Conquered the GMAT in 2nd attempt-100 points increase

MBA
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First of all, thank you so much pagalguy.com and all the great members here including arung, arun j,del@pg by reading whose post I gained immensely and some of whom have been generous enough to reply to any query I had and supported me through thi…

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First of all, thank you so much pagalguy.com and all the great members here including arung, arun j,del@pg by reading whose post I gained immensely and some of whom have been generous enough to reply to any query I had and supported me through thick and thin. For those of you who haven't read my story of the first attempt , here's the link that I had a bad GMAT last time because of my own stupidity.
http://www.pagalguy.com/discussions/bombed-the-gmatthanks-to-a-hangover-angry-at-myself-25081687

Fortunately, I am happy this time around as I managed to lap up a 740. I told myself today before stepping out for the exam, 'I will kill the GMAT this time" and by god's grace, it happened!
My thoughts :

I think this time I did this well because I had the experience of the last time. On the last attempt, I had seen quite a few questions from coordinate geometry and inequalities, areas that I wasn't confident about. So right after my first attempt, I started working on all these areas.

I think that verbal section on the GMAT is quite challenging for non-native speakers. The GMAT RCs were quite dense and the sentence correction questions were again not very easy.
Reading comprehension
For reading comprehension , I didn't follow the "skimming" technique because I would invariably get most of the questions in the passage wrong if I didn't understand the passage. I experimented with a couple of techniques using the OG12 RC(26 passages) and Aristotle RCs(30 passages). So by the time I had finished practicing around 50 passages, I knew what worked for me(reading the passage carefully,overlooking the confusing details) and what doesn't(skimming didn't work)

Sentence Correction
Sentence correction was again an area that I use to initially struggle in. I knew that if I could do a sentence correction question in less than a minute, i could spend more time in reading comprehension. So SC became the prime target for me. I worked on it a lot using SC Grail and Manhattan SC. I realized that the questions I used to get wrong were mostly because I didn't pay attention to the non-underlined part. Reading the non-underlined part is also very important and I started ensuring that I understand the meaning of the sentence properly.

The hype around meaning in sentence correction
That brings to the topic of "meaning in SC" that the test prep companies have been saying has become very important. That is absolute bullshit I think, just a ploy to be different. Most of the meaning changes in a sentence happens because of modifiers or comparison issues in the sentence. Now if you already know how to check for the right modifier and comparison , why the hell do you need to worry about meaning. Isn't it very logical that when there will be a comparison error, there will be a meaning error in the sentence ? All the test prep companies, I think, are just bored and looking for ways to find something new to catch the fancy of test takers.

Which material to use ?
I primarily relied on Manhattangmat's and Aristotle Prep's material. I had access to a lot of other material including veritasprep and Kaplan but didn't use them. Don't want to even talk about Princeton review's material.

One thing I used was that I used one free practice test that all the test prep companies provide. Doing all the different tests gave me a better assessment as relying only on the Manhattangmat tests wasn't proving very good because of their overtly tough questions.


Okay guys, I gotta wind up the post as I am throwing a party and gotta go. I will keep updating this post whenever I get time. If you have any questions, I would be glad to be of help. I can't say that how much helpful has been everyone's opinions, suggestions and motivation been on this website, so if I could do even a bit, that would be great 😃

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First of all, thank you so much pagalguy.com and all the great members here including arung, arun j,del@pg by reading whose post I gained immensely and some of whom have been generous enough to reply to any query I had and supported me through thick and thin. For those of you who haven't read my story of the first attempt , here's the link that I had a bad GMAT last time because of my own stupidity.
http://www.pagalguy.com/discussions/bombed-the-gmatthanks-to-a-hangover-angry-at-myself-25081687


Awesome score and awesome post. Best of luck dude 😃
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Well done!! that's a brilliant score!

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congrats dude....u rock !!!

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Thank you all for the wishes!
@Ashish
I obviously don't have anything against test prep companies; hadn't they been around, how would we, the test-taking junta, been able to ace the exams. You are also doing a great job. Benefited a lot from your explanations too! 😃

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Friendlyfire!

Awesome score - all the best for the application process! I am sure you have some chilled beer stocked in the fridge

Arun

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First of all, thank you so much pagalguy.com and all the great members here including arung, arun j,del@pg by reading whose post I gained immensely and some of whom have been generous enough to reply to any query I had and supported me through thick and thin.....

Fortunately, I am happy this time around as I managed to lap up a 740. I told myself today before stepping out for the exam, 'I will kill the GMAT this time and by god's grace, it happened!


Congratulations for your score. BTW, do you have any valuable suggestions regarding the IR section.

:cheers:
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Congratulations for your score. BTW, do you have any valuable suggestions regarding the IR section.

:cheers:


My suggestion for IR section would be to finish all the 50 questions that comes in the online access that you get with OG13. IR section is all about practice and though initially it looks scary but it can be mastered easily
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Bravo!

Congrats @[485381:friendlyfire]. Awesome comeback!
Wish you the best with the app process. Way 2 go!
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Hi friendlyfire...congrats on a fantastic score

Pls share your IR score and strategy you adopted to do well in this section.

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friendlyfire , can you please throw some light on how were the CR questions in the GMAT as compared to OG13 CR. I have done the first 25 CR questions from OG13 and have found them to be easy

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Congratulations!!

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@friendlyfire First of, congratulations on the great score!

I am one week away from the actual GMAT. I've been taking the ManhattanGMATs and am finding them to be quite high on the difficulty scale, especially quant. The IR section is very time consuming as well and I can barely get 2-3 questions right!

I want to know how closely are the MGMAT and the actual GMAT scores correlated. I'm averaging around 650 in the MGMATs but I am hoping to somehow cross the elusive 700 barrier. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated!
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@LeonCorriea
It's been more than 1 week since posted the post above. Did you take the GMAT ?And how did it go ? I am about to take the GMAT by November mid so your insights will be appreciated!
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@LeonCorriea Thank you for the insights. 650 is not a bad score but yes given the level of competition in Indians it certainly is not very good score. And those tips look awesome
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@friendlyfire Fantastic. I have just entered the GMAT world and gain a lot of insights from your posts. Have you gotten through any business school ?
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I'm about to kick off my prep. I was wondering how is Barron's GMAT book ?

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Hey Guys,

I want to go from 690 to 750 on GMAT. Please suggest some material that i may use to practice more.
Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

PS: Please ignore my previous post 😃
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Hi guys, I'm rank new to this forum. Been contemplating to crack the GMAT for a good 12 months now and have finally decided to take the plunge come June. However, there are a few niggling questions I have (I scoured previous threads but could not find some definitive recommendations). Sadly, there are a lot of people waiting in the wings to have you enrolled and make a quick buck by fobbing you off.


I'll cut to the chase here. A lot of my friends and members in here have recommended to do away with classes. I could have done so but mathematics is my bogey subject. Having worked for more than 5 years, I've become all the more rusty with math and other aspects of the test. In order to get into the swing of things, I've decided not to straddle professional and study time periods. As far as classes are concerned, I'm torn between TIME, IMFS and IMS. It will be of immense help if someone could help me with their experience or recommendations, etc. I've also heard that Manhattan have started off with their courses in India. Could anyone shed some light on that as well? Will it pan out just fine for GMAT aspirants like me?


Thanks a ton in advance!! 👍👍👍


Regards,

Jatin