GMAT Strategy

Hey Everyone!!

I have been a frequent visitor of this site for the past two months now and I must say I have benefitted a lot in terms of my preparation.

A little background info: I took the GMAT around a week ago and scored a 600 (36V 36Q), yes incredibly balanced lol!!!

I can tell you now that I am INCREDIBLY dissapointed with my score, especially since I really prepared for the quantitative section of the test (I barely paid attention to verbal since i am a native speaker)

I know that if I want to seriously turn in a competitive application to a good b-school, I need a higher GMAT!!!

Therefore, I am starting a blog! What a neat idea huh? The way I figured it is everyone on this forum who was serious about posting ended up getting great scores!! Why? maybe because you hold yourself accountable in the eyes of many on this forum lol!!

So...without further ado...welcome to my GMAT world! I will update on my progress daily up until test day which I plan on taking in late December.


Materials used so far:

Kaplan Live premiere online 2010 (solved all the quant and used their strategy)

Barrons GMAT (an absolute waste of money and time)

OG 12

OG Verbal and OG Quant 1st editions

MGMAT SC ( truth be told I barely studied out of this book bc its so dense..but things are about to change now!!!!!)


I would like to thank certain forum members who dont even know me but whose work on this forum inspired me: mayonaise (UCLA) for his inspiring blog, Zuleron, and uptowngirl for her cool blog!

Zuleron is super cool for the 99+ quant problems although i am always concerned whether or not certain answer choices are 100% correct lol!

Anyways, ladies and gents, follow me on a daily basis for my trials and tribulations with the GMAT leading up to just before Christmas when I plan on taking the GMAT again!

Hey Eric!

Thanks a lot for the encouragement, hopefully I can try to get some buzz revolving around this post so that we can all benefit from different tips and tricks.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I got an incredibly balanced score on my first GMAT attempt. Therefore, I still need to sharpen both my quantitative and verbal skills.

I have taken a decision today to focus heavily on quant and sentence correction of verbal (im quite good at CR and RC already, to put it this way, I enjoy those questions the most lol)

So, I went out to buy Kaplan GMAT Advanced (this book used to be known as Kaplan 800) in order to really practice difficult questions.

My first impressions of the book:

1) Excellent and detailed answer explanations for each and every question. Seriously, the people at Kaplan really invest time and effort to give the reader good detailed answers to each GMAT question ( I noticed this too with the Kaplan Premiere Live online book)

2) A majority of problems are more of the 650 - 700 level as opposed to 700+, which I believe are probably a quarter of the book.

3) The Kaplan people say that if you master this book, you should pretty much do very well on the real GMAT exam. We will see! Stay Tuned!

A word of caution for those who plan on purchasing this book, a lot of the explanations show you how picking numbers and backsolving can help you find quick answers to GMAT quant questions.

I have noticed there are quite a few people out there who are not comfortable with picking numbers or backsolving. Personally, I think these tools are effective and you should really keep them in your arsenal in case you face a quant question on the real GMAT that stumps you.

Lets provide a few reasons as to why picking numbers and backsolving is an effective strategy:

1) For problem solving questions such as the following (I just made this problem up for DEMONSTRATIVE purposes ,THE ANSWER CHOICES ARE NOT CORRECT AND ARE MADE UP!):

If X divided by 4 has a remainder of 3, what is the remainder of X divided by 9?

a) x + 9 / x^2

b) (x + 3)^2

c) (x+4)^3

d) x^2 - 3

e) x / 3

Well, you will be given 5 answer choices as we all know. Kaplan advises you in these types of problems to pick numbers because it is much easier then dealing with complex algebraic equations.

Heres what Kaplan advises you to do in this scenario:

1) X divided by 4 has a remainder of 3. Hmmmm...what divided by 4 has a remainder of 3? Lets try 15. Ok, so 15 divided by 9 has a remainder of 6. At this point you will look at the answer choices and plug in 15 for X in each answer choice. If only one answer choice gives you a remainder of 6, then that is the solution! Usually, there will be two answer choices that will give you a remainder of 6. So try out another number (for example 19) and only test against those REMAINING TWO ANSWER CHOICES!

Here is how to use Kaplan backsolving strategy for the next problem:

CAUTION: Again this is a made up problem with FAKE answer choices just to demonstrate how to use this strategy. Please do not try to solve this particular problem!

There are 21 girls and boys in the room. 1/3 of the people in the room decide to leave of which 3 are girls. If there are only 9 boys left in the room, how many girls are left?

a) 5

b) 15

c) 16

d) 17

e) 18

Notice that in each GMAT quant questions, answer choices will either be in descending or ascending order. In this type of problem, Kaplan will advise you to plug in the answer choice of b first in the question stem.

Lets see, b is 7. If 21 people are in the room and 1/3 leave then there are 14 people left in the room. If the remainder of people in the room is 14 then there cannot be 15 girls remainining in the room so therefore the answer must be smaller!

Since A is the only value smaller than B, therefore A must be the answer!!! We dont even need to solve further, choose A and move on the next question!

Now the philosophy behind choosing B first when backsolving is the following:

1) Answer choices are in descending or ascending order. Therefore choose B first when backsolving. If B is too big a value as seen above, then automatically A is correct.

2) If B is too small a value then choose D!!!! Very important over here to choose D next. Why? Because if you find out that D is too big and B is too small, therefore C must be the correct answer!!! If D is too small, then only one other larger value exists which is E and that must be the answer!!!!


Look, like I said, not many people are fond of these two strategies and at the end of the day I scored a 600 but I truly believe that they can be beneficial. I will solve loads of problems today from Kaplan GMAT advanced and get back to all of you.

One last word of advice: Save the OG quant for last in your preparation, frankly speaking the OG does not prepare you well enough for the real GMAT Quant! Im serious, I practically aced the OG quant and found that their questions were somewhat easier than the real GMAT. I even found that GMATprep quantitative was relatively easier than the real GMAT test!

Maybe its just me, but I really hope Kaplan GMAT advanced will sharpen my quant skills!!! Ill get back to all of you with a detailed review of the book tomorrow hopefully!

Best of luck on your preparations everyone!

Hi everyone,

I know its been awhile and I also noticed that no one besides eric really gives a crap about what i write lol!!!

Anyways, thanks eric for your support!!

I have to say that I truly believe that I have improved on quant and I swear no joke...i got a raw score of 45 on quant with the GMAT prep and I had 12 minutes left to answer the last question!!!!!

However, ive been struggling with verbal lately!!

Look, i have a really serious problem, i do really well on verbal its just that i never finish the test on time...i always leave out the last 4-5 questions to random guessing and i end up with a 35V scaled score.

I know my weakness is that I take 2 minutes on each sentence correction question that leaves me no time to concentrate further and take a little more time on CR questions that come later in the exam.

I seriously would like some advice to really master SC and answer each question in one minute so that i have time to answer the rest of the questions on the exam!

I bought the MGMAT SC guide and I bought the Kaplan GMAT verbal workbook as per the great review Dana wrote a couple days ago!


What I really really want is a book that has a thousand sentence correction questions with explanations in them, im really curious if there are any books or a resource out there that can help me out, any ideas or suggestions??

Thanks a lot for anyone who chooses to help me!

Thousand sentence correction questions is a lot. Instead of searching for a resource that has thousands of questions, you can make use of whatever you have currently. OG is your best friend to practice SC's and looks like you are neglecting your friend and looking for some other friend . If you don't have, buy OG 12 and verbal supplement 2nd edition. I'm sure that this is really sufficient. Analyze each and every question and you will come out really strong. If you wanna brush up strategies, i'm sure that you must be knowing what resource to get - it's none other than MGMAT SC guide.

papgust wrote:Thousand sentence correction questions is a lot. Instead of searching for a resource that has thousands of questions, you can make use of whatever you have currently. OG is your best friend to practice SC's and looks like you are neglecting your friend and looking for some other friend . If you don't have, buy OG 12 and verbal supplement 2nd edition. I'm sure that this is really sufficient. Analyze each and every question and you will come out really strong. If you wanna brush up strategies, i'm sure that you must be knowing what resource to get - it's none other than MGMAT SC guide.

Thanks papgust!

You know you are right. What I should do really is just read through the MGMAT SC guide again. I should then solve all the OG SC questions and understand them fully.

I dont have the 2nd edition of the verbal supplement, i have the first edition only. Should I go ahead and also purchase the 2nd edition?

Thanks again for your help.

That's great..! Right plan for SC.

OG verbal review 2nd edition has only around 80 new questions i guess. As it is quite cheaper and if you feel that its worth practicing 80 new questions, then don't hesitate and go for it.

For more info about this book, Dana has a wonderful detailed review of this book. Check this link,
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2009/11/ ... ook-review

Also, remember to make use of Kaplan verbal workbook which you already have. This is also a nice book with good explanations. I'm sure that these resources are good enough to tame this beast.!

GMATaddiction wrote:What I really really want is a book that has a thousand sentence correction questions with explanations in them, im really curious if there are any books or a resource out there that can help me out, any ideas or suggestions??

While I haven't tried this approach, I've thought about the idea.

How about using the OG? But, instead of merely picking the correct one, list out why the other choices are incorrect. So, do a group of 10 questions, and write out why each incorrect answer was incorrect. Then, compare how well you spotted incorrect choices versus the OG answers. Granted, this method involves a lot of time, but I believe it will definitely improve your error spotting technique, which will in turn make you blazing fast at SC. Also, it will help you realize what grammar rules are you having difficulty with.