Beat The GMAT!

This afternoon I studied Kaplan Chapter 4 - Reading Comprehension, pages 113-150. I thought that Kaplan provided a better strategy for attacking RC questions than Princeton Review did. My problem with Princeton Review is that they love having students skim passages. There's nothing wrong with skimming, but PR does it to the extreme.

Kaplan advocates skimming as well, but advises students to at least read the first paragraph of each passage carefully while skimming the rest. This strategy seems much more sensical to me. I also enjoyed reading about Kaplan's technique for labeling each paragraph in a passage into a certain structural type. For example:

- Paragraph 1: Introduce thesis
- Paragraph 2: Evidence for thesis
- Paragraph 3: Arguments against
- Paragraph 4: Arguments for
- etc.

Making these notes (on scratch paper) regarding the paragraph structure of the passages as I read them helped me refer back and forth to the questions and passages.

To finish the day, I did a practice RC quiz at the end of the lesson, getting 6/38 wrong. That's a score I definitely wish to improve. I had a good time though applying Kaplan's strategies to the quiz.

As a final note, I need to build endurance when it comes to RCs. It is damn hard keeping focus on these questions. I would die if I got back-to-back RC passages on the real GMAT, which does occasionally happen.

SUMMARY OF DAY 14 WORK:
1. Kaplan Chapter 4, Reading Comprehension, pages 113-127.
2. Practice RC Quiz, pages 128-150.

RECAP OF DAY 14 INSIGHTS:
1. Kaplan's RC strategies are better than Princeton Review's.
2. Very hard to stay focused on RC.

Labels: GMAT Verbal, Reading Comprehension

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28, 2005 at 5:50 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.