GMAT Update: Week 2 - Veritas Prep RC

My second week of prep started off quite slowly, I must admit. I think the thrill of completing quite a bit in my first week gave me the impression I can afford to slow it down, which caused me to take my prep a little more casually this week. However, I attribute it mostly to Wimbledon – if Djokovic hadn’t made it to the final I doubt I would have had such a lack of concentration!

Halfway through the week, I finished the CR Bible. I was thrilled about this; I’d go through all the worked problems as I read through the chapters, and I’d gotten around 95% of all problems correct. The flip side to this is that all those problems were quite easy, and were only included in the book in order to properly teach a certain concept/strategy.

I then took some time to create notes from the book; important points that I need to keep reminding me of. Such flashcards are available for download from the BTG website, but I felt I would benefit more if I actually wrote them myself. I used PowerPoint to make my notes, and color coded important words. I’m confident that this will make last minute revision a lot easier for me. Maybe it was a mistake to make notes at the end of the book, but I think this way I was able to identify what was important enough to be noted and what wasn’t. I probably would’ve written a lot more had I started my note making from the start.

The day I finished the book, I didn’t want to start RC, so I went to the BTG forum and answered around 8-10 problems in the CR section. I messed up the first couple of them, but got the rest correct, and took that as a good sign.

The next day I began Veritas Prep Reading Comprehension. My first impression was that the layout of the book was awful. The print was so tiny, and with me already having poor eyes, I was reading the book with my face literally just a hand span away.  The book however, does discuss strategies (even if for only around 55 pages), and contains tons of practice problems as well, so I do think it was a good buy. So far, at least. I was able to answer the first 8 questions all correctly, which is a big step for me considering how awful I am when it comes to RC.


I then managed to finish this book, in terms of reading their strategies. There's not much you can 'teach' on reading comprehension. I now have to tackle their remaining 86 questions, along with the ones in the OG Review and OG Verbal.

Next week’s target: to start sentence correction.