This is why I am avoiding GRE

In this serious blog about dreams and MBA, Here is a humurous post 'This is why I am avoiding GRE'

A NORMAL PERSON : People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
GRE STUDENT : Individuals who make their abodes in vitreous edifices would be advised to refrain from catapulting perilous projectiles.
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NORMAL PERSON : Twinkle, twinkle, little star
GRE STUDENT : Scintillate, scintillate, asteroid minim.
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NORMAL PERSON : All that glitters is not gold.
GRE STUDENT : All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
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NORMAL PERSON : Beggars are not choosers
GRE STUDENT : Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
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NORMAL PERSON : Dead men tell no tales
GRE STUDENT : Male cadavers are incapable of rendering any testimony.
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NORMAL PERSON : Beginner's luck
GRE STUDENT : Neophyte's serendipity.
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NORMAL PERSON : A rolling stone gathers no moss
GRE STUDENT : A revolving lithic conglomerate accumulates no congeries of small, green, biophytic plant.
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NORMAL PERSON : Birds of a feather flock together
GRE STUDENT : Members of an avian species of identical plumage tend to congregate.
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NORMAL PERSON : Beauty is only skin deep
GRE STUDENT : Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity.
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NORMAL PERSON : Cleanliness is godliness
GRE STUDENT : Freedom from incrustations of grime is contiguous to rectitude.
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NORMAL PERSON : There's no use crying over spilt milk
GRE STUDENT : It is fruitless to become lachrymose of precipitately departed lactile fluid.
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NORMAL PERSON : You can't try to teach an old dog new tricks
GRE STUDENT : It is fruitless to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated canine with innovative maneuvers.
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NORMAL PERSON : Look before you leap
GRE STUDENT : Surveillance should precede saltation.
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NORMAL PERSON : He who laughs last, laughs best
GRE STUDENT : The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the optimal cachinnation.
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NORMAL PERSON : All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
GRE STUDENT : Exclusive dedication to necessitous chores without interludes of hedonistic diversion renders Jack a hebetudinous fellow.
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NORMAL PERSON : Where there's smoke, there's fire!
GRE STUDENT : Where there are visible vapours having their provenance in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.

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Pacing for Each Question

So, generally, people run out of time at the end because they're spending too much time on other problems earlier in the section. Here are the guidelines you should be following:

SC - about 60-75 sec; max of 90 sec

CR - about 2m; max of 2.5m

RC - about 2.5m (short) to 3.5m (long) to read; about 1 min for general purpose questions; about 2 for everything else

In general, on any problem, don't spend more than 30sec beyond the guidelines. You mention some types above that are the slowest for you, but really measure everything against these guidelines - anything going beyond these is too slow.

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Timing exercise

I think you would benefit from a timing exercise,It is learning about how long one minute is without looking at a watch or stopwatch. If you don't have one already, buy yourself a stopwatch with lap timing capability. When you go to do a set of problems, start the stopwatch but turn it over so you can't see the time. Every time you think one minute has gone by, push the lap button. When you're done, see how good you were - and whether you tend to over or underestimate. Get yourself to the point where you're within 15 seconds either way on a regular basis (that is, you can generally predict between 45 sec and 1min 15 sec).

Now, how do you use that when doing problems? If you're not on track by one minute, make an educated guess and move on. (The general idea is that if you're not on track by the halfway mark, you're unlikely to figure out what's holding you back AND have time to do the whole problem in the 1 min you have left.) For SC, if you're at the one minute mark and you've dealt with everything that you definitely know how to deal with, pick something from among the remaining choices and move on.

Remind yourself that you only need to get about 60% of the questions right. It's okay to get this question wrong - if the question's driving you crazy, forget it!

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Notes of RCS

Think of your notes this way: you're just trying to make a short table of contents so that you know the main ideas and so that you know where (in which paragraph) specific types of information can be found. You should be able to answer any "big idea" questions without going back to the passage but you should NOT be able to answer any "specific detail" questions without going back to the passage. Instead, you should be able to decide quickly from your table of contents which paragraph you need to go to in order to answer the specific detail question - and then you go to that paragraph and learn what you need to learn.
This allows you to take notes much more quickly on the first read-through and also allows you to use the information efficiently. We don't want to get too into all of that detail on the first read-through because they're going to write about twice as many questions as they're going to give any one person. In other words, I know I'm not going to get questions about all of the detail, because I'm not going to see all of the questions that were written for this passage!

Use serious abbreviations, label your info by paragraph (P1, P2, etc), and know that it's rare to have more than one line of notes per paragraph - maybe a mix of 5-10 words / symbols / abbreviations per paragraph. (That can obviously vary depending upon your short-term memory.)

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GMAT RCs

You can practice GMAT RCs from
1. http://sciam.com
2. http://popsci.com

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