advice on approaching EXTRA OG questions and more..

[thoughtrunner]

Hi Stacey,

I am about to delve into the EXTRA OG questions, hoping to take the real GMAT roughly a month from now.

I just took my 3rd CAT and received detailed feedback from my instructor on strengths / weaknesses etc.

I'm wondering whether I should randomize the remaining OG questions in groups of 10 and 20 (so as to simulate GMAT exam / timing) or solve them as they're already ordered (quasi-topically) in the study guide? I plan to revisit the strategy guides for my weaker areas. Since our class was given the new version 3 strategy guides mid-way through the course, some of that material is new to me (and overwhelming!). But the extra topics / questions are helpful.

Second: how would you recommend working in the online question banks? I was planning to do 10-15 a day split between 2 or 3 topics.

Third: are there any other resources where I can find more problems?

I've meticulously kept track of my OG performance in the Excel tracker, and I've made note-cards for all problems and topics that I felt needed revisiting or memorization. I plan to start reviewing these daily as well.

My CAT scores have been 550 / 590 / 640 since I started the course. I took the tests at the suggested times. I'm aiming for a 700 in late Dec. / early Jan right before most round 2 apps are due (min I need is 680). If you have suggestions on how to schedule my remaining tests in this crunch schedule, I'm
all ears.

I know it's a stretch to be aiming for 700+ in this short time, but if I find that the last couple CATs are 650 or lower, I might opt not to take the GMAT yet.

Let me know what you think!

Lastly (and on an unrelated note), I did not do the essay lab. Can I still get one of my CAT essays graded, and if so, who do I write about this?

Thanks so much!

[Martin RC]

Hi Stacey I am in similar position as "thoughtrunner"...
I have also meticulously kept track of my OG performance in the Excel tracker and I feel these problems are easy comapared to the ones on the CAT. Also, comparing my CAT porcentage results and the OG tracker, my CAT porcentage is lower. Should I practice with more challenging problems?
Do you recommend doing the extra practice from the Green and Purple OG's? Do yo recommend the challenge sets? or the questions banks?
Whats my best option? I'm taking the GMAT in 2 weeks time. My CAT scores are 580/ 600. Im aiming at 680
Let me know what you think.

[StaceyKoprince]

1) DEFINITELY randomize the questions. Everything you do from now on should be in the context of: how is this going to be on the real test? Use your performance to determine what you need to go back and review rom the strategy guides.

2) If you're willing to do a little bit of work, you can make these into sort of randomized sets, too. Let's say you want to do a set of 25 questions. There are five quant question banks, so you can do 5 questions from each bank. (You could also do 15 questions from 3 banks, as you suggested, if you don't want to do 25.) Set the timer to 12 minutes. Do questions 1-5 in that bank (try to hold yourself to that 2 min per question average, but do give yourself a couple of extra minutes on the timer, just in case). Then just let the timer run out - don't do question 6, etc (you can, and will, redo the set at a later time to do more questions). Move on to the next bank and do the same thing. Now you can review the results for those banks. A few days later, when you're ready for another set of problems, set the timer to 13 minutes. Click "E" for the first 5 questions and then do questions 6-10. Then let the timer run out. And so on. You'll still know that 5 questions fall into some general category, such as geometry, but you still have to figure out the subcategories and approaches.

3) Do you need more problems? There are 1,400 problems in the three OG books, 200 in the question banks, and who knows how many in the strategy guides and CATs. Plus, there's GMATPrep and GMAT Focus. That's way more than anyone needs - I'd rather see you do fewer problems but really make sure that you analyze the ones you are doing. I'd also like to see you return to some problems you've already done.

Until you can answer these questions, you aren't done with these problems:
Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique?
Did I make a CONNECTION to previous experience? Or did I have to do it all from scratch?
Did I COMPREHEND the symbols, text, questions, statements, and answer choices?
Did I understand the CONTENT being tested?
Did I choose the best APPROACH? (the best approach is often not the first approach)
Did I have the SKILLS to follow through?
Am I comfortable with OTHER STRATEGIES that would have worked, at least partially? How should I have made an educated guess?
Do I understand every TRAP & TRICK that the writer built into the question, including wrong answers?
Have I MASTERED this problem? Could I explain every aspect, fully, to someone else?
How will I RECOGNIZE similar problems in the future?

Plus:
If I got it wrong, WHY, very specifically, did I get it wrong? What do I need to do to minimize the chances of making that error (or those errors) again in the future? And, if it was a verbal question, why did I think the right answer was wrong? How did they fool me?

4) Ideally, tests are once every roughly 3 weeks, until you get to within a couple of weeks of the official test. Then, you take one test two weeks before and one test one week before. Rough guideline - doesn't need to be exact. If you want to take a test once a week for the three weeks before, that's fine too.

5) You can still get essays graded. The instructions for submitting them are in the lab - you actually have to watch the lab in order to know what to do. :) FYI - it's typically about a 10-day turnaround for the grading and feedback, so get in there and do it ASAP if you want feedback in time to do something about it!

Martin: CAT percentages are generally lower than OG for people scoring 500+. That's because the CAT is adaptive, while the OG just shows a broad mix of problems along the entire spectrum. So that's normal - don't worry about that. I highly recommend the purple and green books. After those, I'd do the question banks. I would NOT do the challenge problems (harder than what you see on the test - not worth the time). Generally speaking, it is extremely difficult to improve by 100 points in 2 weeks. I'm not saying it can't be done, but most people who improve by 100 points need more time to do so - typically at least 6-8 weeks. I just want to let you know in case you are in a position to be able to postpone your test; if you can, you may want to think about doing so. Generally speaking again, it's best to take the official test when you are consistently able to score what you want to score on your practice tests.

Good luck, guys!

[thoughtrunner]

Good advice.

[JonathanSchneider]

:)

[thoughtrunner]

Thank you Stacey. This thread will go backwards in time.


I took the GMAT Feb 25 and got a 680 (46Q/38V/5.5AWA).

-details on this test: setting was just right - room wasn't noisy and I was able to concentrate. really focused on timing - guessing if i didn't have a solid idea or strategy after 90 seconds. I think I could have given myself a little more time on the math as I finished about a minute or two early. Also finished verbal about 2 minutes early -- tried to blow through sentence correction and obvious critical reasoning to give myself time to really focus on reading comp, my weak area. but i was really trying not to fall behind. WRITING section - i knew I did well because I wrote a lot. instead of outlining I just started writing this time and rather than focus on nice prose style, i jumped into incredibly detailed argument in my own 'speaking voice'. its not something i would have liked to have published, but i guess this paid off as my score went up by a point. which brings me to a month ago:

took the GMAT for the first time in late Jan and got a 660 (45Q/35V/4.5AWA). math was probably same level i was expecting to achieve, but verbal I ran out of time - guessed last 3 questions. there was a lot of room noise (keyboard typing and sniffling) which kept me from concentrating on RC, and i took a lot of time for SC as well. i came into this test overconfident about my verbal skills because my previous few MGMATs i had gotten 92+%. AWA wasn't that great. one of the topics had me stuck for a while, and outlines ended up being more time consuming than useful.

I started studying in October '08. Between October and January, I took all six MGMATs - 550,590,640,680,710,710

In December and January, I got 650 and 670 (43Q/41V) respectively on my GMAT Prep tests. So just there I knew there was some discrepancy between MGMAT tests and GMAT Preps. The math on MGMAT was slightly more difficult, but in a way that made it easier - I was expecting crazy questions that had definite 'tricks', and was able to get those. Also, the MGMAT verbal proved easier than the GMAT Prep. This is because I memorized every idiom and sentence correction trick in the MGMAT books, and those are very strongly represented by your tests. I think I missed only 4 SC problems total in the last 4 MGMAT tests combined. At any rate, it was difficult to guage where I stood, so I assumed GMAT Prep was more accurate.

Between the two official GMAT tests (late Jan and late Feb), I redid most of the 11th edition OG guide, and bought the 10th edition guide as well to get some extra problems. I did most of that book, revisiting problems I missed on flashcards.

I bought CR Bible, studied some of the assumption techniques. Pretty good - similar to MGMAT.

I bought Kaplan's 800 book. It had some good questions as well. The SC and CR were too easy, but the RC science and math rates problems pretty good. It was good to sample through some harder, unseen problems and get a different type of explanation.

I reviewed all flashcards I made from MGMAT books in that last month. They were helpful for sentence correction. I also really focused in on reading comprehension - my weak point - and practiced a good deal of science essays, phrasing paragraphs in my own words.

I was advised to focus on GMAT Prep tests since they are closer to the real thing. I took both GMAT Prep tests over again February pre-test and got 750 (48Q/44V) / 740(49Q/41V). There were many repeat questions, but I got those wrong and the harder, unfamiliar ones right. Since then I've studied and learned these questions.

I also took a Peterson's practice GMAT and got a 750, but I think that was pretty worthless as I finished the verbal 18 minutes early, missed 14 questions, and somehow still managed to get in the 99 percentile. Math was 43Q. Their answers seemed wrong when they were right, and some explanations made no sense. Good confidence booster though if anyone needs one.

It's been 5 months since I've begun studying an average three hours a day including weekends. Based on the ranges I've scored in, I feel that I can do better than 680. I also need to do better to have a chance at my choice schools.

I don't mind the work. I like it. I guess I just need to know what to do next. Doing verbal problems from the OG is not as effective as it used to be because I've memorized so many of the critical reasoning and reading comp questions (for both 10th and 11th editions).

For math, OG is still good because when I find that I miss a question more than once I really drill myself to learn the concept and change my thinking. IT's ok to repeat those.

I was thinking of taking the Kaplan advanced course because I'm not sure if MGMAT offers anything "advanced". Maybe I don't need a course, but I do need something new to work with to inspire me. Some outside feedback would be nice as well. All of the office hours, forum postings, and problem explanations on this site helped me get from a 550 in October 2008 (MGMAT practice test) to a 680 (real thing) in February 2009.

So thanks Stacey and MGMAT. Your process works for people who work hard! I've taken exactly a month off entirely from studying since the last official test to relax and focus on work. Where to next?

[StaceyKoprince]

Nice job! I know you want to go for an even higher score, but you've already made fantastic progress.

On those OG verbal questions that you know so well... do you think you could teach them to someone else? For a 700+, that's really the level of mastery you're trying to get to - not just the ability to do the problem, but the ability to understand all of the intricacies of the problem so well that you could explain every aspect of it to someone else.

For example, can you articulate:
- not just why a wrong answer is wrong, but why it is tempting / why someone would think it is right and choose it?
- not just why the right answer is right, but why someone would think it is wrong and cross it off?
- how the structure of an SC sentence is designed to make it more difficult for you to spot certain errors?
- how the structure of a sentence in CR or RC is designed to make it harder for you to understand what the sentence is saying? (Esp. really detailed, technical stuff in RC?)
- how the structure of information in an argument is designed to make it harder for you to pick out the conclusion? Ditto for RC, making it harder for you to understand the overall point of a paragraph or passage?
- how to get past that confusing wording or structuring of info to get the right meaning, conclusion, main idea, whatever it is?
- how to make an educated guess (that is, how to identify and eliminate at least one wrong answer, even if I can't get to the one right answer)?

If you can't actually articulate those things for a problem, even if you got that problem right, then you aren't done studying the problem. :)

And you should also be thinking about quant in the same way, by the way - not just "can I do this" and "where was my mistake" but how could I do this more efficiently? What are the traps, even if I avoided them? Why did I make that mistake? What could I do to minimize the chances of making the same mistake in future? How would I make an educated guess on this problem? Etc.

It is good to have some new questions, too, of course. OG12 was just published and contains about 300 new questions (the other 600 are repeats from OG11). So not great that only 1/3 are new, but 300 is still a nice new pool of questions. Just make sure that you are studying to the point that you can teach someone else - otherwise, you're wasting all those nice new questions.

We do actually have three advanced workshops; you can find the details on the web site if you're interested in learning more. Two are focused on quant and one is focused on SC. The workshops provide techniques for the very hardest types of questions that people see on the test - things that you either couldn't or wouldn't want to use on easier problems, but that can help give you the extra few points at the top end to boost your score. (Obviously, you have to be doing well enough to get those very hard questions in the first place - but, with a 680, you qualify.) Also note that, as a former class student, you get a big discount if you take a workshop.

I'm not familiar with Kaplan's advanced course. You may want to ask around at www.beatthegmat.com to see whether those who have taken the course recommend it. (Same thing with our workshops, in fact! Always good to find out whether others think a service was worth the money.)

[thoughtrunner]

Good advice, again! I got a 710. Will post a detailed update soon. Thanks, Stacey.

[StaceyKoprince]

awesome! thanks for the news and we'll look forward to the update!

congrats!