Skewed practice

For us busy people the online forums are the quickest and easiest way to squeeze some practice during an otherwise hectic day. I am regularly browsing around for interesting questions and see the same pattern everywhere. In the verbal forums, it’s all about sentence correction. In the math forums, combinatorics and probability galore. Guys, this is not good. We need a balanced diet of GMAT problems during lunch break.

In Quantitative, number properties, absolutes, remainders – these are much more crucial than the probability of pulling 2 red and 5 green marbles out of your ###. Not to mention that MGMAT still gives me a dismal success rate in number properties questions. I need more of integer n and his buddy k, it seems. (a nerdy joke: a math teacher begins to describe a problem in class – “So kids, we have n planes flying from point A… no, n is too large. We have k planes…”)

In Verbal, it feels wrong to concentrate on only one of the three types of questions. This is the reason I did not buy the MGMAT sentence correction guide. That and because I didn’t know buying the book would be cheaper than buying the CATs from the website. It is also wrong that SC is the only area where one can improve quickly. I was able to substantially improve my practice results in critical reasoning just by reading the stickies in Verbal forum in GMATClub. CR can be learned by studying the rules, just like SC.

In other news, MGMAT CATs went well this weekend. I even hit Q48 on Sunday, because the first 8-9 questions were DS and this gave me an good start. Verbal is stable, hovering somewhere in the low 40’s. Next weekend, it’s time for that great confidence killer, Kaplan.

Scheduled the GMAT

Test day is September 29th. This is Monday, which means one weekend to clear my head. The appointment is for early afternoon, so I should be able to get enough sleep, eat a good breakfast and drink some coffee before the test.

Did two Kaplan CATs, absolutely horrible scores. I refuse to publish them here, they are that much awful. Everyone says that Kaplan’s scoring is way off and is not representative of the real thing, but it still hurts. Nevertheless, the questions look like quality practice especially in Quant. I am going to do the two remaining tests early, so as to have some time to overcome the negative feeling and if possible, without looking at the score, just the wrong answers.

By test day I plan to finish the whole of OG and the two guides, plus Kaplan 800. There are 4 MGMAT and 2 Kaplan CAT tests left to do and I can squeeze some more practice out of GMATPrep (did the first test twice, the second test only once). The paper tests and GMAT Focus are available as well. Some stuff I have/have access to, but am most probably not going to use: Barron’s, McGraw Hill, 800score.

Back from holiday

To the casual observer it may appear that I was having a week off in a beautiful corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, I went there in ordert to work on my international exposure. Sipping cocktails on the shore is just one of the small advantages of being internationally exposed, you see.

I did some quick GMAT drills in the afternoon, when it was too hot for the beach. Kaplan is indeed good practice, though the verbal questions are somewhat weird. It is hard to concentrate on math problems in a holiday environment, but getting out of shape is not an option. Anyhow, the vacation, erm, the international experience, is over and it’s back to OG and MGMAT.

Tales from the error log

Last weekend the second MGMAT CAT gave me the same result as before – 700 (Q44; V41). Analysing my performance in quantitative, over 75% of the wrong answers were avoidable. There’s only a handful of tough problems that I really didn’t know how to solve and those are entirely combinatorics.

The tricky part is not looking at the timer too often, as it breaks the concentration. A couple of experiments revealed that I take more time to answer the first 1 or 2 questions, then my brain warms up and I spend less time on the next questions, even though they are more difficult. I make mistakes when the timer makes me nervous and I rush through a question. Another important lesson: on hard questions the guess rate is very close to 20% – i.e., there is no such thing as an educated guess. It seems the answer choices are carefully selected to take care of that.

Verbal looks pretty good so far, however I’ve been reading some disturbing posts about the difficulty of verbal on the real test compared to GMATPrep. The error log says that my weak spot is reading comprehension. So I tried three science passages from the OG, medium difficulty, and completely destroyed them. The average time was about one minute per question including the time it took to read the passages. This sucks; the Verbal guide has to have some tougher material.

On a side note, this is the first week I got the answer right to a ‘Workbook Wednesday’ question, for approx. 2 minutes. There is hope yet.

Career in Finance? Good luck.

Defining career goals is harder than it looked half a year ago. The storm in the financial world rages on; anyone predicting when it will ends is an ‘empty suit’ – as the black swan dude would say. On the bright side, being in the financial sector at this time also has its advantages. Last month alone produced at least two essay-worthy moments. Not exactly pleasant ones, however full of lessons and me displaying leadership qualities. Nice.

The job market is tight for bankers, so let’s look at what else is there. I could pose as a consultant wannabe, but that’s not really my dream job so it would be a weak performance. There are already legions of people from McK, BCG etc., who just pass through INSEAD. Add to this number the equally great number of crazy people who go to B-school with the sole intention of starting a consulting career. The idea of competing with fanatics for something I don’t really want is absurd. Moving on, we have prospects like entrepreneurship, VC, PE – yeah, keep dreaming. A realistic options is to shoot for the CFO position, or similar, somewhere in what is broadly named ‘industry’ Ouch. I am not investing this much money and effort only to become a glorified accountant.

With the above stuff out of the way, we go back to where we started. My experience is in banking, therefore from a top school it would be natural to go for investment banking, from a not-so-top school, to dive into ‘Other Finance’. And pray that by the time of graduation things will have calmed down. This has two immediate consequences: I have to go talk with someone who knows about i-banking and re-include LBS into the dream school list. Alright, back to integer n and why it refuses to be divided by 7.