Grammar?

Last night was my second class in the Princeton Review. Our assignment over the past week was to do some reading and to sit down and take the first of 5 (or 6?) online practice exams. My first practice exam wasn't so impressive, about 80 points short of my target score. The one thing I was happy about was on the verbal I got the first 10 questions correct which is obviously so important on the GMAT. Surprisingly I got 2 of the first 10 questions incorrect on the math! I'm an engineer for god's sake! What the hell? But I'm hopeful that the class and the practice will lead me to my target score.

The first hour and a half of the class the instructor reviewed grammar for sentence correction. The entire time I kept thinking to myself, "self, that year you spent in South America teaching English is so going ot benefit you now!" Seriously, tell me what engineer actually knows what an infinitive is, not to mention the past perfect tense? One of the guy's in the class, also an engineer I believe, speaks English just fine but with an accent. Obviously English is his second language. I felt awful for him. His speaking English really was fine, but how the hell does he know what an idiom is? And considering we speak grammatically incorrect here, how would he ever recognize the mistake? Poor guy! I have a new found respect for ESL speakers taking the GMAT!

In the meantime I am trying to decide if I should fly out to do a tour of the East Coast schools I want to visit in July or should I wait until classes start in Sept? The thing is, I want to figure out what schools I'll be applying to soon so that I can concentrate on those particular essays. But just visiting the campus and not speaking with a student nor sitting in on a class...is that really going to help me decide? I don't know? I suppose this whole B-School process is really going to help me refine my decision making skills.