My GMAT Experience

This account is targeted at people writing GMAT. I want to give some insights into the GMAT exam(specially afterthe vendor change) and to offer assistance to all those taking GMAT in the coming months. Scoring 680 after ISB offer adds a lot of pressure since the bar is already set for you - you get 680+ and you are in else all the hard work put in the application goes in vain. So, the key to success hereis to keep your cool and work towards GMAT with patience.

Given the short prep time(15 days), i made it a point to plan well before taking GMAT. After few days of research, it was clear that the quantity of prep material doesn't matter, its the quality and the way you work on the material matters. Consequently, i decided to prepare with Kaplan 2006 and OG only. Indian students have a great advantage with quant and after a couple of tests, i realised that quant was a cakewalk. Though i did brush up all the basics. Next step was cracking verbal. First of all, i went through the wren and martin grammar book and tried to understand the nuiances of grammar, but to my surprise i just didn't have the patience to go through the whole book. I concentrated on the portion dedicated to "Correct Usage of Parts of Speech" and made sure that i understood it well. Once through W&R, i collected material from different sites and read it to understand the testmakers' psychology(pagalguy.com,storetop.com etc) and then started with Kaplan book. Its a very good reference for verbal and i felt quite confident after completing the exercises. Then, i took all the sectional tests in Kaplan CD and found that i was weak in sentence correction(60% accuracy), whereasin Quant, RC and CR, I had atleast 85% accuracy. I went through some more material from scoretop.com and practiced the sentence correction tests again. Witharound 75% accuracy in all the sections, i took Kaplan test 1 but got a dismal 640. I had mismanaged time and hence could not even read the last 5 questions in quant and around last 15 in verbal. Next two-three days, i went through some more sectional tests from 800score to understand time management in different sections. In the last 7 days, i still had to cover Official Guide, 3 Kaplan Tests and 2 GMATprep tests.(I took this week off since i didn't want to have additional pressure of work during the final fewdays). I was told that GMATPrep has a lot of questions from OG, so decided to give first GMAT prep test, got 740 in the test and was able to manage the timings well. Next 3 days, i went through OG, reading each question and answer very carefully to make sure that i understood the explanations well. I gave one more GMATprep after OG and got 770 this time, but this might have been because i had already seen some questions(around 10). I went through OG again,specially sentence correction(since i had around 95%accuracy in CR and around 90% in RC). Then , i wrote another Kaplan test, i got 640 only, but by that time i was sure that there was a big difference between kaplan and GMAT prep tests and i decided not to take any more kaplan tests. I was pretty satisfied with my performance in the OG questions and was sure to hit agood score. On the D-day, i was relaxed while writing the test and it went on very well till quant , but i screwed up the verbal part again due to time mismanagement. I took almost 50 mins for first 20 questions itself(since most of them were SC's , i wanted to pay extra attention to them).To add to my misfortune, i got a very lengthy RC with around 6 paras, i had to rush through it. In the later questions also, i just made sure that i did each question in 1 min, even though i had to blindly guess in some lengthy CR questions. After completing the test, i didn't know what to expect, though the difficulty level of questions clearly indicated that i had done okay. Well , i saw the score of 710 and was a little dissapointed. Nevertheless, it was above 680 :)
Apart from this, there are some more insights which may help the GMAT takers:

1. The number of sentence correction question has increased, i got atleast 20 of them.
2. RC's are of varied lengths. I had 4 of them - 3 were of less than 3 paragraphs and one had around 6 paras.
3. There were around 6-7 CR questions.(easy but some of them were lengthy)
4. Quant was simple.
5. Also, just in case you are afraid of sentence correction questions, please don't be so. Sentence correction has strategies and if you stick to them, it is as simple as problem solving. Learn the idioms by heart, understand the simple tenses and parts of speech and then practice well. With this much, i think anyone can do well in sentence correction.
Please let me know if you want more details regarding GMAT. I had prepared some notes during my studies (mostly compiled from online resources) and will send it to you if required.

Cheers !!

Web Services and SOA

Technology is changing at a rapid pace and this is easily evident in the adoption of web services and service oriented architecture by the leading business package vendors. With the advent of Service orientation in the application designing, the business world will not remain the same. The live era described by Bill Gates[Business Week] is surely on its way.

Many will agree that the isolated, disparate, multi-technology applications in Organizations lack the capability of presenting the consolidated view of global business. The merger and acquisitions add to the complexities of the situation. Whenever an acquisition happens, the acquirer wants a quick streamlining of organizations for better visibility and growth.
Add to this, the complexities of offshoring,outsourcing and complex supply chain. Now, the CIO of a company has a mess and he has the job of getting maximum productivity from the existing system. A lot of investment has already gone into this system , so he cannot completely replace the system. This is where web services come in.

Web Services provide an ability to expose specific reusable business functions on the internet. These web services can then be discovered by the consumers and can be used by different organizations located across the globe. Web Services provide a mechanism for machine to machine interaction. The web services can be implemented .Net, J2EE and other technologies, but the web service definition, messaging and publishing has been standardised by W3C, microsoft , IBM and other leading technology company. If every implementation of web services sticks to the defined standards, the number of web services will increase dramatically and infact, organizations can purchase the already deployed web services instead of going for self implementation.