As many of you know English is not my first language, though I do remember speaking it first as a child and having to actually take classes to relearn my mother tongue. That said I did pretty awesome on the Sentence Correction type questions on the verbal portion of the test which basically means I have a good grasp of the English grammar! Haha. I think all those years taking the TOEFL has finally paid off. Also, I don’t really suck at the Reading Comprehension questions either. Again, all thanks to TOEFL. I just need to spend an extra minute or two on actually reading the question because I seem to try to scheme through it too fast like what I do on the TOEFL. Now, the part that I’m actually disappointed in myself in is the Critical Reasoning questions. I mean, come on! Was I not taught how to think critically that I sucked so horribly on these questions? *palm to forehead - sigh*
Anyways, here’s the
breakdown.
The breakdown
Total number of
questions: 41
Allotted time: 75
minutes
Time used: 65 minutes
(again with the rushing!)
Answer break down:
|
Sentence
Correction
|
Reading
Comprehension
|
Critical
Reasoning
|
Total
|
|
|
Correct
|
11
|
6
|
4
|
21
|
|
Incorrect
|
4
|
6
|
10
|
20
|
Assessment of answers:
(Category 1) Mistakes
made because of carelessness/rushing: 4 (all are RC type questions)
(Category 2) Mistakes
made because of content/question type: 17
(Category 3) Fluke: 2
Category 3 was just
added because during my assessment I found that there were questions I answered
correctly purely out of chance/guessing (not even educated guessing) – hence a
fluke.
So. Not looking good
here people. 17 mistakes because I had no idea what the hell was going on. Got
A LOT of work to do! Only 4 mistakes because I was careless, and 2 flukes,
which isn’t bad but having a fluke isn’t a good thing either. I can’t rely on
it.
Time management seems to
have less to do with my mistakes this time (unlike what happened in the Quant
section). From the above table (I just thought of doing a matrix like that now,
easier to use to lay things out), we can see how horrible I am at Critical
Reasoning, while reading comprehension isn’t all that bad. If I took the time
on those 4 Cat 1 questions, I could’ve gotten it right (the way I prove this is
in my assessment I go through each question one by one just like in the test
and try to answer the question again and give myself more time to do it).
Talking a bit more about
time management – the average time I spent on the correct answers was 1:19
minutes per question, with the fastest time of 30 seconds and the slowest time
of 2:02. While the average time spent on incorrect answers was 1:37, with the
fastest time being 1 second, and the slowest 4:37. So I’m spending a good
amount of time on the correct answers, which is what we what. The incorrect
ones I could use to spend a bit more time on them, like what I mentioned
previously about the 4 Cat 1 answers. Right now I can’t help the Cat 2 answers
but that’s what I’ll be working on.
So, overall time
management looks better on the Verbal section. I should however spend a minute
or 2 more on the Reading Comprehension questions, especially on reading the
passage itself. I seem to only be spending an average of 2:20 on reading the
passage AND answering the first question it comes with, this isn’t good. I
should spend at least 3 minutes on reading and 1 to 2 minutes on answering that
first question.
Changing the topic a
bit, looking at my strengths and weaknesses, it’s apparent that the SC
questions are strengths and the CR questions are the death of me. But over all
I do need to get reacquainted with the content/subjects the verbal section
covers in general. The contents of the questions that go into the Cat 2
questions are the following:
- Find the assumption (3)
- Strengthening conclusion (2)
- Modifiers (2)
- Clarity of meaning
- Quantity expressions, comparisons
- Idioms (2)
- Weaken conclusion (2)
- Mimic the argument
- Analyze the argument structure (2)
- Parallelism
- Pronouns
- Main idea (reading comprehension)
- Specific detail (reading comprehension)
So overall I need to do
a crash course on the topics of the verbal section, and then strengthen that
with the strategies on “how to answer” each of the 3 types of questions,
especially the CR type questions. I found some good articles on beatthegmat.com
on how to answer or analyze each type of GMAT question, so when I feel more
comfortable on the fundamentals of the topics themselves then I’ll start
working on those strategies.
I think the Tackle
Verbal Strategy will be as follows:
- Refresh on the topics the verbal section covers – this
could be pretty darn wide so I might have to incorporate it directly into
the next strategy, which is
- Dig into the gist of the 3 type of verbal section
questions, and learn the “how tos” on answering them. I should first focus
on the Critical Reasoning type of questions since they are my weakness,
and then get to SC and RC.
- Work on GMAT practice questions again and again and
again. And assess each question until I thoroughly understand the thought
process behind answering it before moving on to the next.
To sum it up:
Strengths: SC & RC
Weaknesses: CR and poor
time management on RC passage reading
God help us all!
Although my focus right
now should be on the Verbal and Quant sections, tomorrow I’ll take some time
and go through my essay with the professor. He’s my go to guy for critical
writing. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna give me a hard time on it. Uh oh. :D
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