Re-Take in 57 Days

[ParthJ26]

Dear Stacey,

Hope you're doing well. I would like to begin by thanking you on behalf of each and every student for being extremely dedicated toward us students, toward Manhattan Prep and toward teaching in general. Before I talk about how my preparation was, I would like to thank Sage Pearce Higgins for responding to all my SC questions in detail and always showing me the bigger picture, and, of course, I would like to thank the inimitable Ron Purewal. He was the Dronacharya to my Eklavya (refer to The Mahabharata: the greatest ever Indian epic). He never replied directly to any of my posts (probably he's busy as I don't see him on the forums anymore), but I learnt a lot from him, especially for the Verbal section. I cannot get over how good he is. As a side question: WHERE IS HE?

Please brace yourself for this is a long post and will require your time.

I took my first official GMAT exam on 16th April, 2018 (Monday) and scored 660 without studying CR at all. I know it's not a bad score, but my goal is 720+.

Split was:

Quant 42 (Extremely poor)

Verbal 39 (Satisfactory)

IR 7.0

I started my preparation started in October, 2017 when I took my GMAT prep test 1. I scored 500 (Q29 and V30). Following is a month-wise break-up of my preparation for you to get an idea of my preparation style and judge whether I made any major errors.

October:

3 Manhattan Quant guides:

Number properties
Fractions, Decimals and Percents and,
Algebra

I also completed all associated OG sets.

Toward the end of October, I thought that I was comfortable in Quant and that I need to start with the Verbal portion.

November:

Manhattan Foundations of Verbal full guide (without the CR portion)

December 1st - December 15th:

Manhattan SC Strategy Guide (without the associated OG questions)

Break of about 60 days from December 15th to February 17th due to health reasons.

Mid February to End February:

Revision of all that I had learnt from October to Mid-December.

March:

All OG questions associated with SC guide (in excruciating detail). I looked up each question on the MGMAT Verbal Forum and read each and every instructor's comments on the questions.

Please note that I did not study CR at all because I preferred quality SC study over starting CR fresh.

Manhattan RC guide.

All OG questions associated with RC guide.

1 hour reading every day from sources such as:

Scientific American
Smithsonian
Harvard Review
The Economist

2 Manhattan Quant guides:

Word Problems
Geometry

Also took a MGMAT CAT on 18th March. I scored 650 on the test (Q41 V38). I was pretty demotivated with the Quant score.

The analysis showed me that I was weak in Geometry and Word problems - so I re-did the guides.

April:

I took a break from my office in order to study 8-10 hours everyday.

I started practising Quant from the OG again (5 hours - 30 Questions and Analysis in the manner in which you have stated on all your blogs about how to analyse problems)

I practised Verbal for 3 hours (1 hour reading, 1 hour One OG RC passage and 1 hour 6 SC questions).

On the last 2 days before the exam,

I did the entire Quant and Verbal (except CR) portion online on GMAT.Wiley.com so as to be ready for an online experience.

I was feeling good. I didn't take the GMAT prep test because I knew that I would re-appear and wanted to save the test.

My feelings during the test:

I started with the Verbal portion. Except for an RC passage that I found astonishingly difficult, I was really having fun out there and finished the Verbal portion with 8 mins to spare.

I don't know what went wrong with the Quant portion, but here too, I was enjoying myself. In retrospect, I realise that I might have made a lot of mistakes early on and the result was that I got a lot of easy questions and finished with the Math portion with about 6 mins to spare.

Re-Take Strategy:

I am going to tell you more about myself so that you can understand me as a learner and as a person and can probably guide me better.

Historically,

I have been very good at Math. I scored a 100/100 on India's famous Class X board exams.

My Math scores dropped in Grade XI as I wanted to for a bit before the infamous Grade XII began.

I scored 98/100 in Maths on Class XII board exams.

I went to Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics, University of Bombay where I earned my degree in Accountancy and Finance (A quant intensive course).

I interned at the Reserve Bank of India, Bombay (India's Federal Reserve) while I was in college and the internship too required me to work around numbers.

I got my first job at Ernst and Young, Bombay in the risk advisory department. The job required a fair mix of number crunching, accounting and logic.

I came back to my native town of Ludhiana, an industrial town in North India in 2015 and put up a 2.5 Million USD $ Box-manufacturing plant in a record time of 7 months from erection to commissioning.

I operated the plant for about 3 years and ensured greater-than-industry profit levels before I handed it over to my father in April to take a 15-day break for my GMAT.

I'm sorry that you had to read all of what I've written above, but the core is that it is very difficult for me to digest my sub-par Quant score. I've always done very well on tests and Maths has always been a strength. I plan to take a 2-month break to focus mainly on Quant and CR and practice SC and RC on the side.

However, I don't know what to do. I am very comfortable with the MGMAT guides and the OG. But when I look at problems from sites such as the GMAT club, I'm slightly taken aback. I have never shied away from working hard, and I know I can beat the Quant portion. Right now, I'm clueless about what I do. I don't know what my weaknesses in the Quant section are. I don't want to re-do the Guides and the OG ONLY because I remember all the answers and can answer even before reading the questions.

Should I take a MGMAT Quant to judge my weaknesses OR should I order an ESR report?

I would really appreciate a honest feedback.

Thank you in advance.

Parth Jain

[StaceyKoprince]

You are right that a 660 is already a good score, even though you want an even higher one. Nice work.

Q42, V39, IR 7

Your IR score is already good enough. In order to reach 720, you'll want to try to lift both Q and V. It is more difficult to try to get to 720 by lifting only one section. If you aim for about a 3-4 point increase on each side, that would get you to your goal.

Okay, now I'm getting later in your post and I see why you think your quant score is "poor"—because you've done extremely well on math in school. I often find this to be the case, actually. The way that the GMAT tests math is not really the way that we learn math in school, so people who did very well on school math can be at a disadvantage on the GMAT. If you try to approach the GMAT in the way that worked (very well!) in school, it's hard to get to the top levels of GMAT math.

And you are correct that just re-doing the guides is probably not what you need now. How often do you use test-taking strategies, such as smart numbers, working backwards, testing cases, estimating, back-of-the-envelope or drawing out story problems, etc? The harder quant problems are much easier to solve via those kinds of approaches. They're still not easy. But easier than trying to use the textbook approaches (the kinds you learned in school).

My guess is that you have mostly been using textbook approaches because that's exactly what worked well for you in school. And I'll guess further that the times that you've tried the test-taking approaches, it hasn't gone so well? Felt uncomfortable and either took a while or messed it up?

What happens is this: Because you're so good at classic textbook approaches, you only try the test-taking strategies on *really* hard problems. And of course you then don't feel comfortable with that approach because you haven't really learned how to use those strategies well on easier problems—and this problem is really hard! So, when that happens, people just think those strategies aren't that great and start avoiding them.

That's basically the equivalent of starting to learn algebra for the first time by studying, say, quadratic equations. You don't know the basic algebra yet, so that would basically be setting yourself up to fail!

So, if I'm right that you haven't been using the test-taking strategies much, then that's what you need to do. You can use the strategy chapters in our quant strategy guides to help kick-start that learning. Start from lower-to-medium level problems just to learn how to apply these different strategies and work your way up to harder problems. Do start from problems you've already done—it doesn't matter that you already know the correct answer. You're learning a new way to approach the problem.

As you gain skill with a particular strategy, you'll learn the kinds of tweaks you need to make in order to apply the strategies to harder and harder problems—and then you'll actually be able to get yourself up into that higher quant level on a consistent basis. (I literally would refuse to take the exam if I weren't allowed to use those strategies. No way!)

On the verbal side, you said that you hadn't studied CR, so that's one obvious area to work on in order to improve your score. You might consider ordering the ESR just to see whether that confirms your hypothesis that SC and RC are better than CR for you. (You can also use that to confirm your hypothesis about quant—or to show you that something else happened. It would also be useful to know whether there were any issues around PS vs DS or arithmetic vs. algebra/geometry.)

What do you think about the above?

[ParthJ26]

Dear Stacey,

Thank you so much for your response. You're spot-on with your judgment. I don't use test-taking strategies much.

The biggest reason was lack of problems (lined-up) to drill these strategies. For example, let's take Guide 1: Fractions, Decimals and Percents. It covers three strategy chapters.

Chapter 3: Test cases

Chapter 6: Smart numbers

Chapter 8: Estimation

However, when I look at the PDF for associated OG questions, I find only 11 Questions in all to try the strategies on : 5 for Testing Cases and 6 for Estimation.

Of course, there are many other questions in the OG that can be solved using these strategies. Should I look for them on my own to drill a particular strategy? This would take some time but won't be a problem.

OR Could you help me find the questions if already have them lined up strategy-wise? This would just save me some time if you already have them lined up.

On the side, I'll order the ESR and get back to you.

Thanks again.

Parth Jain

[ParthJ26]

Dear Stacey,

Hi again. I received my ESR report and below is it analysis:

Time Management by Section:

Verbal - 1:35 per question

Quant - 1:42 per question

VERBAL ANALYSIS:

Sub-Section Rankings and Time management:

CR - 33rd Percentile 2:31 per question

RC - 94th Percentile 1:38 per question

SC - 98th Percentile 0:55 per question

Percent Correct:

First Quarter: 75% Correct

Second Quarter: 71% Correct

Third Quarter: 71% Correct

Fourth Quarter: 75% Correct

Performance over Time: Average time per response

First Quarter: 0:58

Second Quarter: 1:34

Third Quarter: 1:36

Fourth Quarter: 2:11

Raw scores:

CR = 23

RC = 45

SC = 45

QUANT ANALYSIS:

Sub-Section Rankings and Time Management:

PS : 36th Percentile 1:43 per question

DS: 72nd Percentile 1:41 per question

Arithmetic: 58th Percentile 1:26 per question

Algebra/Geometry: 37th Percentile 2:03 per question

Percent Correct:

First Quarter: 71% Correct

Second Quarter: 57% Correct

Third Quarter: 71% Correct

Fourth Quarter: 86% Correct

Performance over Time: Average time per response

First Quarter: 1:15

Second Quarter: 1:29

Third Quarter: 2:00

Fourth Quarter: 2:04

Raw scores:

PS = 38

DS = 49

Arithmetic = 46

Algebra/Geometry = 39

I can clearly pin point weak areas such as CR, PS, Algebra/Geometry from the above analysis.

However, I would love if you can add anything to the above from your experience and expertise.

Parth Jain

[StaceyKoprince]

Ah! So first of all, we purposely do NOT give you lists of all of the problems for which you can use these strategies. There's a very important reason.

You have to be able to tell when you can use these strategies in the first place. The test is not going to tell you. So part of your task is literally to scan problems in the OG to try to identify, hey, I think I can use Smart Numbers on this problem.

Not sure whether you're right? Go check our OG solution in Navigator. If there's a good strategy to use, we'll have put it in the solution. But don't check that right away. First try out the strategy that you think you can use. If it doesn't seem to go well, there are two possible reasons—this isn't really the right strategy for this problem or you don't know how to apply the strategy well enough yet. Now, when you do go look at the solution, you know what you need to look for / learn.

Does the solution not mention that strategy? Then you need to go back and figure out what makes this problem NOT right for that strategy so that you don't try to do that again on a similar problem. Alternatively, if the solution does use that strategy, now you can learn how to properly use the strategy for this problem.

ESR

Okay, good, this confirms that CR is the area for opportunity on verbal. (I know you already thought it was that, but it's good to have data confirmation.) Further, we can confirm that RC and SC are excellent (including avg time), so your goal on those is just to keep your skills up.

In quant, there's quite a difference on DS vs PS—and I think this goes along with what we already know re: your strong quant background and not using the strategies as much. You're fine on DS because that's where you don't have to get into all of the annoying calculations. But it breaks down on PS, where you likely get all tangled up in the algebra / textbook-type math. (Even the data on arithmetic vs. alg/geo backs up this theory.)

So now we know that we're on the right track on the quant side as well. It's not that you're "bad" at more traditional algebraic-type math. (In fact, we know from school that you're quite good.) The issue is that the way you're trying to approach that stuff doesn't work so well on the GMAT.

Here are some articles that (in addition to the test-taking strategy chapters in your guides) will help you to recast the way you're approaching math on the test:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... rt-1-of-5/

(That's a 5-part series but I've written at least 2 or 3 more since and the newer ones may not be linked, so you might also want to search for "Fast Math" on our blog.)

More in that same vein:
blog/2016/01/12/heres-how-to-avoid-calculations-on-gmat-quant-problem-solving/

Stories:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... them-real/

If you like those kinds of approaches, just keep browsing our blog for more; I have other similar articles there and so do lots of our teachers—you can get tons of ideas there.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... ms-part-1/

For CR, try this in conjunction with studying from our guide:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2015/12/ ... stion-type

[ParthJ26]

Dear Ma'am,

Thank you so much for replying to me and thanks for posting the links of useful articles. I read all of them and found them to be quite useful.

To be honest, I haven't practised as much in the last 1 week and have tried to focus on re-orienting my view on Quant problems. I read everything on those posts and will try to implement those strategies (fast maths, Not diving right in, etc) as much as possible.

Stacey, I have a question for you. Is my following assessment correct?

My PS raw score = 38

DS raw score = 49.

Revised total number of questions on April 16, 2018 (the day I took the test) = 31.

Using weighted averages,

No. of PS questions = 19 or 20.

No. of DS questions = 12 or 11.

New PS:DS ratio range = 1.58:1 to 1.81:1

Old format PS:DS ratio range = < or = 1.47: 1. (22:15)

Conclusion = the number of PS questions has gone up. Am I correct?

It would really impact the way I work as I would have really have to work on drilling and working my way through problems rather than relying on intuition.

Thanks in advance

Regards
Parth Jain

[StaceyKoprince]

They have said that, on their own practice tests, they are going to be giving 17 or 18 PS and 13 or 14 DS. They also said that someone may see different numbers on the real thing. But I wouldn't expect it to vary all that much—maybe by 1 or 2.

So it's still the case that you will see a decent number of DS, though you will continue to see more PS than DS.

[ParthJ26]

Dear Stacey,

Thank you for replying to me.

As I was practising problems, I tried to do its analysis as per this article. https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/arti ... roblem.cfm

I have a doubt regarding the process. Should I do this analysis orally or on a notebook page? (3 minutes approx.) or Should I do this analysis in an excel sheet (7 minutes approx)

Why I ask is because of the time-difference in the 2 methods.

What process do you like to follow? After every problem, do you just ask yourself the questions mentioned in the article or do you log them digitally?

Thank you so much for the help that you've provided me in the last few days!

Regards
Parth Jain

[StaceyKoprince]

I start by asking myself which questions apply to this particular problem—not all of them do. For example, if I got it right (and for the right reasons / I didn't just get lucky), then I did understand the material and I didn't make any mistakes, so those kinds of questions don't apply.

For the questions that do apply, I see where the analysis takes me. For example, let's say there's a faster way to do some math. I need to try out that faster way, so I write that down in my notebook, just to try it out. Eventually, let's say I realize that on this question, it's better to Work Backwards than do the algebra. I might have two takeaways from that:
(1) When I see (certain characteristics that I now realize this problem has), I'll think "I should Work Backwards."
(2) When I decide to Work Backwards, I'll start with answer (B) or (D) and (whatever other details about this process I think I need to write down to help myself remember).

The takeaways definitely get recorded in writing / typing—in a notebook, in an excel file, on flash cards, whatever you prefer. And anything I need to do to retry the problem is going to get written down; if I try to do it in my head, I'll probably mess it up. But I put the takeaways in a different place / a different form than those notes. I'm distilling down to the takeaways and saving just those in a special place that I can come back to and study from more efficiently.

[ParthJ26]

Dear Stacey,

Thank you so much!

I have started recording key-takeaways in the form of flash cards for future reference.

Thanks again.

Parth Jain

[StaceyKoprince]

You're welcome! Let me know how it goes.