Hi,
With 26 days to go. I am getting all jittery and nervous. It’s been a week since I posted anything. Looking back, I went blank because I could not recall what I did the last week. An eerire feeling crept over me which said…. “You did not study…!!!” and the little devil on my shoulder is wagging his fat finger, to gesture that “You did not study!!”
After regaining my composure and senses, things are finally getting back to me.
Aug 24: Test Day!!! I gave another Knewton and and got a stale score of 640 again. I sometime doubt their scoring pattern. I had only 6 incorrect but still the score never increased.
1- 10: 5 wrong
10-20: 1 wrong
20-37: 0 wrong
I am not sure what to make of their scoring pattern. I have not given anymore of MGMAT test yet because Knewton score is improving my confidence(not overconfident 🙂 !!!). I want o keep it going so that it keeps me motivated. I did notice that my Verbal is improving. I was able to hit 35 this time compared to high 20’s when I started. Knewton course has definitely helped me improve my verbal. The knewton test has better question in verbal than I saw in MGMAT test.
Ex: MGMAT had painfully long RC, which I did not see in Knewton. They were more in tune with GMAT pattern. CR on knewton is relatively easier than MGMAT. SC is good and much better in Knewton.
| Test Information (Score / Percentile Rank) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Verbal | Quantitative | Total |
| 35 / 73% | 43 / 67% | 640 / 80% |
I can see a definite improvement in Number properties. I will give the credit to GmatClub math tests. I have taken 6 maths test so far. One area that I see and I avoid a lot is Combination and Probability.
These questions help me gain my essential time lost or time gain. 🙂 NO I AM NOT A PROBABILITY GENIUS!!! On the contrary, it is my weakest point. I always get them wrong. So, when I am stressed out and running low on time, I use these question to skip. I do try an attempt them, but 15 seconds into the questions, I know if I can solve them. If I have slightest idea, I use only 15 seconds and try to figure out the denominator, choose one answer and move on. I have read on forums and heard from many people and knewton instructors that one should not sweat out on this topic. Get the basic understanding and move on.
Aug 25 – 26: Your truly has a big ego!!! Having said that probability is one topic where one need not stress over, I could not resist reading more on it, to gain a little more understanding. So I went over Knewton class, and some sites again. I found this wonderful article/tutorial at 800score.com. Next as I was looking …. I should rather say itching to use my knowledge, I googled again for probability questions and I found a set of question on BTG. You can download the question set from Probability and Combinations.
Now these probabilty questions are not top quality and but they helped me stregthen the concept.
Aug 27-29: I practiced questions from OG 12. I noticed that I have been practicing a lot more from sources other than OG-12, so I decided that I need to finish up Og-12 by 5th September. I have put a hold on all external sources. Sunday was my last day of Knewton online classes. I missed that class because I had help a friend to move stuff. So I did not get to study much.
Aug 30 – 31: I FREAKED out. I did some SC and CR from OG 12 and got quite a few incorrect. My morale went down. I thought that I had forgotten everything on SC. I frantically went through my notes again. I went through knewton’s video class recordings. I skipped through the videos to see what did I lose??? After about 1 hour of thinking, I told myself, you improved a lot a few days back. What am I doing wrong now?? I realised that I was missing one thing.
WRONG APPROACH: I was focusing on finding the correct answer.
RIGHT APPROACH: When I was feverishly doing 1000sc questions, I was looking for what concept is being tested. Once I knew what was tested, I was able to answer without any issues. Scanning trough answer choices to see what is changing between the sentences helped me figure out tricky questions on which I was not able to find what is being tested.
I solved another 15 questions from OG 12 and my accuracy shot up again… yeah!!!!
I have not had time to frequent the BTG forum or go through their practice questions that I won as scholarship. I plan to do 100 questions on coming long weekend.
~~~ Dinesh
A little here and a little there 