount of reading is comfortable for me, I feel that I need to at least double it.

How much do you read?

Some more GMAT scores

While I didn't expect to, I was able to complete the verbal section of GMAT exam in about 60-70 minutes. I believe on exam you are given 75 minutes for 41 questions. So I was pretty much close, however, I'm not sure if it's okay for the exam -- the level of distraction and just emotional pressure is going to be higher.

The numbers were bad. While I'm hunting for low 700's for exam, I just scored low 600's now (according to Kaplan's spreadsheet). Once again, I missed the whole block of questions, consecutive, also in the middle of the test. I'm starting to think that it happens whenever I'm loosing the focus, but recover later on. I need to think more about that.

I'm afraid to think that I'll need more then a month to get my scores to a better level. I don't feel solid on some of the questions, and I know I need to do better. (Well, I'm almost sure I can.)

I found a lot of people struggling to improve by 100 points score with less then 4 weeks timeframe and fail. Well, some people still believe it's possible if you'll study 4-6 hours a day, but lets make it real -- it's not gonna happen even if you'll take a leave from a day job. You just can't do this unless you're going nuts about making 100 points improvement within such short period of time. (Besides, some people believe that all these "books" scores of 600+ can end up pretty close to 700 on a real exam and vice-verse. You never know.)

Anyway, I can't do 4 hours a day on GMAT. The best I can is 2-2.5 hours with an extra hour or 1.5 for reading books. I can't read too much fiction stuff that is recommended in GMAT Club forums, but I do love business books.

So this is my plan. And well, I'm not planning to schedule a test yet, so I don't have any time limits so far. Whenever I'll feel confident with verbal & quantitative parts, I want to write at least 15-20 essays on AWA (AI & AA). This will take me about a week or so. Only after that I'm going to run for the test.

On the other note, I really don't understand people who went to GMAT and got 720-740 and then still came back for a higher score (and often fail). While with the most schools you can suggest which score to consider, I really can't get the reasons -- why did you waste your time and hunt for something more then 720? GMAT is not the only, and, frankly speaking, not the most important piece. Whatever men.

Well, I guess that's all for now. Not much happening around there. I recently got Stealing MySpace book on my Kindle. I didn't have a chance to read it, but heard a lot of positive feedback about the book.

I'm almost there to close a deal with one of the gyms around (month to month, don't even dare to think I'm going to sign a contract :). I think it's going to be 24 hour fitness, even if I don't like it. We'll see.

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.

Verbal

Well, let me make it straight. Now I know for sure -- I don't like the verbal section of GMAT.

It doesn't make me happy.

While I scored into middle third according to warm-up section of Cracking the GMAT, I decided to start with the first bin, instead of the second one. (Better more then less.)

You know what? I didn't mention any difference. The first bin felt pretty hard for me. Sometimes even really weird.

I made a few "educated" guesses, completed it rather quick, despite on the noise and overall distraction of TV and constantly beeping email coming in (yes, I receive a lot of emails on the weekend, too).

So well, what made me even more surprised is my result, which was about 90% of correct answers.

If you'd ask me about that -- I would say I made at least 30% of mistakes. However, I didn't.

So what could be my options to improve myself in the verbal part of GMAT? Still don't have a good answer for that.

Reading helps, however, to what extent? The texts posted in the GMAT are pretty weird and unlikely to belong to my list of readings. Other then that, I didn't mention any improve in my results.

From what I heard, Manhattans' Sentence Correction is very good. I have plans to acquire this book as soon as I'll finish with my official guides and one more (I guess Kaplan's one). I'm also thinking about Kaplan 800, however, I'm little bit concerned on some reviews saying that the questions in it not that good like even the free ones from mba.com.

I also have a set of printed material from my friends, with some sample questions and tests to go through. However, I'm not very fond of solving problems, that I can't get an explanation for. It will take more time, which I'm pretty limited for anyway.

P.S. Found a nice image to accompany this post. ;)