Hi guys,
I've recently started to prep again for the GMAT. I was a former student of the MGMAT classroom course, and I was able to regain access to the online materials that are available.
The class recordings and the various GMAT forums online have helped me a lot with my Quant abilities, but my verbal scores overall are not improving.
Re: verbal - when I diagram CR questions, and when I take good notes on RC passages, my accuracy on the questions is very good. When I don't diagram or take notes during these question types, my accuracy really suffers -- no surprise. It's hard to keep focused on boring, dense reading material, and the act of writing stuff down while reading is really helpful.
The thing is....diagramming and note-taking takes me such a long time that I end up missing 8 to 10 questions at the end of the Verbal sections of a practice test (both MGMAT and GMATPrep practice tests) -- I just run out of time.
Last time (couple of years ago when I was a student w/ MGMAT), I went into the actual test....performed ok on the Quant (I got what I expected), but I didn't diagram / take notes like I knew I had to on the Verbal section. My Verbal score ended being a 31. I like to believe that I had / have the potential to score in the high 30s / low 40s -- I do very well on the OG verbal questions, with accurracy rates of approx 80ish percent, when I do sets of say...20 questions from Verbal.
How can I improve my accuracy w/o taking up so much time per question on CR and RC? I hear from various people that..."it's not necessary to diagram, don't do it"...."i usually do those questions w/o writing anything down"...so...I really don't know what I should be doing w/ the Verbal section. I also remember my MGMAT classroom instructor telling us that she doesn't diagram CR questions either. So I don't know who to listen to, and who to follow, to be honest.
Any tips that you can offer would be great. My test date is scheduled for Jul 26th, but I think I will push this back to sometime in August, so that I can make a bigger effort towards improving my verbal. I just don't know what strategy to follow right now...
Thanks
Tim
GMAT Forum
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- timmyshum
- Course Students
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- StaceyKoprince
- ManhattanGMAT Staff
- Posts: 9361
- Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
- Location: Montreal
Re: Diagramming and Note-taking on the Verbal Section:
The people who tell you it isn't necessary to diagram or take notes may be right... for themselves. Some people perform better when diagramming or taking notes and some don't - you have to figure out what works best for you, and what works best for some other person isn't necessarily what works best for you.
The purpose of diagramming or taking notes is to allow you to understand both what the information is and how it fits together with the rest of the information.
The purpose of taking notes is NOT what it used to be when you were in school: your test was coming up in 3 weeks and you needed comprehensive and comprehensible notes from which you could study in 3 weeks.
On this test, once you're done with one particular problem, you never need to use the notes again. You're done. So your notes should be a LOT lighter than what you'd normally expect when you hear somebody is "taking notes" on something.
First, you can (and should) abbreviate HEAVILY when taking notes. On CR, you may only have 60 to 75 seconds left when you finish taking notes - you can retain quite a bit in your short-term memory for 60 to 75 seconds.
To abbreviate the previous paragraph:
1: abbr >>! use ST mem; CR: 60-75s to remem.
Even what I wrote there is a lot. :) You may even be able to write a lot less and abbreviate a lot more heavily than what is shown in the book.
If you want to get faster / more efficient, you need to study how to do this. You need to analyze your work to figure out where / how you could save time, and then you need to practice doing whatever this new idea is until it becomes a habit.
Redo your notes after you're done with the problem. What could you have abbreviated or abbreviated even more? What wasn't necessary to write at all - either because you remembered it anyway or because it likely wasn't going to matter in the problem anyway? (NOTE: could you have told while writing notes in the first place that some info likely wouldn't matter much once you went to solve the Q? HOW could you tell that?)
If you look at some notes three days later without reading the problem first, do you know what the notes mean? You should have only a vague idea. They should be SO abbreviated that you literally cannot really tell what they mean without looking at the passage again. If you can tell what's going on, you wrote too much down. Trust your short-term memory more.
On RC, you should be able to answer any "primary purpose / main idea" questions from your notes. You should NOT be able to answer any specific questions from your notes; if you can, you wrote too much down. You should be able to use your notes to know which paragraph to use to find the answer - but you should actually have to go back to that paragraph to find the answer.
The people who don't diagram have learned to organize the info mentally - but, if they're doing well on the test, they're still doing exactly what you're doing with your notes: organizing the flow of information and understanding how it fits together. Whether you do that in your head or on paper is up to each individual - but don't let someone make you feel that you "should" be able to do it in your head (or that you "should" be able to do anything in one specific way that works for them). Figure out what works for you.
Take a look at the following articles for some ideas.
This one discusses a particular GMATPrep CR problem, and it shows a sample diagram:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/01/ ... cr-problem
Reading and extracting info from RC:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/04/ ... mp-passage
It takes some time to develop a more efficient note-taking process, so I think your plan to postpone is a good one. Do a few of these every day and remember that you actually need to analyze your work in order to learn how to get better. After every one, ask yourself, what went well and what didn't go so well? What would the ideal set of notes look like? Re-write your notes accordingly, to get the practice, then figure out what habits you want to try to make or break as you do the next problem. What do you want to keep and what do you want to do differently in terms of your note-taking process?
The purpose of diagramming or taking notes is to allow you to understand both what the information is and how it fits together with the rest of the information.
The purpose of taking notes is NOT what it used to be when you were in school: your test was coming up in 3 weeks and you needed comprehensive and comprehensible notes from which you could study in 3 weeks.
On this test, once you're done with one particular problem, you never need to use the notes again. You're done. So your notes should be a LOT lighter than what you'd normally expect when you hear somebody is "taking notes" on something.
First, you can (and should) abbreviate HEAVILY when taking notes. On CR, you may only have 60 to 75 seconds left when you finish taking notes - you can retain quite a bit in your short-term memory for 60 to 75 seconds.
To abbreviate the previous paragraph:
1: abbr >>! use ST mem; CR: 60-75s to remem.
Even what I wrote there is a lot. :) You may even be able to write a lot less and abbreviate a lot more heavily than what is shown in the book.
If you want to get faster / more efficient, you need to study how to do this. You need to analyze your work to figure out where / how you could save time, and then you need to practice doing whatever this new idea is until it becomes a habit.
Redo your notes after you're done with the problem. What could you have abbreviated or abbreviated even more? What wasn't necessary to write at all - either because you remembered it anyway or because it likely wasn't going to matter in the problem anyway? (NOTE: could you have told while writing notes in the first place that some info likely wouldn't matter much once you went to solve the Q? HOW could you tell that?)
If you look at some notes three days later without reading the problem first, do you know what the notes mean? You should have only a vague idea. They should be SO abbreviated that you literally cannot really tell what they mean without looking at the passage again. If you can tell what's going on, you wrote too much down. Trust your short-term memory more.
On RC, you should be able to answer any "primary purpose / main idea" questions from your notes. You should NOT be able to answer any specific questions from your notes; if you can, you wrote too much down. You should be able to use your notes to know which paragraph to use to find the answer - but you should actually have to go back to that paragraph to find the answer.
The people who don't diagram have learned to organize the info mentally - but, if they're doing well on the test, they're still doing exactly what you're doing with your notes: organizing the flow of information and understanding how it fits together. Whether you do that in your head or on paper is up to each individual - but don't let someone make you feel that you "should" be able to do it in your head (or that you "should" be able to do anything in one specific way that works for them). Figure out what works for you.
Take a look at the following articles for some ideas.
This one discusses a particular GMATPrep CR problem, and it shows a sample diagram:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/01/ ... cr-problem
Reading and extracting info from RC:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/04/ ... mp-passage
It takes some time to develop a more efficient note-taking process, so I think your plan to postpone is a good one. Do a few of these every day and remember that you actually need to analyze your work in order to learn how to get better. After every one, ask yourself, what went well and what didn't go so well? What would the ideal set of notes look like? Re-write your notes accordingly, to get the practice, then figure out what habits you want to try to make or break as you do the next problem. What do you want to keep and what do you want to do differently in terms of your note-taking process?
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep
2 posts Page 1 of 1