This article has been contributed by a regular TGite, Sindhoor, who has scored 760 in GMAT and through this article he wants to share his experience with us.
Sindhoor is a Mechanical Engineer graduate from the Vellore Institute Of Technology, Vellore. After graduating he took up a job with Tata Consultancy Services and has been with them for the last 3 years. He also involves himself in the day to day activities of his family businesses and he is an active volunteer at PETA,Madras Crocodile Bank and the Give Life Foundation. Loves football and is an avid fan of Liverpool Football Club. His ultimate goal in life is to use the power of Information technology to better the lives of India’s rural communities.
Books Required:
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1. Official Guide for GMAT Review 12 edition (Here in referred to as OG12). (This contains questions of quant and verbal)
2. Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review (here in referred to as OGVerbal) . (This contains questions of only verbal)
Believe me these two books are enough for you to get a good GMAT score. These books contain retired GMAT questions, i.e these contain real GMAT questions that used to appear may be a year ago. There is no book that can beat these two books. Please don’t even touch other books. There is no need to. The books by Kaplan,Manhattan, Princeton etc, contain questions that are either tougher or easier than the questions that appear in the actual exam. They don’t truly represent the actual difficulty level of the real GMAT questions. Why do we need to touch them when we have loads and loads of questions released by GMAC themselves?
You start your preparation by taking the diagnostic test that is there in the opening pages of “OG12″. This will tell you how good you are in each subsection of the GMAT even before you start preparing. After this you would know where to concentrate during your preparation. Start preparing for the section you are weakest in and then proceed to your stronger sections.
Verbal Section contains three sub sections: Reading Comprehension (RC), Sentence Correction (SC) and Critical Reasoning (CR).
For CR and RC there are no rules. No one can teach you these sections, you master these by practise. Please don’t read any books which tell you how to tackle these two sections , they will only confuse you more. Do the questions pertaining to RC and CR from OG12 and OGVerbal. If you get any question wrong go to the last pages where you have excellent explanations, which will help you understand the logic behind the answers better. Slowly you will improve in these sections. Practise makes perfect.
Now the danger section for many Indians: SC.
SC has one advantage though: It has rules( unlike other two) which when followed can help you tackle SC better. I used to get 6/10 questions correct in SC when I started my preparation, by the end of my preparation I consistently got 8/10 correct.
To start preparing for SC do the first 30 questions form OG12. This will give you a fair idea about how the SC questions are.
Then go through these two amazing materials on sentence correction:
Manhattan SC review: http://totalgadha.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=4415
GMAT Flash Cards: http://totalgadha.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=4415
After going through these two materials, do the rest of the questions from OG12 and OGVerbal. Analyse the questions you get wrong and keep improving.
After OG12 and OGVerbal you would need some additional practise. Luckily there is a set called 1000 series. The set contains three documents:
- 1000 SC (Containing 1000 SC questions)
- 1000 CR (Containing 1000 CR questions)
- 1000 RC (Containing 1000 RC questions)
Download these from the TG GMAT Verbal resources section.
Remember that these are only for additional practise, there is obviously no need to complete all the 3000 questions. Complete both OG12 and OGVerbal and only then start doing the 1000 series and do how much you can. Just 2 weeks before the exam stop doing these questions and start revising OG12 and OGVerbal. I am recommending 1000 series because these are questions that were part of the actual GMAT few years ago.
This is all for Verbal Preparation people. I also want to share that when I gave the first GMAT prep test - the one you receive from GMAC on registering - I scored only a 650 with a very low score in Verbal. It’s only through practise that I racked up my score to 760. Practise hard and you will get a great score.
All the Best
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14 Comments
Thanks a lot Sindhoor… Your article will really help us in preparing well. I am referring to the OGVerbal book for the verbal section.
Ambarish
I have the OG11 edition. Is it enough or should I get the OG12?
Hello Deepak,
Few months back I have read in The Times Of India that GMAT has tweaked their Critical Reasonong section. The latest trend of questions would only be reflected in OG12. Hence its advisable to work with OG12 and the latest version of OGVerbal.
The way you have structured and written your thoughts is brilliant. 760 score is well deserved.
Great work man! you really made the things look so simple and achieveable. Keep up the good work and do keep posting.
Thanks bro.
where are the answers for 1000 sc doc.?
pl give me info where to search
The answers are in SC file only.
Open the word document—click tools–click options—tick hidden options.
You would be able to view the answers in the file.
Thank you Sindhoor for nice article, which would probably induce lot many people to ameliorate their score; however, there are lot other people, who are struggling with low verbal score — almost in 17-23 range — and who may not appreciate much of their effort because of several humiliated score in GMAT verbal section.
By practicing several versions of GMAT SC guide, people can achieve good grasp in SC section within few months but perceivable achievement in RC and CR sections is required something that has not been unearthed till now, probably not even in above article.
Sindhoor,
Great article! Thanks - you just pepped me up quite a lot. I’d appreciate it if you could give me some more information on the schedule that you maintained. I’m talking about things like
(a) after how many weeks of prep and before how many weeks of the actual test did you start solving full length GMAT papers?
(b) For how long did you continue to solve the full length papers?
I know we all have our own methods to approach this but I’ve taken the GMAT once and didn’t get a very good score and hence, wanted your opinion on this. Any information on this would be really helpful. Thanks!
Hi Adi,
Really Sorry for the late reply.
I have only used the two GMAT tests from the GMAT Prep CD for my preparation. I took the first one before I started my preperation ( 3 months before the actual date). This told me where I needed to concentrate. Then for the next month I worked on SC RC and CR from OG. Then instead of taking full length GMAT tests I started preparing my own paper tests taking 10 questions each of RC,SC and CR from the Verbal Guide and 18 questions of quants from the 31 sets. I repeated the first test of GMAT prep CD a week before the exam - very few questions were repeated, so it felt like a new test. I took the second test 3 days before the exam. Hope this helps Aditya.
thank you dagny for your cooperation for finding answers for the 1000sc
thank you
hello everyone . i am also preparing for GMAT .. i am really bad with verbal part of it . i understand there are 3 major parts to it
sc/rc/cr, but i really dont understand where and what to start with . my grammer sucks big time … plz help and advice . i will be gratefull to all .
Hi Sindhoor,
I recently gave my GMAT with 1 month preparation. I belong to engineering background and I am a working professional. I got 690 and 730 in GMAT prep but my GMAT score was a real shock. I scored 620 with Quant-50 and Verbal -23. I am planning to give GMAT again sometime next month as I have to submit my application before June. How can I go about improving. I followed OG 12 and Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide.
Hi Chetan,
The GMAT prep tests are usually a fair indicator and you rarely see such huge difference in scores between your Prep and actual tests. I guess you just had an off day in Verbal. I would suggest you practise for Verbal from OG Verbal guide and 1000 series for a few days and retake the test. If you can mantain that quants score of yours, you should be able to get 700 easily. Only way of improving Verbal (especially RC and CR) is solving ( and analyzing) as many questions as you can
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