GMAT Verbal

[rohini.gangapuram]

Hi Stacey/Ron,

This is not about a general question as such but not about any strategy too. So posting in the verbal forum.

When i read debrief's about people on various forum i get mixed views. Some say the actuall gmat is way above than gmatprep,ogs and other prep materials.Others say its in the same league as the gmatpreps.
There is also a general view that gmat verbal is a lot harder these day.official material is no way sufficient to tackle gmat verbal if you want to score around 40's etc.

As a future test taker this obviously scares me.I dont believe in studying whatevr that comes my way from untrusted sources(i know you agree on this). but then are the official questions along with MGMAT's studied the way you advice to sufficient? I know its a broad question for you to answer. I only wanted to when people scoring 710-730 say the official material is not enough, it gets harder to just ignore them.
I am aiming for a score aroud 720-730 presently around 700 mark(according to the CATs) i know no practice test can gurantee me a final score, but the thought does cross my mind, is the material enough? do i need to get something else? or focus more on the official problems and analyse them the way you suggest to do?
I wonder how to people manage to cover so much stuff in 3-4 months when OG SC alone takes me an hour to do 5 problems :( (including the analysis).

I have my exam in about 1 1/2 months from now and im worried big time about the practice material.
Please advice Ron :(

Also can you tell me the truth about verbal geting harder and all..you must obviously know

Thanks for your time.
Rohu

GMAT verbal worried.
Hi Ron,

This is not about a general question as such but not about any strategy too. So posting in the verbal forum.

When i read debrief's about people on various forum i get mixed views. Some say the actuall gmat is way above than gmatprep,ogs and other prep materials.Others say its in the same league as the gmatpreps.
There is also a general view that gmat verbal is a lot harder these day.official material is no way sufficient to tackle gmat verbal if you want to score around 40's etc.

As a future test taker this obviously scares me.I dont believe in studying whatevr that comes my way from untrusted sources(i know you agree on this). but then are the official questions along with MGMAT's studied the way you advice to sufficient? I know its a broad question for you to answer. I only wanted to when people scoring 710-730 say the official material is not enough, it gets harder to just ignore them.
I am aiming for a score aroud 720-730 presently around 700 mark(according to the CATs) i know no practice test can gurantee me a final score, but the thought does cross my mind, is the material enough? do i need to get something else? or focus more on the official problems and analyse them the way you suggest to do?
I wonder how to people manage to cover so much stuff in 3-4 months when OG SC alone takes me an hour to do 5 problems :( (including the analysis).

I have my exam in about 1 1/2 months from now and im worried big time about the practice material.
Please advice Ron :(

Also can you tell me the truth about verbal geting harder and all..you must obviously know

Thanks for your time.
Rohu

GMAT verbal worried.

[StaceyKoprince]

I wonder how to people manage to cover so much stuff in 3-4 months when OG SC alone takes me an hour to do 5 problems :( (including the analysis).

You're doing it the right way. Don't worry. You don't learn just by DOING a bunch of stuff. You learn by really analyzing and reviewing things.

I agree that there are some ways in which the current OG materials are inadequate. The problem is, they're still the best available materials from which to study - nobody can do it better than the real thing. There are some quite challenging OG and GMATPrep problems, but there aren't a ton, and of course, if you're scoring at a very high level on the real test, then you're going to see a LOT of very hard questions, so it can feel like the practice material isn't "enough."

There are still lots of things to learn, though, from the hardest questions. In particular, if you have already taken GMATPrep and can't really use it anymore as a valid test score indicator, you may want to consider taking it repeatedly to get out all of the hardest questions. You'll see repeats; get them right, and then you'll keep getting harder and harder Qs (until you run out). Pick those problems apart to understand what makes them more difficult than the rest, because you'll see more of those on the real test (assuming you are scoring at a very high level, of course).

I wrote a couple of recent articles on especially annoying GMATPrep SC problems - take a look:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/03/ ... sc-problem
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/03/ ... -problem-2

Look for more of these kinds of questions in particular on SC. I think the testwriters have a higher proportion of questions at the highest levels that are more like those - the answers changing in more complicated ways, rather than just one word flipping back and forth between "is" and "are" or something more obvious like that.