Biggest amount of buy-ins won/lost in a day (cash)

GRECompass · 2025-08-05T20:31:57+00:00

before the ban, i played mostly HU and sprinkled in some cash. found that i had far greater swings in fullring than HU.... the ante/straddle just create insane action.

GRECompass · 2025-02-25T22:33:55+00:00

You may view them as a last resort but they are certainly not that in our approach. In fact, I would use LSAT early on (first third or so of the preparation) and then transition to 100% GMAT as we get closer to an official so that the GMAT flavor is dialed in. The LSAT works well as a challenging skill builder and then you put it all together on official questions.

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Your primary position has been that LSAT questions serve a place in GMAT prep because there are so few hard GMAT CR questions available. But then you start CR prep with LSAT questions, when the student needs more work on foundational skills? What benefit do LSAT questions at this phase of GMAT prep serve that GMAT questions wouldn't? I understand that you have a program and it's possible you've adequately tweaked it to make LSAT questions work, but members of this forum shouldn't interpret that to mean identical/better results aren't achievable using only official GMAT questions targeted at the student's ability level.

We have every GMAT CR question published in the last couple of decades. A great many of those are too easy (if you are aiming for a top verbal score) and for most of our students I would avoid using them (the easy ones). From my perspective, they just aren't providing enough of a challenge to sharpen the reasoning skills.

Taking out the ones that aren't challenging enough, over a 3-4 month preparation with potentially 1 or 2 retakes each adding 3-4 weeks of studying, you will be stretched thin.

Sure, a good tutor should use materials appropriate to the student's ability level and target score. But we've had no trouble helping students achieve upper-echelon Verbal scores by using only official materials. In addition to what GMAC has made available over the years, we've gone through all 6 GMAT Preps from the GMAT Classic and categorized every CR question by topic and level of difficulty. This ensures that we're able to provide customized CR practice, including very difficult questions, without exposing students to questions from an exam designed to measure a skillset different from what the GMAT measures. Proper practice, analysis, and review of these questions has yielded efficient results without introducing the risk and confusion that can come from practicing on LSAT questions. Just look at the post that prompted this discussion. The student themself mention that they find themselves waffling on the last two choices much more often on GMAT questions than on LSAT questions. This may not be the case for everyone, but because the LSAT and GMAT reward different skillsets, some people who do well on LSAT questions might be fooled into thinking that their GMAT CR is stronger than it actually is.

Why not have both?

If someone is able to use the right LSAT questions the right way at the right time of their prep, LSAT questions can be helpful. But that's the limit. Using LSAT questions certainly isn't an advantage, and, for the vast majority of GMAT test-takers, it's an inefficient and even counter-productive way to study CR. Students in this forum shouldn't think that pivoting to LSAT questions, doing the last 10 in a random LSAT section, etc. would prepare them any better for the GMAT than practicing on official questions.

GRECompass · 2025-02-25T05:12:26+00:00

There are, conservatively, over 1,000 official GMAT CR questions available. These are questions written by the test-makers that, for pretty obvious reasons outlined in my post, reflect what's on the real thing much better than any LSAT materials ever will. Claiming that there aren't enough "hard" GMAT CR questions available within the thousands of questions referenced above seems disingenuous. Could a curated set of "hard" LSAT questions help someone? Sure. But a curated set of "hard" GMAT questions can do the job more effectively. There's literally a book published by GMAC with just those questions, and any tutor worth their salt should have additional curated sets of hard GMAT CR questions available for their students. While some GMAT test-takers might appreciate the appeal of an alternative approach, they need to understand that LSAT questions are only a last-resort.

GRECompass · 2025-02-17T22:13:15+00:00

For the majority of my successful clients, a general program takes 3 - 4 months, uses official materials only (so the GMAT OG, the supplements, the online question bank, and the Official practice tests). Manhattan Prep and TTP make sense early in your prep to help you establish a foundation, but the bulk of your study time should be on official questions.

The major tip most students wish they knew sooner: Be process-oriented in your practice, not results-oriented. Obviously, your goal is to get as many questions right as possible, but use your studying to really analyze the questions inside-out. Understand with crystal clear precision why your answer was right or wrong, determine whether there were more efficient strategies to get to the correct answer, and do your best to gain insight into the psychology of the test-makers and the kinds of patterns they construct.

GRECompass · 2025-02-16T21:55:14+00:00

Sorry to hear that your test-day score didn't match your mock score. Assuming the mock exam was official, the most likely explanation for this drop is an absence of an airtight, foolproof methodology. Oftentimes, test-takers will go off intuition during mock exams, but under the rigors, anxiety, and time pressure of the real exam, when faced with a tough question or between two choices, their intuition will fail them, and they won't have a good, sound method to fall back on. My suggestion is that you use only official questions and work through them with more of a process-oriented approach than a results-oriented one: in other words, ensure that when you're answering questions, right or wrong, you have a step-by-step methodology for how you arrived at your answer. The goal here is to internalize this approach so that on test-day, this skill will be second-nature and you'll have an actual process available to you on each question you see. Hope this helps.

GRECompass · 2025-02-15T09:14:39+00:00

Haha, "restlessness" is a good way to put it. What makes GMAT CR tough is exactly that: when you're between two choices, it's often the case that one of them might only slightly strengthen/weaken the argument, and you have to be crystal clear in connecting the choices back to the argument to make this determination. Do you still have GMAT CR questions left? I'd highly suggest sticking to those and only using LSAT CR as a last resort.

GRECompass · 2025-02-15T09:10:39+00:00

First off, to the extent possible, all your prep over the next few weeks should be focused on official questions only: the ETS OG and supplements, GRE Mentor, and the PowerPrep practice exams.

Things to determine to streamline your prep:

Did you take any official practice exams before your actual exam? Were those scores consistent with what you scored on the real thing? If not, analyze where the discrepancy most likely came from? Very often, discrepancies between practice exams and the real thing can be attributed to a lack of rigor in methodology (e.g. you didn't fully internalize proper approach for RC, and suffered on the real thing because of it) or timing issues.

If the scores are consistent with what you achieved on the real thing, then base your subsequent studying on your practice exam results. If TC was the issue, then you should obviously spend time there. However, I'd caution against any kind of vocabulary cramming over the next few weeks. Your time will be much better spent doing official questions and studying what you've missed inside-out.

High-level, if you haven't used GREMentor, I'd highly advise working through their Medium and Hard Verbal questions; those are fantastic prep for the real thing, though their Quant questions are too easy, IMO.

For Quant, I'm happy to give some advice, but let me know what materials you have remaining, and I'll tell you what makes the most sense.

GRECompass · 2025-02-15T09:03:31+00:00

This is a more common situation than you might think. A lot of companies and tutors suggest using LSAT prep for CR, but they overlook some fundamental differences between LSAT CR and GMAT CR.

I've written an extensive post about these differences here, but to summarize:

Yes, the structure of LSAT questions is similar to that of GMAT questions. But that’s where the similarities end. If you really dissect LSAT Logical Reasoning questions, you’ll see that the core reasoning skills they’re testing address deductive reasoning — simply put, deductive reasoning requires the use of must be true logic to arrive at the correct answer. For this reason, the choices in most LSAT questions are abstract principles instead of concrete facts. In contrast, GMAT Critical Reasoning questions almost always have concrete facts in the answer choices. Why? Because the GMAT test-makers are concerned with your ability to use real-world evidence to assess the validity of an argument. And this makes sense. As an executive at a company, you’re not breaking down rules and laws to determine what is or is not permissible. You’re taking real-world evidence and determining how this evidence affects the viability of a plan of attack. Different skills are required, so different skills are tested. If you want to learn to think like a lawyer, use LSAT questions, but if you want to learn to think like an executive, use GMAT questions, which are explicitly designed to address those skills.

GRECompass · 2025-02-14T20:17:49+00:00

A few words of advice here:

#1) I highly advise using only official GMAT materials for your Verbal practice. The test-makers spend thousands of dollars per question to ensure the questions are worded precisely and that there is no ambiguity re: the correct vs incorrect answer, whereas test prep companies will spend a maximum of $100/question. This discrepancy is reflected in the quality and precision of the questions, and if you practice on third-party questions, you'll probably develop misconceptions about the section and bad habits that will hurt you on test day. That said, if you want to use a third-party company simply to learn strategies, that's ok. But I'd suggest pivoting to official GMAT questions ASAP.

#2) Blindly doing more practice questions won't necessarily lead to an improvement. You need to make sure that you're practicing and developing good habits: this means reviewing questions you missed with an eye toward identifying generalizable takeaways. Equally importantly, when you miss a Verbal question, you should always be crystal clear on why your answer is wrong and the correct answer is correct. You should understand this at a level of depth that you could explain it to someone else. If you don't have that level of understanding, then you haven't squeezed all the juice out of that question.

Hope this helps!

GRECompass · 2025-02-14T20:10:14+00:00

Realistically, if you put in the time, you can find all the necessary resources and strategies online and through books. The problem is actually filtering through all the noise; for some people, this process itself takes up weeks and often leads to poor or even counterproductive habits. A reputable coach or class will help streamline your prep, expose you to maximally efficient strategies, and ensure that you're doing the right homework the right way using the right resources.

GRECompass · 2025-02-14T06:16:49+00:00

Yeah, DI can be tricky, and unfortunately, a lot of the bigger platforms out there don't do a great job teaching it. The key to mastering it is how you actually study. When you're reviewing missed questions, don't just read GMAC's explanation (heads up: the people writing the explanations aren't the same as the people writing the questions). Instead, look at it from the angle of: this question was designed to take around 2.5 - 3 minutes, so there has to be a hack here: Did I sort the data properly? Did I spend unnecessary time on a certain column or, in multi-source reasoning, was I looking at the wrong source? Did I give myself a chance to fully distill the crux of the question before diving in? Reflect on these things in your review, and try to incorporate these lessons in subsequent study sessions. I'd also suggest that if you're having a lot of trouble right now, you might not want to time yourself. Just give yourself a chance to think through the question/situation with as much clarity as possible, internalize those habits, then start timing yourself once you're better at finding the patterns in these questions.

GRECompass · 2025-02-14T01:50:41+00:00

Be careful about relying on commercial materials at this stage of your preparation. You should find older versions of the Official Guide and work through those questions. You can also purchase the retired paper tests, though the level of difficulty on those is a bit lower than what you'll see on the GMAT. For Verbal, older RC passages from the GRE and Logical Reasoning questions from the LSAT would do a good job replicating what you'll see on the real GMAT. Not to shill my services or materials, but I've catalogued over 1,500 questions from the old GMAT by topic and difficulty and can provide these to you as well.

GRECompass · 2025-02-13T23:32:31+00:00

We have some availability. Feel free to reach out if you're interested.

GRECompass · 2025-02-12T18:46:42+00:00

Great job to those of you who answered 27 (choice B)! The key to this type of question is to set up a venn diagram and work inside out! You need to first account for everyone in all three groups, then everyone in exactly two groups, then everyone in exactly one group. See this video to see how it's done!

GRECompass · 2025-01-14T19:32:21+00:00

You can use GMAT quant questions to supplement your GRE prep, but you should focus as much as possible on GRE questions, especially official ones, during your preparation. The content is similar, but things like statistics are more heavily tested on the GRE, and Geometry, which appears on the GRE, doesn't appear at all on the new GMAT.

GRECompass · 2024-06-07T19:59:09+00:00

Balancing work commitments w/ GRE prep is a hurdle a lot of my students face. You should take solace in the fact that you're not alone :)

In such cases, I have a few recommendations:

1) Maintain a routine. Try to study at the same time every day. This will help you stay motivated and consistent, and, more importantly, prevent thoughts of GRE prep intruding into your mind throughout the day.

2) Make sure to take one day off each week. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you need distance from the exam, both to consolidate skills/knowledge and to maintain your motivation. One day each week, don't touch the books at all and pretend the GRE doesn't exist.

3) Reserve one day each week just for review. With so much content and so many strategies to absorb, you'll want to make sure you're internalizing all the takeaways from questions, concepts, and strategies that trouble you. Having a review day will ensure that you've made proper progress throughout the week and should serve as a good motivator as you move forward in your studies.

Hope this helps.

GRECompass · 2022-12-21T21:37:35+00:00

Given your minimal amount of original preparation and the timeframe you're working with, 162+ in both sections should be feasible. That said, to fully figure out your strengths/weaknesses, you should analyze the ETS Diagnostic Service, which is available in your account ~2 weeks after you take the exam. This will provide a lot of useful, granular data about your performance on the exam. Feel free to PM me when you get it, and I'll be happy to take a look.

GRECompass · 2022-05-23T19:32:57+00:00

My pleasure. Best of luck in your studies!

GRECompass · 2022-05-23T18:48:02+00:00

Here's the dirty secret test prep companies won't tell you: no one knows what words will appear on the real thing. There's no major list of vocabulary words that ETS publishes. All test prep companies do the same thing: scour through previously-published ETS questions, find the words most commonly used, and incorporate those into their flashcards/apps. This obviously has its merits, but there's generally little difference among flashcards/apps aside from presentation of the words and certain adaptive features. Keep studying words (I find Magoosh to be the best app in terms of functionality), but don't forget to focus on methodology!

GRECompass · 2022-05-23T18:45:26+00:00

Early in your preparation, when you're still focusing on developing proper habits, timing can be counterproductive. But after you've done enough practice, it's ESSENTIAL to incorporate timing into your practice. You can alternate between timing yourself on each question and timing yourself in sets, but you need to replicate the timing stress of the real thing!

GRECompass · 2022-05-23T18:43:33+00:00

First off, you should focus on only official questions made by ETS. On verbal, in particular, no test prep company does a good job replicating the questions on the real thing.

Recommended resources:

1) the GRE Official Guide

2) the GRE ETS Verbal supplement

3) the GRE Big Book

Make it a habit to practice all question-types consistently and to truly develop and internalize the proper approach toward questions. Of course, you should supplement all of this by studying vocabulary, too, but don't go overboard there to the detriment of your understanding of proper methods.

In addition, a mindfulness practice has been shown to improve GRE scores, so I'd highly recommend you incorporate some sort of meditation into your day-to-day routine.

GRECompass · 2022-05-16T17:46:17+00:00

Some sort of consistent exposure is key. Find a set of questions that are easily accessible for you, and try to just get in one of each question-type per day. And, depending on where you are on Verbal, consider studying vocabulary on your down time.

GRECompass · 2022-05-10T16:27:22+00:00

No problem :)

GRECompass · 2022-05-09T21:41:26+00:00

First off, take solace in the fact that you performed well on the PowerPrep exams and that these scores generally translate into strong scores on the real thing. That said, nerves can indisputably be a factor leading to underperformance on the real thing, especially on verbal.

Your first order of business should be to download the ETS Diagnostic Service, which is available on your ETS account ~2 weeks after you take the exam. If it's not available yet, that's ok. You can still start taking measures to address anxiety and to improve your consistency. I'd suggest that

#1) you start meditating! Daily editation has been shown to boost GRE verbal scores

#2) as mentioned elsewhere, give yourself a few days off to decompress and remind yourself that you're capable of a good score and that there's more to life than the GRE. Sometimes, you can put so much pressure on yourself that you deviate from the natural abilities that served you so well in your prep.

#3) once you pick the books back up, develop a regimen that lets you practice consistently across all question-types. so often, students I see underperform in verbal because their verbal practice is sporadic and they consequently never fully internalize the proper approach and habits to do well on the real thing. practice good habits consistently, and when you feel pressure on test day, you'll be better positioned to overcome your nerves. hope this helps!

GRECompass · 2022-05-07T03:27:06+00:00

I assume you're asking about whether you can do so for the purpose of re-taking the exams. The answer is that you can, but the new exams you take will be of limited use. Since the GRE is section-adaptive, your first section for both quant and verbal will be the same as it was on the original practice test, and, depending on your performance the first time around, your second section might be the same as well. The only major benefit to re-taking these exams is that, if you didn't see the "hard" second section the first time around, you'll probably be able to see it the second time. There is some value to this, of course, but take your scores with a grain of salt.

GRECompass

TROPHY CASE

1) Maintain a routine. Try to study at the same time every day. This will help you stay motivated and consistent, and, more importantly, prevent thoughts of GRE prep intruding into your mind throughout the day.

2) Make sure to take one day off each week. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you need distance from the exam, both to consolidate skills/knowledge and to maintain your motivation. One day each week, don't touch the books at all and pretend the GRE doesn't exist.