I prepared seriously for last three months and covered the following.
1) MGMAT - all books and online course
2) Powerscore CR bible
3) Aristotle SC
4) E-gmat online verbal course
5) Did OG book's twice
6) RC 99 (did around 40 passages)
7) Took 10 practice tests(6 MGMAT and 4 GMAT Prep)
8) Have maintained all sorts of "crazy" metrics on all the sections
As mentioned in some of the other posts, I think MGMAT's quant is difficult and prepares you well for Quant but MGMAT's verbal did not help me (MGMAT's SC guide is good but learning the grammar rules helped me only to a certain extent. I was scoring regularly above 35 on MGMAT but when I took the final GMAT Practice tests and GMAT, I scored around 30. I spent LOT of time trying to improve SC by learning all the grammar rules and solving hundreds of practice questions but it did not work out. I generally tend to take ~2 minutes to solve a SC question and it ends up eating time (overall verbal section). My other weak point is RC, most of the times I do well on RC but 25% of the times I screw up one passage and get 2 or 3 questions wrong in one passage. I do okay on CR's (get 2 or 3 wrong out of 11 or 12 questions). Bottom-line is that I need to improve SC substantially (currently get 5 or 6 wrong out of 16 or 17 questions) and be consistent on RC.
I am a non-native speaker and need some good advice to improve verbal. I need to improve my verbal by 5 to 6 points in the next 6 to 7 weeks. What options do you think I have? I am open to private tutoring (I live in US), online course, reading additional books, practicing additional questions or whatever it takes to improve my verbal score by 6 points.
I would greatly appreciate if experts or any other non-native speakers who were in a similar situation as I am can provide some guidance.
Finally, few tips for future test takers:
1) Please be quick with your break. 8 minute break might sound long but in fact it is not. After AWA, I took a quick break and by the time I was back, I did not have any time to do the regular stuff I do (time chart etc) during the break. As I was not able to do the time chart, I did not have the luxury of tracking my progress (7th question - 60 minutes, 14th question - 45 minutes). I feel that I would have scored 49 instead of 48 If I had not struggled trying to figure out where I was with my overall timing on the test.
2) Verbal section is definitely a test of stamina (atleast for the non-native speakers who are not so strong on Verbal) especially towards the end of the exam. For the last 20 minutes, I started thinking that I was almost towards the end of my GMAT saga and so I was not able to concentrate a lot. Other thing that I royally screwed up on verbal is timing. I was doing well until the last 9 questions when I had 17 minutes left but then I spent 9 minutes on one RC (4 questions) and was left with 8 minutes and 5 questions after which I had to guess (as I panicked a bit) all the last 5 questions which might have contributed to my "wonderful" (read a RC question here, why did the author used the word "wonderful" as highlighted in the passage
) score of V29. 3) For the people who are wondering about the types of questions on the real GMAT, the verbal questions looked very similar (no repetitions from OG though) to the questions in OG/GMAT Prep test and the quant are somewhere in between OG and MGMAT questions. There is good emphasis on Statistics (Primarily "mean" and averages), percentages, overlapping sets, geometry (triangles) and Algebra.
