Connecting the Dots

Avalanche of thoughts flooded my mind, when I decided to resume writing this blog and I was so confused where to start with, as I was totally disconnected from blogging for quite sometime and there is a lot that I would like to talk about. My choices in last one year to how I am enlightened. I have done introspection of why I stopped blogging and I decided to dedicate a post just for that. Sometimes watching lot of movies does help you and I hope that is going to help me in drafting my story better.

I abruptly stopped blogging after my GMAT exam. I took the test and I couldn't be more devastated after seeing my score of 700. It was certainly a improvement from my previous score but my target score was 730 and I knew from my previous year experience that I wouldn't get admits for my profile from the universities I would want to go with 700. I blamed this failure on everything that I could think of - my circumstances, my schooling and my childhood and I even lost confidence in myself for a short period of time. I woke up to the reality, and started hunting for different options. I realized that I may not be the best, but I can certainly aim to make myself the best of what I can be. A good friend of mine once told me when I was in college - "Hemant, the best thing about you is that you are never stuck with a failure and you invent new opportunities and that is your strength". I completely forgot my strengths for a year and I was stuck with what I couldn't achieve. This, I believe is my biggest failure in my life.

Below are the main reasons, based on which I chose my schools.

1) I didn’t want to go to Indian bschool (Exception being IIM ABC) – The main reason being - diversity in my class. Trust me I didn’t know how that would impact my learning process when I was applying, but I just took it for granted as one of my fundamental reasons. Why the IIM’s are exception though they have no diversity is because of one and only one reason – “Pride Factor”. Every Indian would know what I mean by pride factor. But I know I wouldn’t stand a chance of making my way into one of them - so what’s the point in trying hard?. Besides I was never really convinced that learning in IIM’s would be phenomenal because most peers in class are inexperienced and no cultural diversity.

2) 2-Year program – Most people, who completed MBA, would say the best time of their life was while doing MBA. And I wanted to live each and every moment of my life consciously knowing that these are going to be the best days of my life – Full 2 years. This was the main reason why I never looked at programs in Europe.

3) Top 20 Schools – Job Prospects and strong peer networking. Babson is the only exception, which attracted me because of strong entrepreneurial community apart from top 20 schools.

4) Case Study model – I am kind of person who would understand when I see things in action. And case studies are the best way of learning. I investigated carefully to find out the schools in which programs are more based on case studies and I ended up with 4 of them.

5) For some reason I preferred small school community where everyone knows everyone. I agree there are certain disadvantages, however I preferred small class and small school size. Honestly, there is no rational explanation, when I chose this as one of my criteria. Till certain point of time I perceived that small class and small school strength are one and the same. And I didn’t even ask anyone got that clarified because I thought its too silly

I started my application process to Tier-2 universities in US. This decision was totally against one of my fundamental objectives - going to top 20 B-Schools abroad, the reality forced me to opt out. That’s when I started reasoning backwards and reevaluated my requirements and the reasons behind the requirements. Now its time that I get back to my exam preparation. Story telling is definitely a good break.

I hate my blogcounter !! May be not !!

Initially I was really irritated by the blog counter spamming my mail box by sending mails whenever the counter increases by a significant number. But I am glad I had that in place and last week when I saw yet another spam mail , I decided to continue my story. I am drafting it and you should find atleast a part of story in my next post by next week.

Reading Comprehension - Info I found very Useful

This was a great post by Stacey in beatthegmat forums. I would be editing eventually how the GMAT would trick to do mistakes with examples.

RC Passage:

What is the main point or purpose of the entire passage (most commonly found in the first couple of sentences or the last couple of sentences of the whole thing)?

What is the purpose / main idea of each individual paragraph?

What kind of info is contained in the various paragraphs?
- background info / context
- support for the main point / purpose (this is generally the largest category of info)
- the actual main point / purpose
- follow-on discussion / expounding upon the main point / purpose

Is there any foreshadowing that gives you an idea of what's coming?

RC Questions:

Is it a general question or a specific one?

If general, what type?
- main idea
- passage structure
- tone

If specific, what type?
- specific detail, what
- specific detail, why
- inference
(those three are the main types, though there are other minor types)

Do you know how to handle each of those types? Do you know what they want? (This is different for each type.)

RC Wrong Answers:

Why are the wrong answers wrong, especially the tempting wrong ones? What kinds of commonalities can you notice after you've thought about a bunch of these? Here are some I've found:

RWP: Real World Plausible. The info sounds good in the real world, but I'm supposed to limit myself only to what the passage tells me.

DC: The info is directly contradicted by the passage

The Mix-Up: Two different pieces of info from the passage have been mashed together in a way that is not what the passage actually says - it just looks good b/c the two different pieces are discussed (separately) in the passage

Extreme: extreme words -- always, never -- typically indicate wrong answers (on RC - this is not as certain on CR)

TBNR: True But Not Right. This info is actually presented just as stated in the passage... but it doesn't answer the question that was just asked.

And, of course, the biggest category of all: Out of Scope. (RWP is a subset of OOS.) The info goes beyond what the passage actually says and we can't do that.


Which Topics does GMAT test ?


The test tends to focus on topics in these categories:
- history
- biological science, including medical / health, anthropology, ecology
- certain physical sciences such as astronomy, geology, archaeology
- business (often theories of business)

Aweful feeling after scoring 700 on GMAT prep.

I took the GMAT prep test yesterday and scored 700 (50Q , 34V) .

Its not the score that upset me. Its the abysmal performance in terms of accuracy.

10 questions in quant and 14 in verbal were wrong. I am sure that luck was my way when I was giving the test and this might definitely not be the case on D-Day.

Nonetheless this made me happy because I was struggling to touch 700 in sample test and after analysis show that I have done minimal silly mistakes. Howeve if i could avoid silly mistakes I dont think I am too far from my dream score.

So I need little more practice and I am on to it with 1000 CR and OG 11 RC. This is what I am gonna work on this week.

One more thing , I need to get familiarized with the essays on american history and the GMAT style of confounding test takers with complicated sentence structures.

CR I need to practice a little of tough questions.

Let see how it goes.

Quant Tips

These tips are only to avoid silly mistakes. I consider the people with good

• Don't look at the answers before solving the problem.
• Write the equation for word problems as in what is asked and solve that equation. One typical example is they ask you to find half the volume of the cube given hypotenuse of one of the side. We tend to choose the full volume forgetting what was exactly being asked in question(1/2 volume and not the full volume).
  
• Be aware of the word 'lesser' or 'greater' when negative numbers are involved.
• Square root of a number is greater than original value if the number is less than one.
  
• All the numbers used in GMAT are real numbers unless specified.
• Zero is neither positive nor negative.
• Zero is a even number.
• For DS questions if you are choosing the option D ( both the statements are individually sufficient ) the value of the answer you are arriving at should be same . (this is just a observation. I haven't come across the exception. If somebody does please let me know)
  

Will add more as and when I realize the tips.

I donno what to call this ..... Let me call it ephimeral happyness

Analysis of SC. I guess I failed horribly.I was probably not able to correlate the questions I got wrong. But one thing I realized was that I am doing good. Of the 30% of the questions I got wrong , silly mistakes account for more then 15%. If I could avoid silly mistakes I am probably walking in the right direction.

Another good news is that when I was trying to solve the OG11 , I hit the accuracy rate of 85%. Most of the questions that went wrong in OG11 are the questions that went wrong in OG12 . So I dont think the % is skewed . Good for me.

Bad news is last four days I was out of station and everything looks like latin right now. :(

SC -- where I stand !!

OG 12 :- questions I got wrong

13,14,16,25,29,30,32,33,36,37,42,47,48,50,53,55,59,65,66,67,75,78,82,85,,87,88,91,96,98,
101,106,108,113,116,117,118

36/120

Exactly 70% accuracy. Too bad . but isn't this where I need to improve upon ? I guess yes. I need to push the accuracy to 85+ . I will post back with full analysis. I guess that gonna take some time because I have not idea how to analyze the SC questions and how to classify the questions.

If anyone has some suggestions on classifying the various SC questions (not the Manhattan SC classification because that wouldn't help much in classifying tough questions ), please help me with your thoughts.

Couple of areas where I am struggling is " parallelism". Questions that are too big in size and most of the question is underlined :)

I need to figure out the rest of the categories and also the how to attack those questions.

Right now I am spending time figuring out why I went wrong in the questions in which I went wrong !!

CR myths busted!!!

Well lot of times statistics prove that perception and truth can be two opposite poles. After the statistical analysis of the OG12 CR i realized that my perception is wrong. Probably this is the reason why most high scorers and GMAT trainers suggest that analysis is very important. This week I spent time working on OG12 CR. In my previous posts I said I would mainly be concentrating on SC. When I said the same in GMAT study group meeting,where we meet up every weekend for couple of hours to share strategies and resources and of course build networking, one of group member,Suman,asked me how could I safely assume that I am good at CR . That made me think twice if the strategy I made for myself is right . Then I thought I would do a little bit of CR as well and see where I stand. Probably that one question helped me change my perception that,"there is no way that I could improve on my CR".

I used to think that the questions that I get wrong most of the time are the tough level,not so common questions like Bold Faced ones, logical completion .But after the analysis I realized I was wrong and there is a huge scope of improvement.

Statistics show that I was making quite a number of mistakes in the common question types like strengthen,weaken types. I am making significant number of mistakes where all the while I was thinking that I wasn't making any mistakes in those question types.

Here goes the statistics :-

I have answered 100/124 questions from CR in OG12. Why I choose to do only 100 questions is because I am lazy to play with complicated numbers and I want to keep my numbers fairly simple.

29 questions fall in typical category of G,T and S of which I got 21 wrong and rest of the questions I nailed them right. All the questions that i solved are under time constraint(about 17 mins for 10 questions).

8 -> Strength/ Support ( 2 right )
7 -> Weaken ( 3 right )
4 -> Resove paradox
3 -> Logically complete
2 -> Must be true ( 1 right )
2 -> Assumption ( 1 right )
2 -> Flaw in reasoning ( 1 right )
1 -> Bold Face

Looking at the statistics the major number of the mistakes is from the area which I safely assumed I was strong at.

Last but not least "Thanks to Suman for making me think twice "

Yet another week passed by with out any prep.

PI11 hardening initiative in our department left most of our team frustrated because of hardware issues. Thanks to recession, it keeps everyone in the team busy for no reason. Anyhow because of the deadlines I had to spend quite sometime to make sure that the protocol that I am testing is working fine. Also, my parent were here in Bangalore and time passed by even with out my knowledge . I thought I would spend time studying on Saturday and Sunday. The silicon india startup city event has ruined my GMAT preparation on Saturday. With these bunch of excuses I am sure the title of the post is resounding.

Warmup Test After one year!!

It over 14 months back that I took my GMAT and now I am determined more then ever to break the mark of 720 score. I started my preparation. I took a bench mark test to start my preparation with and scored 640. I got a scaled score of 28 in verbal. This was the main reason why my score dropped in warmup test when compared to my Firstshot GMAT score. Now I know I somehow have to push my raw verbal score to close to 40. I guess quant is not what I am bothered about this time as well.

The analysis of the test using the Psychodementia method is:-

SC(T16/W9)

Nailed - 7Q,6right and 1 silly mistake
Guessed - 6Q ,1right and 5 wrong
Timed out and Screwed - 3Qs, 3Wrong

RC(Right /Wrong )

Nailed - 9Q , 8right and 1 silly mistake
Guessed - 6Q , 6right
Timed out - None

CR(Right /Wrong )

Nailed - 8Q ,6right and 2 Silly mistaked
Guessed - 2Q , 1 right and 1 wrong
Timed out - None

As I see there is a major scope of improvement in SC and CR . I guess the SC preparation with manhatten helped me to an extent. Now I need to figure out the questions which are bouncers to me. I already succeded in figuring that out. The questions where the whole sentence is underlined and the very short question types are what I need to look at. Looking at the question area wise , I guess I am still having the problem with modifiers and idiom error. So I will keep my eyes open for these kind of problems. Also I am struggling with questions where there are more then one Error types are involed(see Manhatten SC for list of all error types) .

So my strategy for preperation would be to practice Q in 1000SC . I will be specifically looking for questions of the types I discussed above and practice them with a hope that I would imporve after a bit of practice.

For CR I guess I will read the Powerscore Bible. I guess the ones that got wrong in test might he high difficulty questions. May be the Powerscore Bible might help me solve the tougher questions.I remember from my first test experiance that i was very strong in CR. However I see a significant drop in accuracy rate.

Probably I might need to revise OG10 and OG11 as well. But for this week I will be looking only into 1000 SC.

Takeaways from Gyan Session

Suman,one of the group members who arranged the gyan session with arun,said "I am sure, I will not be able to do justice, if i try for one!!how ever, there was an attempt earlier",in response to someone in PG asking for meeting minutes. May be he is right however I decided to make an attempt myself for my own selfish reasons i.e to make note of points that matter me the most.

Typically the whole of 3 hours of gyan session he segregated into following sections.

1)GMAT algorithm
2)Approach to GMAT
3)GMAT resources - Sectionwise
4)Tests
5)B-school selection
6)Timelines for application
7)Coaching


GMAT algorithm

Three most important factors are .
a)Number of Mistakes
b)Position of Mistakes
c)Frequency of Mistakes.

Impact of number of mistakes on GMAT score is obvious.

Position of the mistakes!!! It matters a lot. Getting the first few questions right is probably very important because the algorithm majorly adjust your score based on few questions.The next obvious question is -- so getting the first 20-25 questions right is all that it needs ?

Answer is obviously not and it lies in Frequency of mistakes,the term he used doesnt seem right for the explation to follow,even i couldnt figure out more apt term. Though you get lot of questions right in the beginning, its equally important not to make series of mistakes even in the end i.e continuous 2 or more mistakes. If done so the algorithm would recalculate your ability and adjust your score which you wouldn't want if you are aiming for a high score.

Rephrasing into one line , Getting most of first 20 questions right and then not make a series of mistakes is the key for high verbal score.

Approach to GMAT

Selective reading is the key. Dont try to grab all the material in the world because you are not looking at Ph.D . One should find ways to maximise his/her score in GMAT.Take lots of tests before going to the test. Everytest you take make sure that you do A.W.A also. Spend good amount of time and analyse your test. How one feels about all the questions in the test can be classified into 5 types.

N - Nailed ---you are absolutely sure that you are right.
G - Guessed --- Often in GMAT you get stuck which option to choose and you are not sure which is right one
T - Timed it --- You spend 4-5 minutes to solve it.
M - Missed it --- By the time test ends if there are questions which you still need to answer you might miss them.
S - Screwed or Stumped --- You cant even figureout the head and tail of question.

Analysing the answers using the approach would probably help you figure out your week areas.

GMAT resources - Sectionwise

"As long as your approach is clear and fundas are strong then with a clear strategy and calm mind - you will get a high GMAT score If any of the 4 things lack then be prepared to take a beating. But - solving more questions have never helped anyone - Psychodementia "
These words in mind when answering the questions.

Food for thought from my experiance :-
First time I gave my test I probably had a very good approach and took test with calm mind. However I am not sure if I had clear strategy and I really doubt how strong my fundas were and I got my beating !!!

Snapshot taken form the post by Atul

SC - OG, Manhattan SC Guide, 1000 SC
CR - OG, 1000 CR, Power Score CR Bible (if you really have the time for it)
RC - OG, 1000 RC
Quant - OG, Kaplan 800

Individual Book review : -

OG10,OG11,OG12 and OG WorkBook are the books with questions close to GMAT level and always good to look at it.

1000 series. As they are retired GMAT questions they are the best source for more practice if needed!!

Kaplan 800 is good for quant.Kaplan 800 for verbal-What Arun suggest is to go through for fundas. Not a great book for practice.Kaplan premier Edition -Arun says is not even worth looking at it how ever it was contradicting with what i read in couple of other high scoring blogs by top scorers.Thought there is lot of mixed opinion ,I guess I would take suggestion of Arun.

He said something about kaplan Verbal Workbook, which i dont exactly remember.I will check with him and update it once.

Princeton and Barrons :- worth reading only on shit pot.

Manhatten SC - Its a bible for GMAT SC preperation. CR+RC I dont remember what his take on these bookes is [:(]. Excuse me for my short term memory loss.

Powerscore bible -- 380 pages --- To much to read but worth a read if you have time.

Tests :-

Arun's take on tests in order of preference

1)GMAT Prep (2 tests ) - Must take
2)Power Prep (2 tests ) - Must take
3)Bell Curves (8 tests)
4)Manhatten ( 8 tests )
5)Princeton review ( 4 tests )
6)Kaplan (4 tests)

Its generally suggested to take 14-16 full length tests before going to the exam.

I wouldn't want to talk about the other 3 parts because they don't concern me right now. I will update about the other 3 sections once I have taken the GMAT.

One suggestion is before starting your preparation spend two hours with Psychodementia. he has something for everyone and he has this convincing way of busting the myths.

*All the credit for the gyan session goes to Psychodementia.

Gyan from Psychodementia

Last year ,when I was about to start my application process with abysmal score of 680 ,lot of people told me what I scored is worthless for top 20 universities, especially being a Indian IT Male ( IIM). I was not from IT background so I argued saying that I am not typical IIM and I would make a interesting profile, but universities taught me a lesson that being a Indian Male with score anything lower then 730 is disastrous. Thanks to recession which pushed the raise in the number of applications to universities significantly by over 80%. Securing a admit into even the top 40 ranked university turned out to be a dream with my score.


After my first disastrous failure with GMAT and university application process I learnt few unforgettable lessons. The frustration of failure turned into anger because of long list of Dings from the universities and slowly the anger turned into the lesson, more precisely, the First unforgettable and the most expensive lesson of my life.

After 4 months suddenly it striked me that I got to prepare for the GMAT again, if at all I wish to stand a chance of admit from a descent B-School and I decided to explore the options which I havent looked into while I was preparing for my first GMAT attempt. I decided to join pagalguy and increase my networking with fellow GMAT aspirants. I thought that forming a group for GMAT preparation would keep me motivated and would help me with resource and knowledge sharing.

From pagalguy I came to know of people who already have planned for the meetup at weekends and I decided to join them .In meeting, Junta suggested to have gyan session from a moderator in PagalGuy ,famously called as Psychodementia a.k.a arun. Our whole group went for the gyan session to Airlines hotel,Bangalore the day after we had met and there are few more guys who joined in as well after reading the post in PagalGuy on the gyan session.After the session I only wished that I had the same session a year and half back,when I had started my preperation for GMAT for the first time. Most of what he said looked perfect to me as I have experianced exactly what he was saying.I still wonder , If I had met him before I started my GMAT preperation for the first time , I would have disagreed with his take on GMAT ardently.I asked him "when the schools claim that the score is not the only criteria for admit ,why is GMAT score soo important ?" I loved the way he explained why GMAT score is the important. He asked me what my profile is and he asked the guy next to me what his profile is. Strikingly both the profiles are so close that it is almost impossible for adcom to decide who is better.So finally it boils down to GMAT score as it quantifies the logical ability of the person.

Its already 4:00 in the morning and I am still writing my blog. I gotta go to bed now because I have to getup early in the morning to reach kanteerva stadium for 10k run to promote the NGO's. I will write a new post tomorrow on the take aways from Gyan session.

Finally I moved from blog.com to blogspot.com

Roots of my Blogging initiative :-

One of my team members ,who scored 720 in GMAT, said that its very useful to maintain a blog on GMAT preparation . That would help in introspection of stategy to approach GMAT exam and would also help improving the articulative skills. So I forced myself to search in google with keyword blog and the first returned result happened to be www.blog.com . I took all the pain to register filling a zillion of the fields that registration page throws at the user. Its not too long before I realized how much I hated the interface. However, I was lazy to reregister in a different blogging community ,so I dragged my self on the same blog till I finished my first attempt.
Now what forced me to shift to blogspot.com ? the first one - since I already have a account with google, I could use the same account to loggin to blogger.com (Before I never knew that google blogging community name is blogger, I would say google should have named it as glogger ;) . That would have been more intutive for dumbass like me). Second reason is i forgot the password to login to blog.com. When I tried recovering the password, the password recovery page crashed twice and that pissed me of even more and I finally made a decision to search for alternative and I came across blogger.com and blogger.com turned out to be a ideal option for me. So I pasted all posts on that blog as one past below.

Chronicles of my GMAT first attempt

Debrief of my First Attempt:470--->680 and still beaten :(

People who are weak in Verbal this might help.For those who are weak in quant this may not be helpful.
I took my GMAT exam finally after my 3 months preparation.Aimed at 700 but fell short of it by 20. So decided to take the test again sometime in august.Reconciling my past preparation i am writing down my debrief 2 months after my exam is completed.
Got nothing to blame on.Everything went perfect as planned from starting of the preparation to end of Test.
Here goes my story.

November 2007- a sample quant and verbal test (800 tests)
Got 3 questions wrong in quant and solid 28 questions wrong in Verbal and hardly any right questions in verbal-SC.
From the day one i know that i dont need much preparation in quant and so never did I prepare.I was totally depressed at my verbal performance not just because of the score but because of lacking confidence while answering the questions that I am not sure that even a single question i answered is right.I gave up my Prep as i know I would need somemore time to pull my confidence up.


December 2007
Pulling up my socks,I started my GMAT preperation a month later.Attempted a Princeton review test and scored 470.Depressed again,but i clearly know where i need to start my preperation.SC.
I started my SC preperation with manhatten SC guide. (Believe me for any one week in SC ,just reading this book ,understanding and applying it right will get you to a place where you can get 50-60% questions right .).


January 2008
After 20 days of preperation (SC mainly) I attempted another Princeton review test and scored 520.The best part of second test is I was really confident that some of the questions(20%-30%) in verbal were right for sure.This confidence is something that i lacked when i was taking the previous exams.This clearly is the impact of SC preperation using OG and Manhatten SC.
And second thing that i noticed is that both the times I took the test i only got 3 questions wrong and none of the wrong ones in first 10 in quant and engine reported raw score in quant as 43.

Dubious on the difficulty level and scoring pattern of PR tests i decided to take one GMAT800 test.Scored 620.Claps from audiance .

Tests take aways:-

Test strategy 1:-After two exams I decided to break verbal into 2 parts.0-33 questions in first 60 mins and the rest in remaining 15 mins,as i read in some forum that there will always be a RC passage in last 7-8 questions.I have done this to reduce the time pressure on initial questions.

1)Endurance
I relalized that when i was taking tests before i found it tough to take 150 mins long test.This impacted directly Verbal section,as i was trying to finish the section with out much patience . This contributed a lot to reduced accuracy levels.For example,while practicing OG-10 CR , most of the questions were right(50 right of 60).However in exam the percentage of questions i got right is low ,generally 4-6 right of 12-14.This was clearly because of low endurance level and impatience to finish the exam fast ,especially when i feel that i am getting few questions wrong.

2)RC :I thought i was strong in RC.But i realized that I need more pratice becasue GMAT is altogether a different type of exam.The strategy was using in past in paper based tests is to look at the questions before reading the passage ,which would allow you to figure out the answers while reading the passage itself.This trick saves lot of time ,but when this is not allowed in GMAT exam i gotta find out other ways and the only way is to read passage faster.


Mid-jan to Mid-Feb :-
Gone for a toss.Release time and loads of work in office.

Mid Feb-End of Feb:-
Worked on Endurance and RC .Took PR3 and scored 660(30V 50Q).I know i am getting closer but I am still not close enough.Just one week befor the scheduled exam date I decided to take GMAT Prep 1 and scored bad GMAT Prep Test 1 :- 640(27V 50Q). So i rescheduled my exam for april 11th.

March:-
Spent more time on RC (1000RC) and longer streches(2-3 hours) of study for about a month.Completed OG10 and OG 11.However i dont think last month preperation with out much strategy did help me reach my target.Took another couple of tests.

GMATPrep2-660
PowerPrep1-700
Since i didnt want to postpone the test again.I prepared myself for the disaster and took my GMAT in 11th april.Scored 680(50Q and 31V).

How to best use Manhatten SC :-
Read and understand 9 error categories.I would even suggest to try and remember each common error explained under each category.
Be true to your self while doing the exercise below.
Pick up OG 10 ,look at each question of SC and try to list down the possible error categories the question would fit into.Your aim here should not be finding the right answer to the question,instead your aim should be finding the right error category of all the errors in the question.Do the similar task on all the answers.
Now cross check with the problem matrix if you have correctly figured out the errors in each question.
IMO if this task is done properly with both OG's you would get atleast 50-60% questions right there after.


Resources I used for my preperation:-
1)800 tests.
2)PR Tests
3)OG 10 and 11
4)Manhatten SC Guide

Posted by Maddy at 07:00:31 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Monday | March 03, 2008

Prison Break

Where the hell has prison break come into the picture in b/w GMAT preperation.This could be your first thought,after seeing the title.
I am talkin about the mental freedom i achieved.I was struggling at scores of 470 -600 in december.A bit more practice i am touching 670.
GMAT Prep Test 1 :- 640(27V 50Q)
Princeton Review 3 :-660(30V 50Q)

The reason I believe I pushed my score is becasue of the practice I invested in strategy i formulated in Jan.
I realized that there are 2 things that i needed to work on:-


1)Endurance ---I need to get the ability to sit continuously for 4 hours with out much stress.

I relalized that when i was talking tests before it was tough for me to sit for 150 mins at a strech as i lost touch.This problem impacted particulary on Verbal section,as i was trying to finish the section with out much patience which impacted directly on the accuracy.

2)RC :I thought i was strong on this.But i realized that I need more pratice becasue GMAT is altogether a different type of exam.The strategy i use is look at the questions before reading the passage ,which allow you to figure out the answers while reading the passage itself.This trick saves lot of time ,but when this is not allowed in GMAT exam i gotta find out other ways and the only way is to read passage faster.

OG 10 and OG 11.

I will post eventually all the the resources that i am using for my preparation.Can someone comment on how effective is Princeton Review??

Screwed up my preparation for last two weeks,blame it on new year parties,Christmas parties,scorpions,friends visiting my place and at last cold and fever.Lost the touch at the right time when I thought I was picking up some pace in answering the questions.

Testing gonna start in another one week.So I guess that will keep me busy .However i still feel that lack of interest in preparation is whats turning me off from picking up the book and solving questions.

Now I Feel like committing the first fatal mistak, postponing the exam.

Good that I have come back after couple of weeks.I was able to get more resources,more i mean the ones i felt that i should be having like complete OG11 and Manhattan SC 2005 for my preparation.

Analysis after 2 weeks of preparation

The first full-length test(Princeton review) i have taken i scored 470.Probably this is the reason why I was soo depressed to start my preparation.Some how I pushed myself to book the date and started the preparation with sentence correction and critical reasoning.

Slightly confident i decided to take the test again and got a score of 520.What to do now is the question.No significant improvement of score.Depressed again. However i felt that verbal section was slightly under control.Some of the answers in SC I was damn sure they were right ,the second time i took the test.From what i observed,i lacked this confidence in answering at least few questions ,the first time.

But one question nagging me at back of my mind mind.Is princeton review the right gauge of my score?Both the times I took the test i only got 3 questions wrong and none of them in first 10 in quant and my score in quant was 43 both the times and also the verbal questions are quite lengthy and answers options are ambiguous too(may be most of the questions are hard level questions).

So I decided to take GMAT800 test.And i got a score of 620.Now i felt really good as i am getting close to my target of 700.

When practicing OG-10 CR ,i am getting most of the questions right(50/60).However i never got soo many questions in exam (generally 4-6 right of 12-14).This may be because of the time pressure.Need to work a little bit on this.After taking two exams I decided to break verbal into 2 parts.0-33 questions in first 60 mins and the rest in remaining 15 mins,as i read in some forum that there will always be a RC passage in last 7-8 questions.

The Convergence

What ever might me the reason,I decided to take GMAT exam.Even here so many questions circle around like when should i book the date and when should i start my preparation.Finally taking suggestion of experienced,with GMAT,that preparation wouldn't start with out booking the date ,I booked GMAT date.

There are a million resources online both on "How to start prep" and "What to study".However picking up one and start prepring is soo tought that i didnt realize till i tried.I decided to collect all possible material online and i did.Now what?
Where to start with is a question again.Soo many suggestions to start of with ,a sample test or OG.

I finally decided to take a sample test and horribly failed with only 3 mistakes in quant and got only 13 right in verbal with 80% questions wrong in SC.A total disaster it was and i was totally depressed.What to do next?It took me almost a month to comprahend the fact and started solid preparation couple of days before and here i am today.

Manhatten SC 2003ed happened to be the light at the end of tunnel for my verbal preparation.After A couple of days of Manhattan SC study ,i was able to get most of questions right in OG.The best part is problem matrix and the way each question in OG is correlated.

Now looking for right guide to shed light on RC and CR.

Prelude

Every one say that before doing MBA you should know exactly why you are doing.Everytime i think about this question a thousand questions popup in my head.Everytime I tried answering this question I am lost in dark space,I know I am going no where ,yet I try.

Am I born interested in doing MBA?
Is it the Money that drives me to pursue MBA or is it life after MBA where one would most probably be the center of attraction?Howmany wouldnt like to go to parties , or howmany would like to live a objective life like what Ayn Rand describes as heros?Is this feeling is what brings me closer to MBA?
Is it because of family pressure?
Is it my hatred for current job profile?
Is it my technical weekness that left me unsuccessful is what's pushing me for change in job profile?
Is it my true destiny?


I am sure everyone has these questions,the first time they think "why MBA?".

Probably I dont even know what a MBA means till undergraduation.I thought MBA is just a source of big bucks and who can deny the fact and how could i deny the fact that I started preparation for MBA entrance because of family pressure?