practice material

by **asdert** Fri Jul 11, 2008 12:53 am

Hi, I would like to know if you could suggest practice material. I took the test a month ago and didn't scored as high as I wanted to, so I'm scheduling a retake for August-September.

Since I run out of questions (I finished all 3 OG guides), I've been wondering about what practice material I should go through now (I've also done the 'In Action' questions).

I've heard about a document called 1000SC and also a software from gmatter.biz which different pools of verbal questions, but I'm wondering if that's wise, since I have no idea what's the source of such sets.

Thanks in advance for your help!

by **Guest** Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:48 am

any mgmat moderator?

by **StaceyKoprince** Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:33 am

Generally, if you don't know the source, don't use the material (especially given what's been going on lately). I can tell you NOT to use 1000SC because those definitely contain copyrighted questions that are NOT free for use (in other words, they're used illegally in the document). I don't know about the other source you mentioned.

Also, generally, if you don't like your score, you're not done with OG. You may have done all of the questions, but you didn't study them the way you needed to in order to get the score you want.

You mentioned having done the in-action stuff from our books too. Did you take our course or did you just buy our books? (The answer to that question determines what I'll advise you to do - depending on the resources you have access to.)

As a general rule, remember that just doing questions is not actually learning (well, it's a little bit of learning... but not a lot). You need to analyze the questions, not just do them and move on.

by **asdert** Thu Jul 17, 2008 12:57 pm

Stacey, thanks for your answer.

Here's a little more info. I didn't take a class, but I had a private tutor for 10 hours and although my quant skills improved greatly, it didn't really show up on test day. My Q was 10 points lower than all my CATs had ever been (I scored a 34, while my range was 42-45). My Verbal, on the other hand, improved quite a bit and reached the 40 points, which is great for a non-native speaker (I think).

Thus, for my next attempt, I would d like to raise my Q anywhere close to my real range while keeping (maybe even improving) my previous Verbal score.

That's when I started looking for practice material I could go through for the Verbal section (I still have plenty of Quant questions) as a way of keeping my Verbal skills intact. What do you mean with the OG? Should I redo the questions? I'm sure I remember most of the answers (ot the correct approach) as I carefully reviewed the answer explanations and the correct approach. I also kept an error log I constantly checked and even wrote the questions I found hard to answer.

What do you think I should do now? What practice material would you recommend? Should I go through the OG guides again?

I'm currently going through the 9 recorded classes and following the syllabus (going through the guides again, etc).

Stacey, thanks again for your help.

by **StaceyKoprince** Mon Jul 21, 2008 11:31 pm

Okay, if you're happy with your verbal score, then you don't necessarily need to redo OG. I was referring to the fact that, if you don't like your score in a section, you haven't learned what you needed to learn on your first run-through of OG, so you need to do it again!

There are somewhere close to 700 verbal questions in the three OG books - you really do remember them all? (That's amazing!) You can also try OG10 (the 10th edition of the Official Guide); about 75% of the questions are the same, but 25% are different, and you don't need as much verbal practice anyway, so that might be enough.

For your quant work, make sure that your issue didn't have to do with timing / application of the material to the test. When people have big score drops on the real test, it usually has to do more with poor pacing and messing up the recognition of question types / sub-types or application of the material to specific questions than it does with your fundamental knowledge of the basic math material being tested. When you do practice questions, are you doing them under timed conditions? Are you doing random sets of problems (so that you have to figure out what kind of question you've got, rather than knowing you're about to do 10 rates & work questions)? Are you comfortable making educated guesses - both making yourself do it before too much time has passed and knowing how to do it depending on the type of question? That kind of stuff.