GMAT Update: I don't even know what week this is anymore

I haven’t been here in a while.

It’s ridiculous just how hectic my life is, just when I need as much free time as I can get for the GMAT. I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting Cologne, Siegen, and Switzerland, each time meeting up with high school friends whom I haven’t seen for at least three years. It was amazing to know that the distance didn’t change a thing – no awkward silences, no feelings of let-down, it was all just wonderful and ended far too quickly in my opinion.   

I was going to post last weekend, but then Liverpool lost to Tottenham in a 4-0 humiliation, and to make matters worse, Novak Djokovic suffered from a partial muscle rupture on his back, and had to retire from his match after writhing on the court in agony. Not a pretty sight. I then managed to break a wineglass in the kitchen, made a chicken curry without a key ingredient as I’d forgotten to buy it, and checked my email to find an unnecessarily  rude message from a Professor at University giving me stick about my late arrival. All this gave me a major headache and I just couldn’t do anything else really.

This is officially my last week in Berlin. Next week I’m off to Paris, and will spend the weekend there before heading home. Sadly, my European adventures have come to an end. But I’ve had a brilliant 13 months, almost irreplaceable really, and I know I’ve met some people and seen some places that I’ll never forget in the years to come.

How can I concentrate on the GMAT when my time in Europe is coming to an end? It’s awful to have such expectations really. But I do try. I have finished all my strategy books, and it’s all OG from now on – practice, practice, and more practice. My scores are alright in the practice problems (as expected, RC being my least scoring section of the test, and SC the highest), but when it comes to taking a full length test, I tend to rush through, subconsciously panicking about the thought that I wont finish the test in time. I therefore end up with some very foolish errors, errors I would have never made had I more time. And I do have more time – when I took a test last weekend, I finished the quant section with 20 minutes to spare, and the verbal section with 16 minutes to spare. That’s crazy; ideally I shouldn’t have more than five minutes left at the end of each section.

Dad’s coming to visit me this weekend (to take some of my luggage back more than anything else really, I really don’t know how I’ve managed to accumulate so many things over the past year), but I still hope to take another test. This time, I shall treat it as a sequence of practice problems so that I don’t panic. Fingers crossed my scores improve!

GMAT Update: Week 7: Very Unproductive!

So Novak Djokovic created history and became the only player to win five Masters Tournaments in a single season by winning in Montreal. I have absolutely no expectations from him now for this week’s tournament at Cincinnati. Hope he saves himself for the US Open that starts in a fortnight.

Liverpool drew with Sunderland. I am bummed – and that’s putting it mildly. The first half was so brilliant, and the second half so awful. It’s only been one game though, 37 more to go!

As far as the GMAT is concerned, i haven’t been able to do much this week. My mind has unfortunately been occupied by other stressful issues, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve therefore neglected the GMAT. I’ve finished part 1 of the book, which contains general strategies as well as an introduction to Data Sufficiency problems, and I’ve begun part 2, the advanced portion of the book. I’m finding it harder and harder as I progress, which makes sense as I’m now in the advanced bit. There are just so many numbers being thrown about that I find myself taking a deep breath, going back and reading the explanations again.

I should be done with this by the end of next week at the very latest; I’m spending a three-day weekend in Cologne with one of my high school friends. I’m so looking forward to it. But that obviously means I won’t have time to work on the GMAT. I’m considering packing the book though; perhaps I could read through at the airport?  

Rather short update this week unfortunately!

GMAT Update: Week 6 - MGMAT Number Properties

First of all, omigawd, I’m in week 6?! I opened my blog to see what week I was on, so that I would be able to title this post accordingly, and had a mini heart attack when I realized I was on week 6. Six weeks have passed since I began studying the GMAT. To put it another way, it took me six weeks to finish revising verbal strategies.

I immediately opened the calendar tool on my computer (and waited for an agonizingly long minute before it finally popped up, I seriously need a new laptop) and counted the number of weeks remaining until 14^th October – my big day. (No, I didn’t use my head to calculate the number of weeks; I physically counted them using the calendar. That’s what panic does to you.) I then breathed a sigh of relief; I still had nine weeks.  All was well again.

So anyway, to recap my sixth week of prep, I’m officially halfway through Manhattan GMAT’s Number Properties.  As an engineer (or should I say, as an engineering student), I have done math way more complicated that what is asked on the GMAT, and at this point I haven’t been seriously tested by any information. My PowerPoint on quant contains just three slides so far. And that’s including the title page.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the quant section is going to be a walkover for me. In fact, it’ll be hard for me to get above 45. Not because I don’t know math, but because what is tested is so basic that I don’t know it and don’t bother learning it. (Does that make sense or am I coming off as a douche?) What I’m trying to say is that, the math in the GMAT doesn’t test your ability to work out complicated equations; it tests your ability to analyze the problem and find a solution without too many calculations. There’s a reason why a calculator is not provided – it’s because you’re not meant to need one.

One thing I feel this book is lacking is a page of all important formulae; for example, a formula to find the area of a triangle that has three unequal sides. I studied this in eighth grade, but just can’t recall anything about such problems (and I don’t particularly want to buy a book on geometry to find out either). So if anyone knows of a website where such important must-know pieces of math knowledge can be found, please do share!

Plans for the weekend? Plenty of sporting action for me, with Novak Djokovic cruising in Montreal and the start of the EPL. But I’ll do my best to squeeze some work in, perhaps more practice problems. Really got to work on that reading comprehension. 

GMAT Update: Week 5 - Practice Problems

Finishing the verbal section was definitely the best thing about this week. I was getting so sick of the MGMAT SC book, and I’m glad that it’s finally done and dusted. The GMAT is far from over though; I started Number Properties, Manhattan GMAT’s first quant guide. It feels so good to finally be getting to the quant section!

I spent Saturday evening doing 20 problems each for SC and CR, and 15 problems of RC.

(Yes, this is how my weekends have become; no social life whatsoever. I’m hoping it’ll be worth it in two and a half months’ time. However, I’m totally taking a break and going out tomorrow to see some of Berlin’s lovely sights.)

On average, one is expected to spend roughly 1 min 45 seconds per question in the verbal section, in order to finish the test on time. My average time per question was as follows:

CR: 1 min 27 seconds

RC: 1 min 57 seconds

SC: 50 seconds!

Clearly I was finding RC a bit of a problem – and I knew this while tackling the problems. My mind would just drift, focusing on other aspects of my life, and it would take a lot of effort (and hence time) to bring the focus back. It doesn’t help that the passages are just so incredibly boring. It’ll definitely be something I will have to work on.

And as for the answers, I got three wrong for both CR and RC, but my SC was perfectly accurate!

GMAT Update: Week 4 - More MGMAT Sentence Correction

There’s been quite a gap between Week 3 and Week 4 of my studies. I’ve finally moved to Germany, and I must say it’s lovely here. I can totally see myself settling down here in the future, and the language is not too hard to learn either; I’ve already started ordering Pepsi and asking for directions in Deutsch! I can't wait to start visiting all the tourist places.

So with things getting quite hectic with the moving and travelling, I’ve barely had time to get those books out. All that changed this week though; I’ve unpacked, started work, and settled into my routine for the next two months.

I continued where I’d left off, with SC. I’m reaching the end of the book now – I’ve finished part one, the basic strategy bit of the book, and have now progressed to part two, which is the advanced portion of the book. To be very honest though, I’m not too thrilled about this book. Yes, it’s great; yes it contains everything you need to know to ace SC, but it just feels too much. I’m starting to lose patience with it, wondering when on earth I would get to the end. Now that I’ve started work, I’m not able to put in more than an hour of study per day on weekdays (I actually put in an hour and a half, but only an hour of that is useful). So weekends are going to be very important, I’m going to try and stay away from distractions as much as possible. Easier said than done I supposed, given that I’m in a new country.

With SC out of the way, I would’ve fully completed the verbal section of the GMAT, which is quite an accomplishment, I feel. Now I just have Quant, which is supposed to be what I’m good at.

I’m planning on taking a practice test this weekend, to see if there’s any improvement from my previous test score after studying verbal. Or maybe I should wait and do some problems from the Official Guides first, before tackling a practice test. Or maybe I’ll do both. Yep, I’m over-ambitious sometimes.

GMAT Update: Week 3 - MGMAT Sentence Correction

I started off my third week of prep by practicing the aspects of verbal that I’d already learnt. I did around 10-15 questions for RC and CR. But I found it really hard to try and use the strategies I’d read – not because the strategies weren’t good, but because once I saw a question, I just couldn’t remember what I’d learnt about approaching such problems, and went back to my old way of answering questions.

I got most of my RC questions correct, the ones from the Veritas book. In fact, I think I only made one mistake. But with CR, I made quite a few. That was a huge setback for me, and I realized I needed to go over my notes again and again to get those strategies fixed in my head. I will now start going through my notes for both RC and CR once a week (maybe more often, if I find once a week is not working either).

I then began MGMAT’s Sentence Correction Guide. At this point, I’ve gotta say, I randomly flipped through the book and had a slight panic attack when I saw just how much information was included in the book. I took a deep breath, and started reading. After going through just the first page, I realized that this was a fantastic book, a SC bible really. Not only that, but I also think it’s an excellent grammar book, teaching you all the rules of standard written English, with correct and incorrect examples included for better understanding of the grammar concepts.

At the end of the week, I’ve managed to go through about half of the book. I’m not a native English speaker, but living abroad has definitely helped me with my English, so I feel I’m at an advantage compared to a lot of non-native speakers. I didn’t find the book to be very difficult, but it did have a lot of information. I made notes as I went along, for all the little bits I didn’t know. I already have more slides for SC than I do for RC or CR, and I’m only halfway through!

I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do next week, given that I’m finally moving to Berlin, and I haven’t even started packing. It’s gonna be a busy week for sure.

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. 

GMAT Update: Week 1 - Powerscore CR Bible

After the ridiculously unsuccessful attempt at scoring well on the first practice test (you can read about that here), I decided not to wait until July, and started on my prep right away. Some might argue here that I have three full months, in fact three and a half really, given my GMAT exam is not until 14^th October. But from mid July to the end of September, I will be on an internship, and hence this is probably the maximum free time I’ll have to get some reading out of the way. I have absolutely nothing to do until the internship starts (except for watching Wimbledon of course). And in October it will be back to University life.

The ‘week’ here began on Wednesday, when I opened the Official Guide (hereby OG) Review. I spent my time familiarizing myself with the test, the number of questions in each section, etc. I read through each and every section, what each section consists of, and what you’re expected to do. I then did the same for the OG Quant and the OG Verbal book.

I next started off with Powerscore’s CR Bible. I read on the BTG forum (the 3-month study plan) that you should start with your weakest area. CR wasn’t my weakest, RC was. But I dislike that section so much that I decided to start with CR.

First impression: I LOVE THIS BOOK. As I read page after page, I actually felt that I was gaining a lot of information, a lot of useful information, with every word I was reading, which is not something you can say about every book.

I took Sunday off, as my concentration was lacking. It was good that I didn’t try and force myself to go on; on Monday I was fresh and managed to cover a lot more. I now know that I need a break every four days or so to recuperate!

The plan for next week is to finish with the CR Bible and start doing around 5 CR problems every day from the OG Guides. And I guess I’ll start with RC. Sigh.