Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Updates on my GMAT prep

Due to less work pressure this week, my GMAT prep is going on satisfactorily :).

OG is almost complete once now, except some RC passages which i will complete soon.

Various sections:-

RC - Presently doing from OG
SC - Doing it from a 200 SC collection. They are good.
CR - Doing it from another collection which i have.

PS & DS - Done with OG, not started with any other material. Looking for some material on DS.

I am also having OG Verbal review, i think i will start it soon. By early next week, i will have Kaplan GMAT 800 with me. I will start it after giving one more Computer Based test ( and scoring good marks in it :) ).

I have given 2 test till now :-

Kaplan CAT 1 - 670 ( M - 50, V - 36)
Kaplan CAT 2 - 610 ( 50, 30)

Also gave some sectional tests from Kaplan CD, which were good. They help in timing for a particular section. I was able to complete the SC's well before time i.e with a speed of less than 1 min. per question. Accuracy was also decent. Also tried one CR section, which also went fine.

The main problem area for me right now is RC, where i am having very bad accuracy and i almost take 2 minutes per question. Will need to do a lot of practice here.

Cya guys. Any tips are welcome.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Bought some books related to management

I was thinking to buy some books related to management for quite sometime now, finally today i went to the store and bought 3 books.

1) Snapshots from Hell - The Making of an MBA
- Peter Robinson
2) The McKinsey Way
3) The Mckinsey Mind
- By Ethan Raisel

"Snapshots from Hell", i am sure most of you people would have read this one. I started this book and read the first 3 chapters. Its an interesting book about the life of a guy who gets admitted into Stanford GSB and what he goes through when he reaches there. But the guy in this books seems to hate Mathematics especially Calculus, which i definitely love :) .

The other 2 books, i haven't started and i basically bought them to get more insight into Management Consulting. I hope they turn out to be good books. Anybody of you people have read these??

Also i wanted to read some of the good biographies or autobiographies, ofcourse related to the field of management.
Please suggest me some good books related the field of management. I basically want to get more insight and also motivation by reading some of the books. I would also like to read some books on finance.

Waiting to get some good suggestions from every one of you out there :)

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Kaplan test 2 - 610 :(

My second kaplan test and it really didnt go upto my expectations. I aimed to cross 650 atleast in this one and what i get is a poor - 610. I understand that Kaplan test are tough but i should have managed atleast 650. My aim of scoring 750 seems to be distant right now.

I had a feeling that i have marked all questions in Maths correctly but 3 questions went wrong this time also :( . Anyways, i can improve on that. my first mistake happened at Q 22 which is satisfactory i think.

The blunder happened in Verbal. Though i was able to mark first few questions correctly, but then marked Q6, Q7 wrong. Both of them were SC's.
Then i marked my second RC fully wrong :(:(.
Question 18-23 i marked all wrong which included 1 RC and 2 CR's.
In all my accuracies were something like:-
SC's - 8/15 ------> 53.33% :(:(
CR's - 9/14 ------> 63.33%
RC's - 6/12 -------> 50 % :(:(

Total 23/41 --------> 56.1%
In all 18 questions wrong in verbal which is quite bad.

Final Result - 610 (50, 30)

I didnt practice SC's this week, maybe that resulted in such a bad show there. I think, i will have to pratice more regulary in this area. RC's i have just started doing, i know i will be able to improve here.

But one thing good about today's test was that there were no time constraints. i managed to finish Maths section with 4 min. to spare and Verbal with 2.5 minutes to spare. Atleast i am catching up on speed now.

Today's learning:- More practice and regular practice.

I am yet to complete OG- the goal i had set for myself last week. The only thing left here is 126 RC questions and 49 PS questions. RC i will complete by doing regularly whereas PS i will complete by tomorrow.
Its time to start GMAT 800 book now, but unluckily i forgot that book at my parent's home when i last went there. Have asked them to courier the book but that will take 3-4 days to reach me, meanwhile i will practice the online material.

Cya guys, will keep you all updated. And if you people have any useful tips do share them with me.