Prepared to take on GMAT again?

I have been contemplating whether or not to take GMAT appointment in the next 15 days. For many of you, taking GMATPrep, MGMAT, or any of the FLTs would be the obvious choice to gauge your progress. Not for me.. I find myself in a difficult situation. That I have already taken GMATPrep, MGMAT tests in my last attempts and done OG11 multiple times complicates the matter for me. I remember many OG11 & MGMAT questions. These tests do not represent my true level. So the question is how do I evaluate my performance? Will I be able to cross the 7XX hurdle?? Will my score go down further?? At this moment, I don't know.. Needless to say that I have no respect left for all the FLTs. I just take FLTs for building stamina. So what goes wrong? Do I falter under pressure? This post is my effort to find answer to such questions and to gauge my fundamental knowledge, accuracy, and speed.

Quantitative section:
- No issues with fundamentals except for few topics.
- Have practiced an approach to avoid silly mistakes.
- Have seen accuracy improve
- Haven't practiced tougher P&C questions
- Careless mistakes! I am always in a hurry :-) I guess old habits die hard.
- Slow. I take ~1.75 minutes per questions.
- I will manage at least 48 in this section (I know this is not good enough!)

Sentence Correction:
- There's no end to fundamental concepts.
- SCs are becoming tougher in GMAT.
- Accuracy in tougher questions drops drastically.
- based on experience, cannot rely on SC either.
- Timing not an issue here. Ha Ha.. When you don't know enough, you will never have time pressure. :-)) You will never catch the error in the original sentence. :-)

Critical Reasoning:

- Have practiced tough Reasoning questions.
- Reasonably confident in this section. Feel much comforatble.
- Should get 85%-95% questions correct even if they are difficult ones.
- Think the approach is just right.
- I take ~1.75 minutes per question while doing tests.

Reading Comprehension:
- Have practiced OG10/OG11 ONLY!!
- CR fundamentals help. That's the confidence booster.
- Timing is alright.
- Unable to understand some of the passages because the language & comprehension are really difficult. I don't expect to see more than 2 such passages however. So this should be fine!
- Should be able to manage moderate difficult passages with reasonable accuracy.

To sum it up, I am not ready yet.. But I think I have reached my peak level. Anything beyond this will require too much committement. I don't think I can commit myself to GMAT journey for another 6 month. At the same time, This doesn't mean that I'm low on confidence. In fact, I am in excellent mental state. Guess kinda prepared for the worst case scenario.. And I still have at least 15 days to work on my weaknesses. Think I can do it this time.. Let's see..

GMAT Quant Trouble :-(

Contrary to the general belief that people from engineering background will find GMAT quantitative section easier, I find Quantitative section tougher than the Verbal section. My accuracy is only ~70% in Quant question sets. The worst part is that I'm stuck at this accuracy level for sometime now. The difficulty level of these questions is very close to the real thing and unless I improve accuracy, I can forget entry to the magic 7XX club :-(. So, I analyzed my mistakes today and tried to bin them in different broad categories such as gap in fundamental concept, careless mistakes, etc. The mistakes are too basic, but time and again I continue repeating similar mistakes. This is good news because it means I have fewer problems to work on and it's bad news because I still haven't learnt from mistakes. Anyways, better late than never.. I hope that this exercise will help me minimize the mistakes.. :-(

Here are the mistake categories -

1. Number properties.
- I have lost count of the number of times when I got trapped in the properties :-(

- Unless stated otherwise, all numbers in GMAT are real numbers.

- If given number is integer, don't forget to consider '0', -ve, and +ve integers.

- In problems involving X^Y, always consider the special case when X, Y is 0, 1, -1

- Try out these different values: -2, -1.5 -1, -0.5, 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2. Does time permit to try out so many values? Specially if there are more than one variable?

2. Word problems.
- Read the question carefully. While translating it to equations or symbol representation, double check that you have translated the word problem correctly.!!

- After spending 1-2 min, you realize that the calculations do not yield the correct result. You have two options. Either to do the exercise once again, or to guess and move on.

- Even worse, if you did not read the question stem carefully, you will mark one of the wrong answer choices and move on. Worst, you will not even realize your mistake until you see your score :-(

- Bad choice of variables/symbols and you find yourself lost in the equations. Finally, you just guess and move on. Take a deep breath.. think... then proceed. This will probably cost extra 10 sec, but will help a lot.

3. Probability Questions
- Question is to find the probability of event A. Almost certain that you will see probability of (1-A) too in the correct answer choice. You fail to read the question carefully and mark the wrong answer choice and move on.

4. Ratio problems
- Very similar to the last point. The question asks you to find out the ratio of A and (A+B). You find the ration of B and (A+B), mark the wrong answer choice, and move on. Be assured that answer choices will have all the possible ratios :-(

5. Data Sufficiency
- You read the statements in the given order. By the time you are analyzing option B, you will use the information provided in A ( ofcourse you wouldn't notice that) and mark the answer as B.
- There are less questions with A as the correct answer choice ??

- You think C is the correct answer? Think again!! This has troubled me sooooo many times.

6. Inequality Trouble
- You get two values by solving a given inequality and mark the answer. Hmm.. think again.. Inequalities do not necessarily have two different roots. One of them may be not a valid root of the equation.

7. Lacking in fundamental Concepts
- Some questions are just tougher.. need more practice.. time.. energy.. :-(

8. Lost Concentration
- You start loosing focus towards the end of the test. :-(