Few additions/changes in blog: You must have noticed Knewton GMAT’s link in the middle column, yes if you’re interested in joining GMAT   prep course Knewton is the one I recommend. They’re cheapest yet the best in the town. Go get it.

I seriously want to write resources pages, I hope this time around I get more time for this site to add some content.

I also have GMAT FAQ queued up they’re somewhere around 75 frequently asked questions I would featured in this blog & try to answer clear, short & simple way. I might post them twice a week, maybe. Although I’m not sure when would I start posting it but as I would, I know I may end up writing infinite no. of FAQ posts … so I should stop myself at 75. All in all, expect this blog to be regularly updated with fresh content.

Pranav juggles many roles at a time. He is engineer by profession and has setup a bootstrap startup engineering firm with his friends. While staying at village, believing in decentralisation philosophy, he looks after his retiring father’s fabrication workshop and agricultural farm.
He’s webmaster by hobby and blogs about GMAT and general stuff occasionally. His interest lies in social enterprises, government schemes/initiatives for social change, ^going green^, magazines and internet (& yes! web 2.0). In past time he designs/makes useful articles by re-using useless trash. follow him on twitter @johnycage

Man! am I getting self-obsessed? or have already become one?

View My trip to Pune, Kisan exhibition. in a larger map

I am deactivating Feedburner, a feed manager/ distributor service from Google. If you subscribed to my blog recently that is in last 6-8 months, chances are you’ve automatically subscribed me via feedburner url. In that case please change my feed url to simple n straight feed://http//pranav.amrute.me/feed/

I think it’s wise to switch back to basics, also I think it’s bit annoying seeing adsense ads in your RSS feeds. So I’ve removed it. No adds on feeds

If you want GMAT specific articles, simply click on that right cartoon sitting on the bench.

Although dont panic, if you dont understand a word here; this post wasn’t even necessary. But WTH! Following figure will help you understand & google will take care of rest.

That doesn’t mean that end of this blog or website, but I’d add posts here when I have something significant to say. In fact I’m in the process of adding many static pages to blog. Notice resources, & GMAT books recommendation pages? they are in html, I’ll add them in this blog and also, many other resourceful webpages in pipeline.

On personal front: We’ve got new puppy (male dog). He’s cute & looks just like fantya, the dog we had 10-15 years back. I named him twitter. For naming actually I used the social media. Asked this question on Gtalk status, orkut etc & got tons of responses….(Ah now I feels like Chris Pirillo ). My cousin suggested that name & I really liked it. So I’m not acting like a zombie anymore. yep check profile page to know my current hobby/habits/interests

On Amrute’s website front: I’ve just renewed my domain to year 2012. So we dont have to bother much about those issues now.  Also I just had shoutout at Amrute orkut community to invite amrute to this website. So I expect some signups as well.

On beat the GMAT front: yes, Eric & David are fine tuning the website & new revamped website will be open by this weekend, 15 Nov. For time being you can check getting started at Beat the GMAT page.

~Enjoy~

There’s simple way to stay away from irrelevant posts of any wordpress blog or follow only specific topics. All you need is adding ‘/feed’ to its category. That means, if you want to follow my marathon related posts only, you can simply subscribe to http://pranav.amrute.me/topic/marathon/feed 

So ideally, all my visitors who just want GMAT related posts should subscribe to beating GMAT & beyond category. 

But if you’re not sort of techie, you probably would have ended up subscrbing whole blog. Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t post it before, it’s something that I should have mentioned first after merging other blogs with GMAT stuff. Anyways, on the right column can you see cartoon of the man seating on the bench reading my RSS feed? OK, now I’m changing it’s Feeds url to GMAT specific topics. So if you follow that man, you’ll get GMAT articles on your PC, without having to visit my site! (And this feed will be ad free! so enjoy the man seating on bench!)

As you might know this blog is inspiration from Beat The GMAT blog & I liked its title too, infact it was the title of that  blog that attracted me on the first look! Sigh!! it’s 2005 I am talking about! & when I thought of making a GMAT related blog I want something similar name yet I wanted to address beyond GMAT topics as well. Hence the name

Now you can guess where we’re heading… yeah since I moved this blog from blogger to wordpress (& my personal domain/website.) I’ve made it clear that this blog is not gonna be ‘only GMAT specific’ but I’d add some other stuffs along with my personal updates.

“Johny Learns to Blog” was my signature (yeah MLTR is my fav. you have problem? ) in one of the online forums later I must have changed it as I dont remember now where I’d used that line.

Now I’m in dilemma as should I use my real name? instead of Johny? It’ll be then “Pranav Learns To Blog” hows that sound?

leave a comment & tell me. Is JLTB is OK or should it be PLTB?

Well it’s not a regular book, it’s an e-book, yeah this is the first time I’m getting some success in reading an e-book.

Thats why they say “easy read”, I think the book is an easy read as I could read it; otherwise I’d made thousands of attempts reading several ebooks but I somehow never read more than 10 pages of any ebook.
Word of mouth Manual

As you can guess from its title the book is about viral marketing or below the line marketing/advertising The book is easy read, written is plain English (avoided jargons). I liked the tone of this book it has subtle humor which you’d enjoy if you know what exactly author wants to convey.

This is offset to my blog title & not at all related to GMAT, but as I hinted some time back I want to make this blog more general and want to write about other topics I like… (so I would gradually reduce the font size of GMAT phrases in tag cloud ) haha, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop or reduce writing GMAT related articles, matter of fact it’s not going to get affected. I’d rather fill the gap between my articles and increase my posting frequency. Thats the point. … anyways enough of personal comments. I think I should add a ‘now reading’ category or tags now.

Actually I wanted to share it using Scribd, it’s ready preview feature so wouldn’t have to acutally download it. But they thought it to be inappropriate to upload such document so I had to upload it on my website server. It’s a shareware so feel free to distribute it to your network if you liked it.

Before I explain the importance of OG12 I need to tell you how GMAT test works.

How GMAT adds new questions to their question bank & removes old questions, periodically.

Have you heard of experimental questions in GMAT? Around one quarter of GMAT questions you tackle in the test are experimental & they never get counted in your real GMAT score. They are present in both sections, verbal & quantitative and are placed randomly throughout the test. Yeah, but this is not important to us right now; our main concern is “why GMAC have them in the test when they are irreverent to the final score?”

Well! As they call it, they are experimental questions; they are untested and are brand new. To figure out the difficulty level of each of these questions, they experiment with them by adding them in current GMAT question pool. Based on response collected from GMAT test takers all across the world, questions are “tagged” with certain difficulty level. Once the difficulty level is identified these questions come in test as ‘real’ questions. (which then no more remain ‘experimental’).

The point is, questions in GMAT keep on changing but majority of questions remain in question bank for certain period. (In our checmical engineering terminology we call it space time ) Now you might realise the reason why you’re not allowed to retake the test immediately after your first (former) attempt. [hint! get the hint!!] (FYI, You need to wait for at least 30/31 days or something to retake it.)

In past when 11th edition just launched, I learned, test takers found quite a few questions from OG 11 in their real GMAT test …. same or similar set of questions. Although GMAT students can’t reveal the live questions they were certainly forunate to take the test during the period when OG was fresh and new. As time passed, test takers reported less questions or less similar questions in their real GMAT to official guide. It is therefore obvious to expect more similar questions in real GMAT these days when OG-12th edition is fresh-n-new.

So, what are you waiting for? Get the Official Guide 12th Edition now!

I must confess, this is series article & I drafted it in April 2009. But due to my erratic blogging frequency I didn’t publish it. I am fully aware that I should have posted it on OG-12th launch period but :sigh!: … anyways.

One more update is, official guide for verbal review & math review the two supplimentary books are about to be on stores in couple of months. Though I dont take them seriously, I just thought to inform you about it.

More about OG-12 & its review in next article <maybe>

bbye!!