Need Help - GMAT

[VenturiC576]

Hi,

I'm Chiru and this is the first time I am posting in this forum looking for some serious help. I am an Indian who studied in a Non-English medium school during primary & secondary schooling.

I'm an Engineering Graduate and Quant has always been my strength. Whether I take an exam with all formulas memorized or not, I always score atleast 49 in Quant. I don't have any fear of exams or studies since I am a gold medalist (Topper in the class) in my schooling & graduation. So, I am pretty sure and confident that I can make it top business schools provided I can overcome GMAT barrier in verbal section.

I prepared for GMAT in the year 2010 (that was 5 years back) and had taken after 3 months of study. I scored 570 (Q50, V19. AWA 5.5. Integrated Reasoning section was not there at that time.) in my first attempt. I was not at all disappointed after seeing the score because I knew I was going to hit the score around that figure as I hadn't seen any great improvements during my preparation. I didn't want to take actual GMAT again unless I know by heart that I had improved in my verbal section by changing the way I prepare.

Last 5 years had passed so quickly because of my consulting assignments in Oracle Singapore and couldn't really focus on my GMAT again. Now I am desperate to crack GMAT with 700+ for better reasons in life.

My weaknesses in Verbal are
1) Poor Vocabulary -> In CR & RC questions, I don't understand some of the very critical words, which push me to guess the answers and get them wrong.

2) Reading Comprehension -> English passage reading was always boring to me because of the topics discussed. I am trying to change it over the past few months by engaging myself into reading, could it be Straight Times News Paper, The Economist magazine, or Novels. If I am familiar with the topic I understand 90% to 95% of the content and I get almost all the questions correct unless I cannot understand a very critical word in answering the question.

3) Sentence Correction -> I could apply most of the concepts (Redundancy, Subject-Verb Agreement, Parallelism etc.), which I learnt well in questions but when it comes core grammatical concepts such as Idioms, missing verb, complex sentence construction I get most of the questions wrong.

All these weaknesses are the result of my Non-English medium background however I am now desperate to change my result of GMAT. I believe with my logic, hard work, never give-up attitude, confidence I can learn the skills required to crack GMAT.

Appreciate if this forum can link me to some bright students who can study along with me to improve in GMAT verbal section by correcting my mistakes to hit my magic score. Also if any personal tutoring can be given to improve my verbal score by at least 11 more points to consistently hit 30 score.

Regards,
Chiru

[StaceyKoprince]

What have you been doing recently to improve your verbal? What resources do you have - books and other study materials?

You're going to need a comprehensive study plan, obviously. You mention tutoring. I'd also recommend researching some classes. I know that you don't need help with quant, but tutoring is far more expensive than taking a class, so you might want to get through a full class program first (at a more efficient cost) and then do extra work (if necessary) with a tutor.

You mention vocab. Your written English is quite good, so I'm wondering whether part of your trouble is that you're getting distracted by words that even native English speakers don't know (and also get distracted by). The passages will sometimes have technical terms or hard vocab that are really just there to distract you. You concentrate on the fact that you don't know this one word and then you miss what the sentence is really trying to say overall (which you can usually figure out even if you don't know one word).

It may also be the case that you don't know vocab that native speakers typically know. One thing I would do is start to make a list of words you don't know - gather specific examples from 5 or 6 passages (plus their questions). Talk about that with your teacher / tutor to try to diagnose what's really going on there.

Your reading strategy is great and will help you with vocab as well as comprehension and topic familiarity. Keep that up. One other trick I use to get interested in a topic I think is boring: I pretend that a friend of mine would be interested, and so I'm reading about it so that I can tell him or her about it later. (It's even better if you really do have a friend who likes that topic. :)

Our new 6th edition SC guide gets more into sentence structure (we've expanded the subject-verb agreement chapter to cover overall sentence structure). You might want to look into that, since you cite that area as a particular problem.

Idioms have decreased in frequency over the past few years - the more obscure ones in particular - so that's good news for you.

I also think it's a great idea to try to find other students with whom to study - find someone who's strong in verbal but struggling with quant and the two of you can help each other. (This is another potential advantage to taking a class - you can find compatible people easily.) If you don't join a class, I'd recommend looking for study partners over on Beat the GMAT. (We do have a folder here for people to find study partners, but most people here are looking for advice from teachers, so that folder doesn't get a lot of traffic.)

And, of course, come back here and tell us how things are going!