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This was the Princeton Review practice test.  This time I did the whole thing (meaning essays too) and I think that contributed to my lower verbal score.  That extra hour of thinking kinda fried me and I did worse at the less analytical things.  I’m happy to keep my score in the mid-700′s though since I heard from a couple people that the PR versions are a little harder.

Further score breakdown:
Math: 34/37 questions right (all 3 incorrect were Data Sufficiency, 0 Problem Solving)
Verbal: 33/41 questions right (missed 4 Sentence Correction, 4 Reading Comprehension, 0 Critical Reasoning)

One nice thing about the PR test is that they give you this kind of information so you can quickly and easily see exactly what kind of questions you were missing.  I’m glad that my practice learning how to read questions seemed to work for the Problem Solving questions.  The 3 questions I missed were pretty difficult, so I’m not too upset I missed them.  One was a worded a little poorly, but whatever.

I’m going to do a good bit of work tomorrow on my verbal portions.  If I can get that back up to a 45 and keep my Math above a 50 then I think I’ll be in great shape.

Anyway, basketball game tonight so that’s all for now.  Hopefully we can actually look competent in one of these leagues now.

I did the Bin 4 problems yesterday in the Princeton Review book and got 18/26 correct.  However, I only didn’t know how to do two of them, I misread (standard) two more, and the other four were varying degrees of poor problem construction.

Here are two examples

1) There was a problem involving a rectangle of width x, length y and containing a diagonal z.  The first condition of the problem was that x-y = z.  Well, that’s impossible, and by looking at the answer section I can see that the problem was supposed to read x-y = 7.  Awesome.

2) Together, Andrea and Brian weigh p pounds.  Brian weighs 10 pounds more than Andrea.  Brian and Andrea’s dog, Cubby, weigh p/4 pounds more than Andrea.  In terms of p, what is Cubby’s weight in pounds? 

Now, try to guess whether the third sentence means Brian plus Cubby, or the dog Cubby who belongs to Brian and Andrea.  And I hope you guess right, because if you don’t the answer you come up with doesn’t exist.  At least they didn’t get that tricky I guess.

Enough of that now.   Yesterday turned out to be a lot of fun.  UGA won, which I don’t really care about, but it made everyone else happy.  We went out to some Emory party that George told us about that was some girl’s 21st birthday/costume deal.  Of course Marty McFly round 2 was in full effect.  It turned out to be a lot of fun even though we didn’t know very many people there.  Three people ended up splitting off to go somewhere else, but George and I stayed behind until about 3:30 when I got a ride back from a girl who I kinda knew of before hand since she manages the Emory track and cross country team,  but got to know more during the party.

Anyway, those decisions turned out to be a disaster as we got railed in the second round of the flag football playoffs.  Worst loss of the season (33-0), and it came at the worst time possible.  Oh well, I guess it’s on to basketball season.

Neither ESPN nor NBA.com have a Hawks roster picture of Mario West up yet, but he made the final roster. Buhlee dat. So, even though the Hawks have two Rookie of the Year candidates on the team, I’m going to be buying a #6 jersey first. Keep at it kid.

As for yesterday’s studying, I did the Verbal assessment in the official GMAC book, and got 48/52 right, broken down as follows:
Reading Comprehension – 16/17
Critical Reasoning – 15/17
Sentence Correction – 17/18

Pretty solid all around, and I’m very happy with it. What I’m not happy about is that I wasn’t able to take a practice test today. You see, last night we (Ben, Pete, Gouda, Mike and I) went to George’s trivia and came in second. After that we went to Moondogs for a few hours before heading back home. On the way back, Ben, Mike and I decided we wanted some Checkers so we went down to 10th street and got a few combos. We should’ve realized this was going to end poorly when it took us about 20 minutes to get our order from the drive through. Well, on the way back we were driving down the access road beside 75/85 and suddenly Mike’s front passenger tire blew out.

Being Mike, of course he didn’t have a spare or a jack or AAA. So we had to call Gouda to come pick us up. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite understand the directions and ended up on the wrong access road. At this point it’s about 3AM and we’re still stranded on the side of the access road eating Checkers and drinking the mini-bottles of alcohol Mike had left over from his flight back from Europe. Well Gouda finally finds us and we get home at about 3:30.

Now on to today, and why I couldn’t take a practice test. We had to take care of Mike’s car. That involved the following steps, and dealing with Friday traffic the whole time:
1. Drive back to Mike’s car to take off his busted tire
2. Realize Mike doesn’t have a jack, so there’s nothing we can do
3. Go borrow a jack from the tire store
4. Go back to the car and take off the tire, leaving it jacked up in an empty parking lot
5. Take the tire back to the tire shop and get a new one put on the wheel
6. Return to the jacked up car and put the bootleg tire on
7. Drive both cars back to the tire shop
8. Wait an hour and a half while the shop puts real tires on
9. Wait longer when the shop realizes how bad Mike’s brakes are and fixes them
10. Kill Mike for wasting my day

So yeah, I’m just going to do a few more question in the books instead.

Yeah, I pretty much feel like Franklin Morales right now, although without the whole “giving up 7 runs in 2/3 of an inning” thing.  I’ve taken 6 or 7 different tests or test-like sections of Quantative GMAT stuff and I always seem to do about the same regardless of the difficulty.

I got 19/20 right on the Princeton Review practice test
I got 23/26 questions right in Bin 1 (easiest) from the Princeton Review book
I got 23/26 right in Bin 3
etc, etc.
On the GMAC practice test (most like real test) I got 33/37, so I think things are getting better
Today I got 23/27 right in Bin 2

It’s so dumbfounding and frustrating that I can’t manage to read all of the questions right.  At least 1 or 2 of the missed questions on every list are because I didn’t read either the question or answers correctly.  You’d think I’d be able to correct this, but nope; still messing it up.  And then I manage to miss other questions for not remembering stupid things like whether or not 1 is a prime number (it’s not) or knowing how to use an addition table (wtf?  I haven’t seen one of those in 15 years).

So yeah, I know I can do all of this, but I just can’t keep my focus it seems like.  Ugh, but whatever.  Keep practicing and hopefully I’ll find the little tricks they use and stop falling for them.  I’m going to keep looking over my past answers and making sure that everything other than my stupid mistakes is making sense to me.

Tomorrow is going to be a pretty heavy Verbal day since I haven’t done any of that in a while and want to brush up on my logic and reading comprehension.   Probably go over all 41 questions on the GMAC practice test and then do a section out of Princeton Review.  If everything goes according to plan I’ll take a second practice test on Friday.  God willing, I’ll have sured up some of this stuff by then.

On the advice of other people I kinda took it easy on the GMAT studying after my first practice test came back so well. I didn’t want to burn out, and most everyone agreed that I was in good shape already. I don’t think I’m careful enough to get an 800 even if I had that kind of intelligence, so there wasn’t much point in my cramming my brain full of information.

Well, now it’s about 10 days til the test and I’m going to start studying again. I’ll take a few practice tests and work through my practice question books again. Also, I’ll update this everyday with what I do so that I force myself to actually do something. I figure I have 7 or 8 more days of solid studying left since I don’t really want to do anything major right before the test. So, get ready for more updates like the “70 Miles of March” only without any fun pictures to go along with it. Instead it will just be very lame scores from GMAT books.

Also, I don’t know why I still have Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs up on the sidebar there but I just noticed it.  It was an okay book, but I was expecting more given how well everyone else talked about it.  Since then I’ve read a little of a couple books (Founders at Work, Four Hour Work Week, The Blind Side) but I haven’t really gotten into any of them enough to sit down and finish.  When I do I’ll let you know how they are.

I have a job again, so that’s good.  Getting a paycheck is going to be a welcome change from running up credit card debt and draining my savings.  Also, I just submitted an invoice for an independent project I was working on, so that should be another nice little payday.  And, to make this even more fun, I’m talking to some people and working on starting up another small venture that can hopefully get me a little extra income as well.

So, since last week I’ve added two and possibly three streams of revenue.   That makes me feel a lot better about stuff right now and will hopefully keep me busy again.  I’d really like to be able to pay off all of my credit cards, car, and save up a significant amount of money before going back to school next fall.  That would be the ideal situation, but we’ll see if it turns out.

So, this weekend kind of came out of nowhere.

Saturday we decided to celebrate all of the college football wins by making an impromptu trip up to Athens for Joe D and Nani’s birthdays.  Oh, and 10 minutes before we left we found out that it was a Pimps and Hos party, so we had to try and do the best we could with what we had in that time.  Highlights from the party included hitting on girls who graduated high school after we graduated college (well, not Mike), going downtown in full costume, and some girl asking me what year I was followed my Little Klein going “Yikes.”  And then, since we had a double-header flag football game on Sunday we drove back to Atlanta at 3 in the morning.  Thanks to sober Mike for that.

Sunday morning we had a double-header in the flag football league.  Mind you, we’re 0-3 at this point and still a bit hungover.  However, I guess that we’re getting better because we won both the games and won them by mercy rule.  To let you know just how bad it was, I play center and managed to catch two passes including a touchdown and got a sack.  When I’m scoring points on you in a speed based game, you’re in trouble.  Of course, I also managed to pick up a nasty hip bruise trying to dive for an interception and now can barely walk.

We capped the day with Ben and Gouda losing the rest of their sports betting money when Kurt Warner got injured and Vinny Testaverde led the Carolina Panthers to a victory over the Arizona Cardinals and then almost buying some XBox 360 games to heal the pain, but Best Buy was closed at 7:30.  Oh well.

-Those are the results from my first practice GMAT.  I filled in the percentiles with the data in the back of “The Official Guide for GMAT Review” book that the testing company puts out.  The numbers are based on all 600-something thousand tests taken from June 2003 through June 2006.  Umm, yeah, can I just stop now and take those please?  Thanks.

-I’m about to go back to my old company to see about letters of recommendation and, rumor has it, they want to offer me a job.  However, I don’t think they know I’m planning on going back to school next fall, so we’ll see what happens.

-Three get togethers for me this weekend.  First, early Friday night, it’s Ross, Jena, Bill, and a host of other people who play poker.  Later on Friday it’s cheap wine party at Katie P and Nikki’s place (picture above).  Depending on how intense Friday night is, I might do a 5k on Saturday morning that Cuz just told me about for Creative Loafing.  I’ll have to decide if a tee shirt is worth $25.  Starting Saturday in the late morning, though, is college football day at Betsy, Erin, and Sims’ place.  Tech and Maryland play at noon, UGA/UT at 3:30 (along with Texas/Oklahoma), and then Florida and LSU bring it home after a dinner break at 8:28.

-Saw 17th Floor recently at Tavern.  Awesome show, although they kept repping UGA when they were 4 miles from GT’s campus in a bar filled with GT students, so that was uncool.

-I just finished a job recently that should give me some money so, if that all works out, I’m going to buy the membership on Flickr so I can put up all my photos there.  Some of them are on facebook now, and some of them are here, but I want one place that I can have them all, and that seems like the best option.