Friday, May 23, 2008

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..

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Cool analysis of your strengths and weaknesses! Cool .. where are you now preparation wise ?

Aryan-Arjun said...

Cool...good analyssis. Best wishes
Aryan's Mom