Phase 2: Practice, Perceive and Pitch!!

For the past 3-4 weeks my preparation has been specifically targeted at my weak areas and areas where the possibility of a score increase is directly proportional to the square of my efforts. I was solely concentrating on sentence correction and critical reasoning.
My typical week would be to do a set from the logical reasoning section from the LSAT section and do a set of 25 sentence correction questions from the Official guide books. This in my opinion has helped me a lot in spotting errors in reasoning (for CR) and in answer choices (for SC). I never really studied for quant because i think my efforts in quant prep would be directly proportional to the inverse of my over all score. Yes, thats exactly what i think. Throw me a quant question and i can solve it, i'm sure. What this means is that i have nothing much to Study in quant. All i need is practice.

Borrowing a quote from Cliff Gladwin, "cometh the hour, cometh the man", I feel the time has finally come for me to shift gears, and get down and dirtly. My routine with the 'efficient scoring' areas (SC and CR) proved to be very useful. I have developed a mental habit to think the right way and spot the flaws. Now with 3 weeks remaining for my GMAT, I am officially going into phase 2 - Practice, Perceive and Pitch!!! While continuing to strengthen the weakness, i'm also starting my quant practice. I have a lot of GMATClub tests remaining and i plan to do at least two every week. I had taken a few of them in the past and i think they are very good. I would also be doing sets of 25 quant (PS/DS) questions from the Official guides. My verbal practice would include those brutal reading comp passages from LSAT super prep, CR and SC from the OGs and some extra questions from various other mixed sources.

However the most difficult part of my following weeks of study would be the "rise at 6am" schedule. I have my test at 8am so i am planning rewind my mental clock and get adjusted to rising before the sun.

I'm planning to keep phase 2 active for 2 more weeks and then i'll move to phase 3 - Introspection!!

So thats my rough plan for the coming weeks. Let me leave you with a video that i recently saw and loved. TC.

Some useful information..

I was reading this very interesting write-up on Business Week and i thought i'll post the link for those who haven't read it. The article stresses on originality, self-reflection and career objective and gives a lot of good tips on how to write a strong application essay. Here is the link -> How to Write an MBA Admissions Essay

Prior to this article BW also posted another very useful article about the new admission criteria for B-school admission. Very interesting read. Here is the link for that -> New criteria for B-school admission

Climbing up the ladder.

Its been roughly two and a half weeks that i re-started my preparations and with the help of my new tutor, I've been making some good progress or atleast i like to think so! I've been doing a lot of SC and CR questions and have a strong feeling that my verbal muscles are starting to develop. I did a complete autopsy of the SC section from the official guide book, solving and analyzing all the questions and trying to find out all the errors in each of the answer choices for the entire set of 113 questions. Took a lot of work but the result was amazing. I never thought that re-doing all the same questions again would help me. But it did.

Here is a tip or a take away: if you found an answer choice wrong in sentence correction, dont stop there. Try to find other errors in the same answer choice. Odds are that there are more than one mistake in the sentence that makes it wrong!!

I've also started doing some LSAT logical reasoning questions. After taking the GMAT 2 times i know the level of toughness of the questions. LSAT has some obnoxiously tough and lengthly logical reasoning questions. I hope this would take away the shock when i see a tough question in GMAT!!! Also they make for some great practice. I've starting my quant preparations from this week. Hope to improve my quant score by 5 points, and to get this i need to grill on some really tricky questions.

In other news, my friend Rocky Balboa craked the gmat with a 740 and had a great pre-application interview with Rotman, one of his top choice school!! Congrats pal.

Jukebox.

Jukebox - whats that gotta do with GMAT and B-schools? The term actually symbolizes this post. I have so many things to write about that its going to sound like a mixed tape - a jukebox!!!

First things first, last weekend i sat down with my tutor and analyzed what went wrong with my GMAT and he came up with some really logical reasons. Thanks to him, he also came out with some possible solutions. Oh and btw this guy is absolutely brilliant. So in case you live in New york city and want to take up some tutoring i absolutely recommend him. Shoot me an email and i'll give you his details!! So coming back to my preps - I've started off with verbal (duh!), for the next two weeks i'll be doing the entire SC section for the OGs. Not merely answering them but writing down the reasons for eliminating each answer choice. With this i guess my tutor will be able to give me some good insight as to where i stand.

Secondly, as you all know the long weekend officially starts tomorrow. Not for me. I'm flying to Chicago today and vacation starts today, yeeyy!! This trip is going to be packed, lots of places to see, and lots of things to do - Hancock building, Shedd Aquarium (btw its the world's largest indoor aquarium in the world), Chicago food festival (free yummy food), Navy pier, Skyline cruise, July 4th fireworks, and partying!!! oh my dad has subscribed to this blog so i'll not go deep into the partying part!!! :) so thats going to be fun, plus it will take my mind off the nerve wrecking preparation thats been going on for the past 5 months!!!

I recently came across this facebook application. This application helps you to track your score on gmat practice tests, shows you a performance graph, shows you all the application deadlines of the popular B-schools and has a reader. You can use this reader to read the popular blogs like Hella's list, clearadmit, accepted, stacy blackman etc. Sounds fun right, check it out (GMAT_MBA_News).

So now you see why the name Jukebox!!! Thats all i've got for now. Herez wishing all the American readers a very happy long weekend and all non american readers a very happy weekend!!!