Monday, June 07, 2004

Burn out?

Haven't posted in the past couple of days basically because I haven't got much to say as far as the GMAT prep is concerned. I am not sure why, but after scoring 700 in that princeton practise test, I kinda lost focus. Not sure if I was holding on too tight, or just lost enthusiasm, but for whatever reason, it was that much more difficult to sit down and concentrate.

Gave a couple of tests in the interim period though. Scored 690 in the second powerprep test with a scaled score of 45 in quant (82 percentile) and a 40 in verbal (90 percentile). The same trend continued in a Arco's test that I took at home on Sunday. Make about 6/37 mistakes in quant and 12/41 mistakes in Verbal.

I am pretty confident of cracking quant, just because most of the mistakes were silly mistakes due to being rusty from the week long break. Things I should have spotted but din't, mental fatigue and just bad strategy. The good news in Verbal is that my sentence correction skills seems to have gotten up since I took it as a challange and concentrated on it. I took 50 questions fromt the ETS OG, made mistakes, but went through the explanations a couple of times. And that has really really helped me drastically. Once you start spotting the patterns, you can usually zero in on a right answer. The place where I seem to have regressed is Reading Comprehension where I have muffed up more questions in the last couple of tests than you can imagine. What is it about RC paragraphs where I can make neither head nor tail, that I screw up. Gotto get some strategy down for that.

One thing that might have contributed to the low score was me taking the essays before getting started on the verbal/quant. This is something I feel everyone SHOULD prepare for. It is absolutely essential to get your timing down on that part. Also it makes a big difference to your mental state, since the test normally takes 4 hours as compared to 3 hours if you practise without the essays.

Hopefully the disapointment of not scoring well in the practise tests will spur me on to study more seriously for the next few weeks. I should register for the test by the end of this week. My cousin plans to come and visit us over the long weekend, which will negate the usage of the long weekend as a study period for me. So it is better for me to give the test in June as compared to July.

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